Cosmic Star Heroine Review

Cosmic Star Heroine

Developer: Zeboyd Games
Platform: PS4, PC

Cosmic Star Heroine is the epitome of classic JRPG style games, while also bringing something new to the table. The game is by Zeboyd games designers of some of the Penny Arcade games, as well as the amazing Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII, both of which are available on Steam. You can get Cosmic Star on Steam as well as PS4. I played it on PS4 and I have to tell you, it is fantastic.

The game totally nails the feel of SNES era JRPGs of the 90s in both the art direction and audio. The graphics in particular are gorgeous, and have cool combat animations. The game has cutscenes that make the game feel even more nostalgic. The music for the game is very good, although a bit repetitive during combat. The story is very different, this isn’t your normal fantasy setting. I won’t go into too many details because of spoilers, but you play as a spy that works for a spy agency in the far future. The writing is on point, and the dialogue seems like it is cheesy on purpose. It almost feels like it was written to mimic 1980s action movies. The game has quite a bit of dialogue, but there are some real great jokes in there, each character feels like they have their own personality, and timing.

Combat works like most traditional JRPGs in Cosmic Star Heroine, in that it’s based on menu manipulation. I really like that Each fight is its own, and if you hardly survived a fight, you were back at full health for the next one. Every character has a multitude of abilities to chose from (you can customize which skills they will use in combat as you can’t use them all) but I didn’t feel like there were traditional roles where characters were pigeonholed as healers or damage. Every character also has style which increases the damage that you do as a fight goes on. At the end of a fight you’re doing more damage than at the beginning. Enemies also have the same mechanic, so its in your best interests to get fights over with quickly.

Your character’s abilities are augmented with items and programs which are essentially the same thing, with one exception. Programs are character specific, where items are shared by the party. Each ability has a cooldown, which can be reset by using the rest ability. Figuring out when you should use the various rest abilities of your characters is essential to success. The coupled with the fact that your roster is changing often and you’ll have a very different style of play from one encounter to the next as characters in your party come and go.

Cosmic Star Heroine isn’t super easy. It has four difficulty levels, and even though I chose what was described as the “normal” setting, I still had a lot of trouble with some bosses and had to lower the difficulty in order to complete the game. That being said, Cosmic Star Heroine does let you change the difficulty any time you want, which is welcome as I was getting frustrated going up against the same boss many times in a row. Death is also handled very well. If you die in a fight, the game simply takes you back to the beginning of that fight. You don’t lose anything other than time. The game could have used some minigames as you’re often hacking consoles which consists of just going up to it and hitting a button on your controller. It would have been nice had I had a chance to fail at hacking and had something to do.

The Verdict

Check It Out. If you’ve got a PS4 or PC and you like JRPG games, this along with other Zeboyd games is right up your alley. The game doesn’t have a whole lot of choice though, and at times I felt railroaded. But I had a lot of fun playing it, and I highly recommend Cosmic Star Heroine if you enjoy this style of game.