Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix review (DS)

One of the complexities, however, is a satisfying one: attack sessions. An attack session is a combo attack, and while pulling one off takes a good deal of patience, completing sessions is one of the few rewarding mechanics in Hoshigami. In standard combat, you time a button press with a battle meter to determine how much damage you'll do. In an attack session, you set up your characters in advance and perform a shoot attack, which knocks enemies backwards. If you time everything carefully, you can bounce an enemy from mercenary to mercenary like a pinball, doing a ton of damage and potentially earning an item for your troubles. It's hard to do, but when you do it, it gives you a real sense of accomplishment in a game that's high on work and low on returns.

Complex and detailed game mechanics aren't bad things, nor is it necessarily a problem to aim at a decidedly hardcore audience. But even if you are an experienced strategist and quick to pick up on all of these elaborate contrivances, you're still not likely to enjoy the experience. Keeping track of coinfeigms, deity relationships, and your RAP meter is a lot of work, but you will never feel all that rewarded. You need to periodically stop and level up in towers specifically created for level grinding, because as difficult as Hoshigami is, leveling up your characters and coins is more important than smart battlefield tactics. You will also discover halfway through the game's sixty or so hours that it is incredibly imbalanced. If you make the mistake of putting more effort into standard weaponry, you are in for a rude awakening and likely to throw the game away in disgust: Coins are essentially the only way to finish the game, and about twenty-five hours in, your melee fighters will be useless. Magic is highly overpowered, which means if you concentrated solely on improving coinfeigms, you should be able to eke by without too many issues. If you went with a more balanced party, or worse yet, built it around physical weaponry, you will be easily overpowered and potentially incapable of finishing unless you have a will of steel.

If you played Hoshigami on your PlayStation and for some reason feel obligated to check for differences, you will find a new playable character, a new (and thankfully improved) soundtrack, and other minor changes. As you can imagine, there is also touch-screen support, yet you'll be unlikely to use it, since variations in map terrain sometimes make it tough to choose the square you want. The game doesn't make very good use of the top screen during battle either, relegating it to showing unit statistics and not much else. The chance to add some flash to the plain isometric visuals was there for the taking, but the unique capabilities of the DS were left mostly untapped, which is just another reminder that some titles are better off left as distant memories. Not that it looks or sounds terrible. The character sprites are fine, and you may notice small details, like the way archers scan the horizon while you queue up their attack. But coin effects are simple and unexciting, so battle has very little pizzazz, and the game is missing personality as a result. Some sound effects are OK, while others are just weird, like the banshee wails that female units emit upon defeat.

Needless to say, Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix is not a handheld-friendly game, let alone user-friendly. To play it, you need to find a quiet corner, grab your notes, and settle in. Complexity can be a good thing of course, but here, the resulting gameplay is just frustrating without anything to compensate for it. If you're into strategy RPGs, the ideas may interest you, but even the most devout players will decry the unbalanced combat and emphasis on level-grinding over strategy. As a result, this is a game that's not really for anyone.