KickStarter Cosmic Star Heroine - Released

[MRY]

This is a somewhat childish complaint, but I've long said that one of the most endearing things about Chrono Trigger is the way that every character has his or her own distinctive silhouette. The character sprites in this game are very much more in the vein of Final Fantasy 6 in that they all basically have the same silhouette with the differences being in the flair. I know this make it much easier to animate the sprites, but it really loses a lot of the personality.

 

[MRY]

So what happened with this game? It seemed to have tremendous fanfare on Kickstarter ($135k!), but it looks pretty unattended on Steam. (Steamspy reports just 9,000 owners, and ~6k keys would've gone out via Kickstarter.) Is it just primarily PS4/Vita?

 

[flyingjohn]

So what happened with this game? It seemed to have tremendous fanfare on Kickstarter ($135k!), but it looks pretty unattended on Steam. (Steamspy reports just 9,000 owners, and ~6k keys would've gone out via Kickstarter.) Is it just primarily PS4/Vita?

Generic indie studio play a bunch of jrpgs.
Generic indie studio thinks "hey i can make something like this" without having any concept of what made the originals good.
Generic indie studio makes a very underwhelming jrpg.
This happens to most indie jrpg developers ,i mean just look at i am setsuna and the million rpg maker games.
And it is not like the originals were exactly works of art so how they screw it up is just a mystery to me.

 

[Achiman]

So what happened with this game? It seemed to have tremendous fanfare on Kickstarter ($135k!), but it looks pretty unattended on Steam. (Steamspy reports just 9,000 owners, and ~6k keys would've gone out via Kickstarter.) Is it just primarily PS4/Vita?

Generic indie studio play a bunch of jrpgs.
Generic indie studio thinks "hey i can make something like this" without having any concept of what made the originals good.
Generic indie studio makes a very underwhelming jrpg.
This happens to most indie jrpg developers ,i mean just look at i am setsuna and the million rpg maker games.
And it is not like the originals were exactly works of art so how they screw it up is just a mystery to me.

Bit harsh, I don't get the impression that they didn't respect the source material and weren't trying to make a genuinely (and original) good game.
Problem is the game is just too derivative.
It doesn't surprise (as yet it hasn't anyway) the player with new ideas or game mechanics.

Nostalgia is pretty powerful and goes a long way to selling these games, but you can only have the same or very similar experience so many times before you are underwhelmed by another copycat game.
Whether that is fair or not isn't really a concern of the economics of it I suppose.

 

[flyingjohn]

So what happened with this game? It seemed to have tremendous fanfare on Kickstarter ($135k!), but it looks pretty unattended on Steam. (Steamspy reports just 9,000 owners, and ~6k keys would've gone out via Kickstarter.) Is it just primarily PS4/Vita?

Generic indie studio play a bunch of jrpgs.
Generic indie studio thinks "hey i can make something like this" without having any concept of what made the originals good.
Generic indie studio makes a very underwhelming jrpg.
This happens to most indie jrpg developers ,i mean just look at i am setsuna and the million rpg maker games.
And it is not like the originals were exactly works of art so how they screw it up is just a mystery to me.

Bit harsh, I don't get the impression that they didn't respect the source material and weren't trying to make a genuinely (and original) good game.
Problem is the game is just too derivative.
It doesn't surprise (as yet it hasn't anyway) the player with new ideas or game mechanics.

Nostalgia is pretty powerful and goes a long way to selling these games, but you can only have the same or very similar experience so many times before you are underwhelmed by another copycat game.
Whether that is fair or not isn't really a concern of the economics of it I suppose.

I never meant that in a harsh form(should have worded it better),more in a they don't understand form.
And i really don't think it is nostalgia.
I replay chrono trigger every year,and the mechanics still hold up.
But to me the one thing modern jrpg dev's don't get is the exploration part,there is just something in older jrpg about finding secrets that just isn't found in modern attempts at the genre.
edit:This just reminded me of a game i am currently playing called arc rise fantasia.
Game has interesting combat(weapons have tetris like skills that can be interchanged and has a ap system for combat) but horrible story and no exploration whatsoever.(you basically can't find anything and the game stops you from exploring).
Hell the only side content are quests in the form of kill x monsters.
It is such a shame because the exploration part could have made the game bearable.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I suspect that modern game devs have pretty much all been to some sort of game development school, where they teach them how to dumb down games to appeal to casuals. This is why shit like forced tutorials and 'can't fail' versions of things like exploration or customization (those retardedly superficial skill trees you can win the game without touching) are so prevalent, and even combat mechanics are often so shallow you can just spam any attack at all and win easily. A lot of the best games were developed by people as hobbies who didn't have preconcieved notions about how to retain a player base, and they require skills at every turn: exploring, managing resources, effective exploitation of customization, and predicting combat patterns. I've got a lot of memories of narrowly winning fights in older games by making a last ditch desperation attack at exactly the right time instead of continuing to try and heal or defend. Hardly ever happens in modern games because the systems are designed in such a way that the combat is stable and you can do the same thing during the entire battle.

 

[TigerKnee]

What the fuck is with all the "Devs are dumbing down modern games" statements for this particular game? The source material is supposed to be Chrono Trigger, not Fire Emblem Thracia 776.

So what happened with this game?

Maybe it's a huge hit on consoles, but assuming it isn't - here's my opinion

1) On release date, the game was extremely buggy - we're talking "save after every battle in case the game freezes" level of buggy with multiple instances of "Forgot to insert NPC names" and one spot where trying to sequence break by visiting a later area instead of following the corridor made your save file unwinnable if you saved after the flag is triggered.

It's a linear JRPG clone so bugs like these really shouldn't present in the final product. They at least tried to fix it with multiple patches within a really short period of time but the damage was done and they really should have pushed it back a bit.

2) Low news coverage on release. I think it could be because Persona 5 was released a week or two ago, which kind of makes point 1 even more jarring since it feels like they shot themselves in the foot for no reason.

3) My personal opinion but the game is quite subpar on the story-telling front - too many characters with too little development and you don't get a sense of why the heroes are doing what they do. There's no sense of drama or connection with the events that happen in the plot and the music doesn't pull it up either.

It's a very forgettable game in that regard and I think it just doesn't have that factor that would make it into a "cult classic" over time through word of mouth through fans, so not getting any coverage hurt it even more than usual.

 

[Cromwell]

....The source material is supposed to be Chrono Trigger....

It's a linear JRPG clone

what could possibly be wrong with the game?

 

[MRY]

This paragraph, from a glowing player review, does seem to highlight that problem:

I mean that Cosmic Star Heroine, like many other such games, takes the main formula behind the old JRPGs and tries to make it work. Except unlike other such games, Cosmic Star Heroine does most of the things right. Specifically, it engages the player with an interesting and dynamic story, and doesn't rely just on the "magic formula" to do the work. Also, unlike other games, the story will pull you into the interesting part right from the beginning, so you don't end up yawning between scenes. Then again, this might also be seen as a drawback, as you don't get the freedom to explore and interact with the world on your own, as you could, for example, on either of the Phantasy Star games. So while being interesting and fast paced, the main story branch is also linear and fixed.

I think of the Phantasy Star games (either!! poor Phantasy Star III, I still love you! and Phantasy Star I is no slouch!) as fairly linear, so I'm a little taken aback by the notion of a game that is considerably more linear. My jRPG days are behind me, anyway. Still, a bummer. These guys were said to make good games and this one had a lot of excitement behind it.

 

[TigerKnee]

Gameplay wise and ignoring the bugs, this game actually isn't really a decline from their previous works - they're all very linear corridor simulators that are focused on combat and character set-ups.

Writing-wise, I think they've been doing "jokey" tone games too much though. This is their first game where the main plot is supposed to be taken seriously but they couldn't really get it right because they're so out of touch IMO.