Cosmic Star Heroine (PS Vita)
Plenty of role-playing games rely on their stories and characters as their main appeal, the battles fought along the way often being serviceable conflicts with fairly weak enemies before a boss appears that pushes the mechanics a bit more due to their durability and strength. Cosmic Star Heroine, on the other hand, decides to invigorate every battle with a battle system that is not just open to the constant use of varied skills, but actually requires it by design.
During a battle in Cosmic Star Heroine, you control up to four fighters in turn-based battles, each one of your fighters packing a character-specific set of skills. A single character can have eight different abilities set at one time, but while in many RPGs you might be content to use basic attacks to whittle down enemies or push through small battles, there are conditions applied to each of your abilities in this game. After using most abilities, they can’t be used again until you use a defensive recharge ability, and while some can be reused indefinitely, the stronger and more useful attacks tend to follow this design choice. What this means is when you enter a battle, you’ll constantly be thinking about which ability is best for a character to use on their turn. You can try and use their high damaging attacks to try and end things quickly, use defensive or support powers to even the playing field, or you’ll need to watch your enemies carefully to know when is a good time to use certain powers. Enemies have elemental weaknesses and defensive options that vary up how they deal with you, so the player needs to consider things like which foe to defeat first in a group and when is the best time to spend a turn recharging due to characters being vulnerable while doing so. The most interesting part of this system though is that it allows you to use many of your interesting and strong techniques more freely, the price for doing so reasonable and easy to recover from.
Each character also learns plenty of different abilities as they level up, many packing a healing option, elemental attacks, stat boosting abilities, and different levels of powerful strikes or ways to hit multiple opponents. The game will change your party around plenty of times and at others give you the freedom to pick who you adventure with, so there is rarely a moment where you feel stuck with a party composition too much because most arrangements can cover the necessary basics of battle. However, they definitely have different proficiencies and unique styles to them that still allow them to fill roles or serve as interesting attackers. Perhaps the most unique one has to be your disco dancing robot companion Clarke whose whole shtick is he can self-destruct to defeat enemies, but his explosion can be accommodated for by having him contribute stat boosts while dead or have a revival option in place to bring him back after he either blows himself up or the enemy gets to him first. There are characters who sing songs to gradually heal the party or hurt the enemy, a party member who can program her drone to do different attacks on its devoted turn, a character who damages himself to use more powerful skills, and plenty of characters who manage to be interesting despite being simpler in concept. Chahn uses teleporting guns in what is known as Gunmancy, the more skills in that art she uses allowing her to power up even more powerful attacks. The hacker Dave has plenty of attacks that inflict extra statuses, with most enemies being vulnerable to at least some of them or becoming more vulnerable to one if an attempt to inflict something like poison or a stun on them fails. The shifting cast composition only helps the combat be more about interesting decisions as you’re put into positions with new mixes of skills to face your enemies with.
On top of the charge-focused fighting system, after combat is completed, your characters will all be healed and revived if they perished during the battle. Again, this helps to contribute immensely to the design of every battle, as even the simplest enemies can afford to be a bit tougher since you can take risks and suffer loses as part of a fight with your enemies. There’s still definitely a need for healing and reviving in combat though, especially against the longer boss battles, but even the regular encounters might make you consider your life bar since they’re allowed to hit hard enough to be legitimate threats. Besides the eight abilities you can set per character though, there are two more ways a character can participate in combat. One is the Program system, these being determined by your equipment that otherwise focuses on raising stats. Depending on your Programs, your character will pack special skills that are only usable once per battle, this being an excellent way to give unusual skills to a character like giving magic to a physical fighter or adding healing options to a character who might not have the best skills in that category. In addition to this, you can set items to bring into combat, and these follow the same rules as programs. Whether it be a healing potion or an explosive bomb, you get to use it once per combat, that item available for use again in the next fight. Rather than sitting on items for when you need them, you can instead employ them in most any situation you feel the urge to whip them out, although the amount of items you bring into battle is limited to prevent this from being too powerful. With adjustable difficulty and enemies appearing in the overworld to be avoided if you don’t wish to engage in combat with some of them, it is a battle system that can be adjusted to be a little easier to conquer, but even when you’re meant to be thinking over your ability use in every battle, many of them cut a quick pace save the ones meant to be uniquely challenging.
Funnily enough, despite all these systems existing to make the combat an incredibly enjoyable component of this RPG, the story has become the more serviceable part of this particular game. Cosmic Star Heroine’s name refers to its main character Alyssa L’salle, a highly successful agent for an interplanetary peace-keeping organization. During one of her expeditions, she uncovers a dark secret that leads to her shifting her goals to instead trying to protect the whole galaxy from having their minds controlled by one organization. While the plot will deviate as the characters search out new ways to foil their foe’s efforts, the central story never really grows any further from there and sometimes even fades into the background as more interesting ideas are explored. The different planets and places you visit mix in new environments, new alien races, and new scenarios, the game having you infiltrate a mobster’s party in disguise, clear your name of a murder charge, and explore unusual laboratories and alien structures. Seeing the new places the game takes you still makes progressing the story interesting, as does meeting the characters who will join your team. While there are a few sidequests or introductory moments to give you a decent idea of who your party members are, they’re mostly personalities rather than full-fledged individuals, and it does feel like a bit more time with them could make up for the pretty standard “save the galaxy” narrative at the core of the adventure. The variety between them and archetypes works in their favor though, and seeing the thought out designs given to the game’s alien races makes traveling between planets pack in some helpful world-building for a game that is mostly gameplay focused at heart. Some excellent background music such as the main theme and “Gunmancy” both help to further satisfy the sensation of an action-focused sci-fi adventure, Cosmic Star Heroine like Star Wars in that there is plenty presented for the sake of a thrilling adventure that creates a universe that will make you want to know more about the world and its thought-out but not fully explored species and characters.
One tiny issue of note that doesn’t ruin the experience thankfully though are a few technical problems that may be unique to the Vita version of the game. When accessing your pause menu to swap around equipped abilities or armor, the game may sometimes crash, but this is also the menu where you can save in a quick and easy manner to help avoid losing any progress when doing so. A problem that’s a bit harder to avoid though is that certain fights may encounters glitches, although one worked in my favor when they couldn’t spawn in any more helpers. The other though involved the game not bringing up the attacks during Alyssa’s turn, meaning the battle was unable to be completed. These won’t always happen as I fought multiple battles with the same foes that worked fine, but saving early and often is recommended so that these small issues don’t ruin an otherwise enjoyable adventure.
THE VERDICT: Cosmic Star Heroine is a thrilling sci-fi adventure where the focus is surely on making the journey exciting and engaging action-wise. Alyssa’s adventures take her to many different locations across space, meeting new alien races and finding new battles to fight along the way, the plot more of an excuse to see so many interesting concepts and join up with fun but simple characters. The battle system is definitely where most of the strength of the experience comes from though, the ability system allowing even the simplest fights to encourage the player to let loose with strong skills will still being strategic in their use. Reusable items, healing after battle, and enemies made strong enough to support such allowances make for involved battles, with bosses and the unique skills of your party members opening the way to even more variety in the strong gameplay core of this outer space adventure.
And so, I give Cosmic Star Heroine for the PlayStation Vita…
A GREAT rating. With such an excellent battle system at the heart of the experience, it is a bit of a shame more time wasn’t given to making a more compelling plot, and while the characters have excellent use in battle and some fun personalities, they too were aching for a bit more attention to truly make them a memorable traveling party. Cosmic Star Heroine doesn’t seem to be trying to be a moving plot though, the thrill of adventure allowing it to still stay enjoyable to the end as it keeps throwing the player into new situations that connect the world and its invented sci-fi concepts and creatures into a place worth exploring. The incredibly engaging battle system is definitely what drives the experience to achieve such a high rating though. Energetic music and fun characters are one thing, but the battles they support make enemy encounters desired rather than little road bumps on the way to more interesting content. Figuring out which abilities work best for a character and then what order to use them in battle keeps the fights interesting even against the simplest foes, your hard work really paying off when up against the more powerful enemies who will test your preparedness and strategies. The healing after a fight is becoming a more common RPG concept and it tends to allow for these battles to be stronger for it, conflict less about being slowly whittled down by multiple foes and instead a single battle making for an interactive back-and-forth that is definitely still tipped in your favor but also requires active participation.
Cosmic Star Heroine is an RPG that makes the fighting the main focus and does an excellent job of making it worthy of that level of attention. It’s a bit of a shame that the story takes a pretty basic road to completion, as there was plenty of work put into making the fights along the way exciting, the worlds fun to see and characters interesting to meet, and the music a wonderful backing track for it all. If viewed as the action-packed sci-fi journey its pieces combine into though, Cosmic Star Heroine makes for wonderful adventure despite its obvious potential to be much more.