I was familiar with Zeboyd Games after the rather excellent "Cthulhu Saves the World" which I grabbed and played way back in another life of the year 2011. Cosmic Star Heroine is their latest game. I actually grabbed it on the release date back in April, but it took all year before I sat down to play it.

It's a refinement of Zeboyd's other games, retaining the retro style and nods that made them great. It's a decent game, but alas, does have a few issues.

You play the role of 'Alyssa L’Salle', one of the top agents in a galactic government working for the "Agency of Peace and Intelligence". That name alone should be telling you that they are the real baddies.

The game immediately drops you into a tower assault mission where you have to fight a mini boss and defuse a bomb, from here the conspiracy driving the overall plot starts to set in.
Before you really get into it there is a series of side missions on the worlds of the star system the game is set in, until you eventually switch sides, gain your own starship as a home base, and go off on a planet hopping adventure.

The overarching story is honestly nothing special and a little forgettable. But does pay plenty of homage to RPG games of the 8/16 bit era and you can play spot-the-reference with the scenes you come across.

While I didn't enjoy the plot, I did enjoy the cast of characters you recruit along the way. They've sci-fi based magic powers at their disposal and a good amount of personality and humour to go with it. One of the early characters you meet is your friend Chann, a 'gunmancer'. Her power summons guns in mid air to shoot enemies at point blank range. Which makes a nice spin on using a firearms trope character.

Others include Dave, an easily scared hacker. Who has an 'enviro-Hack' ability that gives you different buffs or effects based on what area you are in. And there's Lauren, a club musician who attacks with summoned microphones and guitars. Various non humaniod aliens join for short periods. And eventually 'Clark', a jazz-hands robot with a style mixed of The Fonz and Tony Manero, he has abilities that do a small amount of damage to a monster and then kills/suicides himself. Really. he gets better once the battle is done

There's a good blend of serious and comedic tone to all of the crew. It never quite feels like they're all the butt of a joke. Instead they have their moments to shine and be useful to the world. There's some great banter and observations that they all get to make as they travel with you through the game.

Those that you are fighting against do come off as imbecilic moustache twirling mooks. But it does lead to some great moments. Such as one of them threatening to unleash a monster on the world after you easily dispatch him. They getting into a bloody Robot vs Kaiju battle!

It's moments like the Kaiju or early outdoor-ascent battles that help break up a battle system that is both brilliant, and a little disappointing.

Characters have both a Health and Style rating. Health works as it normally does, if it drops to zero you are pretty much dead. There's a few exceptions where the characters can hang on giving you a chance to heal/revive them, but once out consider them lost for that battle. Thankfully they are instantly revived and everyone is back to 100% HP after each fight. Even after suicide/sacrifice attacks.

Style mainly works as a damage modifier. You start at less than 100% and gain more with each attack. Normal attacks will not do more than 100% damage, so you have to use your Hyperblocks.

Each attack/action fills in one block. When all are filled you are charged and will do more damage on the next hit. There's abilities here that I've seen do 10x and more normal damage when you set things up correctly.

Instead of using MP/TP/AP you have up to 8 different types of attacks or actions you can unleash. (It is possible to gain more, but only 8 can be assigned at once.)

Most of these can only be used once per battle before needing to be rested and used again with the defaulted 8th ability.

This creates a game of hitting with low attacks to build up Style and Hyper, using next-turn abilities to boost your power even more, then WHACKING the opposition with an attack that is not only powerful, but that the enemy is weak against.

There is a good amount of satisfaction in chaining up commands per turns and then destroying the opponent with something akin to overkill. My main issue is that you don't get to use them that much unless you deliberately delay finishing the fight. And some of the buffs/debuffs are pretty much useless, as the gains you get are not worth wasting your turns on. This might be different on the very highest difficulty, but on hard mode it proved barely a challenge.

Enemies also appear on screen and battles are only engaged when you enter into a region around them. This does make it possible to skip them completely by scooting around their outskirts if they're not blocking doorways. You'll lose the potential EXP if you do this, so don't do that you silly.

The only way to grind is to do a VR battle off your main menu. This feature becomes available in an area you've cleared of all opponents and allows you to fight again with a slightly harder opponent.

If you liked Phantasy Star, Final Fantasy, and Chrono Trigger, you'll likely get something out of this. Beyond the bugs the game has there's a great amount of charm to this one. If you're after an indie turn based RPG I'd also recommend giving it a look.

It's a niche titles that will not appeal to everyone. But does fill in a gap within the genre on the PC.

Just be sure to keep a few different saves. The game could of done with a few more passes of QA as things can easily break if you try to do more than it expects. Both for getting stuck in the geometry and breaking quest lines.

Also the control scheme is kinda terrible as there's no decent feedback on how to select the different elements via the keyboard and the mouse does nothing. Go pretend it is the late 1980s.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on release
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 5 December 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7 32-bit
Processor: Intel Atom X7-Z8750
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD 405 Graphics 600 MHz
Storage: 6 GB available space
Addition Notes: No issues found running on a non Atom CPU.