I was pretty on the fence about picking up Stellar Blade when it was coming out. After reading enough reviews suggesting that it really wasn’t just the fan service fest I feared, I decided to take a chance and ended up grabbing it at launch, having just finished up the other main game I was playing a couple days before it came out. I was instantly hooked from the moment I started the game and knew I was going to love a lot about it. As I’ll get into, that liking definitely faded some as the game’s flaws became more apparent over time, but overall—while I wouldn’t call it a must-play—there is plenty of good mixed in with the bad here.

Note: I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong or what, but every time I tried to take a screenshot, the textures got kinda blurry. Not sure if the photo mode update helps this but I played it at launch so didn't have that available. I still got some good shots but just a note that the textures look better in action than they may appear herein.

Stellar Blade presents itself primarily as a fast-paced and stylish action game. On that front, I’d say it’s good, but not great. Combat generally feels fluid and the skill tree offers a sense of progression early on as you unlock new abilities and ways to react and counter different enemies. However these additional skills become less interesting as the game goes on. The fighting looks and feels pretty cool and delivers a lot on style in that sense. Even at launch, the game boasts a lot of polish that makes for a pretty smooth experience in and out of combat. After a time, the combat does get a little repetitive though. Most of what the game does to change up combat is add new elements like attacks you need to dodge and can’t block, and vice-versa, or attacks you need to counter with a ranged weapon instead of just hacking and slashing. You get new flashy special attacks that function better in different situations and ability bars that fill up through different means. The game keeps adding these new elements to keep things fresh and it mostly works, but only to an extent. While this isn’t a terrible way to keep gameplay moving, it’s not as interesting as finding ways to play with more elegant combat systems in dynamic ways throughout the game. That is something Stellar Blade seems uninterested in doing. Thus while the gameplay is pretty good, as the main appeal of the game, it could use a bit more to set it apart and really shine as outstanding.

Though I’ve seen this game labeled as a soulslike, I don’t think it really quite is one beyond a few things it borrows from the genre. There are the enemies that re-spawn once you take a rest, and a system that on its face looks tailored to punishing mistakes and encouraging learning and improvement. However, while I don’t feel soulslikes really need to be as brutal as they sometimes are, I simply feel that in most respects, the game just isn't hard enough to feel like one in practice as some difficulty is part of the soulslike formula to encourage/require learning and improvement (or cheesing I suppose). Here though, you can more or less brute-force most boss fights without even really doing much to learn patterns. I almost never died on a boss throughout most of my playthrough and I don’t consider myself especially good at the game.

The story of the game is frankly just not very good. It’s one of those stories where you can predict some of the major twists from so far away that you start to wonder if the characters are pretending to not already know what’s going on or what. The game employs some typical sci-fi tropes with androids, sentience, and existential themes, aiming for something like Nier; but ultimately, it just lacks much depth and nuance. Reading some of the lore entries and background, there actually was some solid potential here, but the game just really tanks the landing in its execution through the story itself. The plot mostly boils down to sending you after this or that mcguffin while you meet a cast of characters who at most have one or two quirks in place of a personality. Perhaps the biggest issue is that our supposedly-iconic protagonist, Eve, is legitimately one of the most boring video game main characters in recent memory. I think if she had been a silent protagonist, her characterization almost wouldn’t be affected. That alone renders the narrative a hard sell.

Now, you might think “well, it’s not really a game about story, so that’s fine.” After all, it is at least ostensibly being likened to a soulslike, which is a genre not known for its cinematic storytelling and in-depth conventional character studies. The problem is, the game really wants the story to be a focus. There is a lot of cutscenes and dialogue in the game, even apart from the detailed codex full of lore and background information. Though some of it overlaps with exploration and combat scenes, there’s probably as much story as there is gameplay in the main plot and a good chunk of it is just listening to dull characters saying dull things in a nearly deadpan voice. Though I appreciate some of the themes the game tries to explore to an extent, it feels like it goes about things in such a by-the-numbers way, I just couldn’t get invested. The side quests are a bit more interesting than the main story at times, but even these often feel like a decent idea that could’ve used some better execution and they vary in quality with several feeling like filler. This is a game I think would’ve benefited from cutting down tremendously on side quests, similar to how I felt about Ghostwire Tokyo. About a third could be really good and if they’d just cut out the rest and worked more on those, you’d have ten compelling stories instead of thirty that vary between almost-interesting and plain boring.

Presentation is hit or miss in different areas. For one, to address the busty elephant in the room: the constant jiggle physics and sexualization of most of the female characters doesn’t really add anything meaningful to the game for me and at times just feels like it distracts and detracts from the setting and themes. No, I’m not "triggered” and I’m not “offended.” I mostly just don’t care about those elements being there in themselves. What I do care about is the clear detail and resources allocated to it in a game that could use a lot of work on its narrative and characters otherwise. Like, how many Digital Ass Sculpting Artists did we hire, and could not a chunk of that budget have been spared for I dunno, giving the character a personality of any kind?

In part because they needed to look as much like sex dolls as possible, at times the characters don’t look like they fit the same aesthetic as each other or the rest of the setting. This was surely somewhat intentional since Eve is supposed to be special and distinct, but at times, she looks like a character from a different game when she’s standing next to Adam or one of the many post-apocalypse's townspeople. At times it feels as if you modded her into the game like dropping Homer Simpson into a Resident Evil game or you’re playing a session of VR Chat full of avatars of disparate styles. I don’t mind the characters being especially—even exaggeratedly—attractive; they are in plenty of great games. But the execution here just feels weirdly off despite how much attention was obviously put into the effort and it just feels over-designed to the point of a kind of balloon effect, pun intended.

All that said, the visual presentation otherwise is quite strong. The environments are gorgeous and the game really excels at creating atmospheric locations to explore. The rainy city you begin in especially evokes a drearily beautiful aesthetic. The main city of Xion is more bland, but the other environments you explore look great and made me want to explore them. My only complaint there is that the game only has three or four (depending how you count) big explorable areas and one of them is a big sandy desert and another is a rocky area. While there may be climate and biome reasons for why this is, and there are some distinctions between those zones, they still feel way too samey when you only get a few areas to choose from. Apart from the environments, as I said, the combat is definitely quite flashy and cool to look at. Even if they’re little more than cutscenes you have not much part in, Eve executes a good number of climactic over-the-top finishers on enemies and your basic moveset is animated with great intensity to make things look all the better. This flashiness does help do some of the lifting in areas where the combat itself is lacking.

On the other hand, voice-acting I found to be pretty weak. I played the game with the Korean voice-over and thought it was just okay at best. Most characters sound pretty bored and Eve’s VA does no favors for her characterization. I thought maybe for some reason the English might be better, but when I looked up a video, I thought it was a parody someone recorded over because the English VA clearly did not want to show up to work that day. Other characters don’t fare much better, but her voice might be the worst. I suppose it fits some of the ruined setting, but it certainly doesn’t get me very excited about the world the same way other aspects of the setting do.

Now, while I’ve touched on several pros and cons, my actual favorite thing about Stellar Blade is something I’ve heard a bit less discussion of: the vibes. By this I mostly mean the soundtrack—which is fantastic—especially with how it complements the exploration and tone of the game. There are a lot of ways in which I think the game fails a bit in its imitation of Nier and its execution of theme, but I must admit that despite that series having one of my favorite video game OSTs, Stellar Blade’s own tracklist legitimately rivals it at times. I remember well my first night with the game, wandering the Silent Street area in the rain and just vibing out with the softly-repeated lyrical song, which is one of my favorites in the game, despite its robust track list elsewhere. It pretty much instantly sold me on the game as a whole and made me initially quite excited to spend more time with it. I had had a pretty long and tough day and just playing the game for a while, headphones on, immersed me and carried me away instantly. I find it a little odd I usually hear this element mentioned as an afterthought or as “oh yeah, it's got a good soundtrack too,” as in my eyes, it’s where the game excels most and unlike with its presentation and gameplay, I have no real caveats or ambivalences whatsoever in this regard.

Overall, Stellar Blade is a game with plenty to love about it. It’s stylish, fun, visually striking, and has a banger soundtrack. I wouldn’t say it’s an essential game for anyone’s backlog, but going in with the right expectations, there’s a good time to be had. I’ve seen it hyperbolically described as one of the greatest games of all time and it indeed performed quite well critically and financially. But its lackluster and overbearing story paired with several areas it falls short in disruptive ways leave it in a awkward position that prevents me from putting it on any such pedestal. Though I haven't platinumed the game, after doing most of the extra content, I’m not sure I’m interested in returning to it.

Stellar Blade is a soulslike-spectacle fighter hybrid. From spectacle fighters it takes flashy combat focused on combos and big moves and from soulslikes it takes the save system and the focus on clothing and accessories. From somewhere, it takes the terrible story and bland characters.

Combat is strong. It's fun to land combos, manage the various bars while parrying and dodging. Bossfights are fun, especially near the end. Although near the end you get so many upgrades that you can basically tank most attacks, so strategy and positioning become less of an issue.

Exploration is the second sturdy pillar. Although the two big areas are pretty boring deserts, I still enjoyed poking around the landscape and various nooks and cranies of each area searching for secretes. The biggest rewards being new outfits to dress your character/manequin. Some of them are laughably sexualised and ridiculous, like the bathers, but there is enough variety to find something to like. I really took to a couple of the more biker looks, which went well with the hello kitty earrings and cat eyeglasses.

It is unfortunately that with so much effort going into clothing accessories and jiggle physics, there was so little left to the characters and story. It's all bad, bland and predictable, with Eve being the charisma black hole at the centre who all the terribleness orbits around. Everyone is a one-note character with their emotional range flattened by an orbital cannon. It is something that might work in a different game, but Eve's stoic demeanour doesn't fit with her penchant for fashion and ostentatious fighting style.

Although I do have to make an aside for Raven. She's a light presence, showing only through informational video logs until the end when (spoiler alert, but who the fuck cares) she appears as probably my favourite bossfight and carrying the insane energy that was missing from the rest of the game. She is angry, she laughs. Her soundtrack is punchy and defiant and the way she moves and attack fast and with style. Honestly, the game would've been better if at that point we had switch characters.

Lets get it out of the way: The game clearly goes out of its way to be sexy. I know it. You know it. The developers knew it.

And while I would be lying if I said I didn't appreciate said sexiness, that element its not really what makes the game shine. The way Eve looks is more of a novelty, at least for me. Yes, my gaze went there the first few times, but afterwards I was mostly focused on the world and the enemies.

The game excels when it comes to visual spectacle. Attacks look fluid and cool as hell, critical hits are incredibly dynamic, and chaining combos generally feels really good as there's some variety to keep things from becoming too stale, at least animation wise.

Because of the above-mentioned elements, it is a little disappointing that most enemies are pushovers. Only three bosses stalled me for any amount of time, and almost all of them were located at the very tail end of the game. In general, it was incredibly puzzling that a game that went to such trouble to make combat look so good also made it so easy.

Other than that, the story itself also felt a little bit undercooked. Though there's a reason for the way things happen, I wish things were more narratively explicit. Maybe coming from someone who loves FromSoft's cryptic approach to storytelling, this desire is a little hypocritical, but in my defense, Stellar Blade clearly wants to be a more traditionally-told story. It just doesn't quite manage, relying heavily on collectibles to fully make sense.

Lastly, I think the two maps were you can only use the gun were wasted. Going by the aesthetics, I feel like the developers were extremely tempted to make those stages survival horror-ish, but they come across as, again, way too easy, specially with the ammo dispensers every other spot. If the game had taken a slower, more methodical pace and maybe auto-switched to aim-view while in there, it would have been perfect and served as a nice break from the otherwise mostly-melee focused hack-slash of the rest of the game.

All that said, I enjoyed the game. Maybe a little more expensive than I wish, but thats most games nowadays.

I really wonder if Stellar Blade 2 will improve map design, boss difficult

TL;DR - A flashy hack & slash game that offers a surprisingly deep combat system that takes some ideas from the soulslike genre. And although it is severely lacking in well-written characters and a compelling narrative, it does however deliver in the combat, visual, and exploration departments.

HACK & SLASH - Eve battles the Naytibas in order to save humanity’s last city of Xion.

PROS:

++ Fantastic combat. Easily the best part of the game. You can't get away with just mashing the buttons but you really needed to learn the different enemies' attack patterns. And there are a good amount of enemies to fight. It was surprisingly deep, with normal attack combos, perfect parries and dodges, burst skills, beta skills, Tachy mode, different combat consumables, and different types of ammunition that you can shoot with your drone. It makes the combat constantly fun throughout the game's 30ish hour playthrough. And in order to beat the end-game bosses, you really need to master all your tools in combat. Not only is the combat deep, but it was flashy and animated well too making it exhilarating to watch.

++ Worthwhile exploration. There are two open-world areas (Desert & Wasteland) and I really enjoyed exploring every inch of these areas. There were a lot of rewards and outfits to find, and there was enough platforming thrown into the mix that made it not too mindless.

++ Visually stunning. The game is flat-out gorgeous. From the environments, to the characters models, to the grotesque monster designs, to the particles and flashes during combat, and even how well animated Eve is in general. The game director admitted that he wasn't a writer and that he was a visualist, and this game really showed his strengths as a visualist.

++ Great boss fights. There were some absolutely fun boss fights in this game. They looked terrifying to fight, and they had good movesets. They were the perfect level of difficulty in my opinion and it was nice that I can fight them at any time through the game's Boss Challenge mode. The bosses are when the game's combat shines the most.

++ Selection of outfits. The outfits are a big part of the game and most of them looked great. I know it leaned way into the fan-service side of things, but it's nice to get a game where there are so many outfits to choose from and to unlock.

++ Fishing minigame. I'm not even lying, but I spent a LOT of time fishing in this game. I don't know what it was but I was having a blast catching fish. It was a simple process, but it was quite addicting to me.

++ NG+. There is ample reasons as to why one should replay the game. New outfits, harder difficulty, and even new skills to unlock. Definitely a game that I'll be replaying in the future!

CONS:

-- Uninteresting characters. The protagonist, Eve, is devoid of any emotion or personality. And the same goes for every other character in the game. The only one with a slight personality is Lily with her playful attitude, but even then she's not that interesting of a character. The only one that had great potential was Tachy, but she was killed off early.

-- Weak narrative. It's not just the characters, but the story was also lackluster. Near the midpoint, I honestly stopped caring about the story because it just failed to hook me. There were some attempts to appeal to the player's emotions, but these attempts missed the mark. And the "plot twists" were also quite predictable.

-- Uninspired locales. The game is beautiful, but the settings themselves were not that original. They were all different forms of an apocalyptic wasteland, whether it be a ruined city, a desert, or a flooded plaza. It just wasn't anything original. The best locale was near the end when Eve was confronting the Elder Naytiba, but it was too short-lived.

-- Subpar voice acting. I just felt that all the voice actors delivered their lines flat, and nobody's performance stood out. This is a big reason as to why I think the characters were so lifeless. From the banter, to the emotional moments, none of it was delivered that well.

-- Side quests. The rewards for the side quests were decent up to a point and allowed me to nearly max out my character and even unlock some outfits. But most of the side missions were mere fetch quests and nothing really stood out or were all that memorable.

Stellar Blade—Came for the cute girl, stayed for the tight balance between sick visuals and slick gameplay.

Developed by Shift Up and released in the first half of 2024, Stellar Blade is a fast-paced action-adventure game drawing heavy inspiration from the hack-and-slash genre crossbred with some souls-like elements. The game chooses style and flair over all other aspects and to my surprise, it actually pulls it off and plays great. But let me not get ahead of myself, I’ll properly break down each aspect of the game down below as usual.

Graphics, Flair and Art-Direction

Stellar Blade excels in visuals. Of course, as expected of a modern-day AAA release, the graphics are phenomenal. The art-style is a hybrid between stylized and realistic, opting for more “idealized” realism. The environments are intricately crafted and look absolutely gorgeous, both from afar and up close. The characters—especially the protagonist—are a treat to look at. What surprised me the most was the level of detail in each aspect of the game! The details made the world feel like it was actually lived in. One example: each interior was decorated with physics-based interactable objects.

The Naytibas (monsters) had a surprising amount of variety, each more grotesque and/or unique than the last. The earlier bosses were kind of uninspired but thankfully the latter batch of bosses had very fun and unique designs. In short, the game is dope to look at.

Story

Clearly the weakest part of the game. In short—Eve, our protagonist, is sent to Earth from a foreign human settlement in space called the Colony. She’s sent to clear Earth of the Naytibas, mutated organisms that have spread all over the planet and threaten the remaining humans. Slowly as the story unravels, she discovers the secrets of Earth, the Colony, and even herself. The protagonist’s objectives were uninspired and the story beats were extremely predictable. The pacing was also a bit rushed and the entire package just fell short of being good.

Now I would’ve forgiven the uninspired narrative if the characters made up for it, which they unfortunately didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, all of the characters were likable, especially the protagonist—but they didn’t have any compelling motivations. It almost felt like they were following the script a little too tightly and didn’t have the freedom to be themselves. And one last thing: the side missions were boring as hell, disappointing because the true ending is hidden behind them. Overall, serviceable but forgettable.

Music and Sound Design

There was definitely some inspiration taken from Nier: Automata and even Shift Up’s other game—Nikke: Goddess of Victory. It made for a pleasing and fun soundtrack. The save-station music was always pleasant to hear and the boss music during the latter half of the game was really fucking good. The sound effects were always on point; during combat they felt punchy, during exploration they were subtle and added to the immersion—nice little dopamine hits. Overall, pretty fantastic.

Gameplay and Combat

I’ll say this: throughout my 30+ hours playing Stellar Blade, the combat never felt stale. It looked (and felt) so flashy, with bright flashes and slashes, deep saturated colours and bursts of neon lights, fluid and exaggerated animations—at times it actually felt like I was watching an animation. There were enough combos and skills that I didn’t even unlock them all in my playthrough—so that means even on a second playthrough, it won’t feel boring.

Speaking of variety, the Naytibas have an insanely big roster; each sub-area introduced at least two to three new enemy types—and at first I thought it was going to be too much to remember. But thankfully, to my satisfaction, the game does a good job at drip-feeding the mechanics and new enemy types, so I was never overwhelmed.

I will say that sometimes the smooth animations and the flashy effects did get in the way of fighting bosses, but not enough for me to dock any points. Also the QTE button events were kind of annoying. In short, just think of it as a modern-day equivalent of Nier: Automata or even Devil May Cry. I’m looking forward to the sequel.

Customizability (Bonus)

I’ll keep this section short. The number of costumes, accessories and even haircuts will be sure to make Eve fresh even towards the end of the game. And as a bonus, the cosmetics are an extra collectable that were pretty fun to unlock!

Stellar Blade—Weak narrative, smooth combat, addictive visuals—and most importantly, a cute protagonist—8.5/10