Tecmo Secret of the Stars (1993)

Secret of the Stars, for SNES

Rating: 5.8/10; Average

Not recommended unless you really have a SNES Jrpg itch to scratch and have already played everything better.

Secret of the Stars is a traditional Jrpg in the same vein as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest; turn based random battles, magic that uses mp, an overworld with a ship and later airship, dungeon crawling, etc. The game starts off with a lone protagonist and very early on a poor design choice forced me to check a walkthrough. In the starting area (and nowhere else in the game) the hill sprites on the overworld are actually entrances to caves despite the lack of any graphics indicating a cave entrance. The game does nothing to help, only telling you to find a cave.

Soon after, you are introduced to the game’s main gimmick; 2 separate parties. One party consists of youths who are the main heroes of the game; each one is assigned a stereotypical class, an element and a set of magic. The other party consists of adults and there are more of them than can fit in a battle. There is a guild in town where you can switch the adult party members but at no point can members of one group join the other. This is most ridiculous at the beginning when each group has only a single member and they cannot merge into a single party, which would be the logical thing to do. The game arbitrarily forces use of both parties by including gates and doors that can only be passed by 1 of the parties. The concept of having multiple parties on the go at the same time is actually very interesting, but the implementation in this game is the opposite of interesting and only serves to make the game more tedious than it needs to be.

Combat in the game is quite difficult. Normal enemies increase in difficulty rather significantly to the point where it is easy to inadvertently wipe when enemies that completely overpower you are mixed in with reasonable enemies, and it is often necessary to grind levels just to get by. However, this is mitigated by the fact that wiping is not game over; you respawn in town and lose money. It is also ridiculously easy to run from battle; seriously, the odds of fleeing from battle without taking any damage whatsoever are 80% or higher. When you realize this, you understand that there is little point to have the adult party fight at all while the main party can grind in an easy location while fleeing every battle in dungeons to be in the best condition for bosses. This really takes out the tension and resource management that makes dungeon crawling fun. Bosses are very challenging though there is far too much emphasis put on randomly used powerful hit all magic attacks that can easily wreck your entire party.

In battle, 2 or more heroes can combine attacks to create an entirely new attack. The game leaves it up to you to experiment and find the combos but they are not actually necessary. The most useful ones are tied to certain items and the game does nothing whatsoever to indicate this. You can turn on/off animations and set message speed directly from the battle menu and there is an autobattle. Turning off animations and setting message speed to 0 = turbo mode for grinding and is a nice touch. The autobattle is quite effective and characters will use magic to heal if needed. There is a fair trade off; targets are chosen at random during autobattle, so you can end up taking more damage than if you had manually focused on a single enemy at a time. I found it most efficient to fight more difficult battles manually until 1 enemy was killed and then put on autobattle. Autobattle is difficult or impossible to turn off, so don’t use it if the fight is too hard.

The concept behind the main villain is interesting, but the story is largely lackluster and boring. There is a distinct lack of interesting dialogue or character development and all the characters are generic. Overall, the simplistic nature of the game feels like it would have been a decent game on the NES, but in the realm of the SNES the game is relegated to mediocrity.

Pro

• Decent combat and challenge
• Concept of building up your base by recruiting new people and seeing how new buildings are constructed and occupied
• Higher level spells are streamlined in the menu without separate entities. Instead you select a spell and then press “right” to increase the mp cost for a more powerful level of the spell

Odd

• Can rest in any bed to fully recover health, including ones in dungeons. Only by paying for a bed at the inn can you recover mp (though there are certain special places that recover for free)

Con

• Stats for equipment not shown in the shop
• No description for spells and items in the menu
• Limited inventory with no stacking, to the point where healing items are not worth buying
• Can’t directly back out of the inventory using the menu button. Have to move the cursor to the “end” button
• No map whatsoever
• Lack of secrets
• 2 separate parties, one of which has too many people
• Running from battle is way too easy
• Cannot transfer items between parties until mid game
• Often not clear what or where you have to do/go next