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.
