Wander Stars takes place on a lil’ island where Ringo, our apple-headed protagonist, is learning the ways of Kiai. Kiai, for the poor, uninitiated fools, is a method of fighting that uses words. That’s right, instead of simply performing an action, this martial artist shouts the names of their moves as they’re performing them. Just like in one of my Japanese anime. Fight, use, and collect words throughout the game to build up an arsenal of powerful abilities you can craft during battles to punch and kick your opponents into submission.
The concept is sound, even their marketing refers to the concept of collecting words as a deckbuilding strategy. It’s true, with a limited word count, a limited number you can bring into battle, and a layer of elemental attacks you can glaze onto your words, this has the makings of a deckbuilder. A deckbuilder where you don’t have dope card art, a damn shame considering how gorgeous Wander Stars anime-style art looks. With gorgeous-looking animations and character art, you’re wondering why they took the road with less art.
Our first quest in the demo is to collect coriander or parsley? Both Ringo and I forget and happily move along anyway. Instead of an open world, you’re faced with what looks like a board game or Super Mario World map with linear routes, points of interest, treasure, and battles. Treasure mostly consists of healing items and items to be used in battle, and unless you’re using items liberally, your inventory fills up almost immediately with only five available spaces. I begrudgingly consume an ice cream to make way for an empanada that offers higher health regeneration.
Other landmarks offer dialogue with villagers, generally fighting grabs with boxing gloves on their hands or an extremely sexy capybara with an exposed midriff. Sometimes they result in fights. Other times, random events, like beach volleyball, finding tea buried in the sand, or falling down a well. These are all text-based, mind you, but if you’re bought in on Ringo as a protagonist and are enjoying the goofy, off-the-wall humor that Wander Stars provide,s then this will be the extra spice that makes this dish extra delicious.
Battles are an important part, having you build out attacks in a turn-based battle, using “action words”, “modifier words”, and “elemental words.” So you’ve got your action verb like punch, kick, headbutt, etc, and you throw an adjective on it like “super” or “extra,” and if you’ve got the elemental adjective, you can add that to it. In the demo, there are only four slots available (but there are multiple upgrades, so it’s possible you can expand the amount of words you can use in the demo,) so you’re putting together moves like “Special Fire Super Headbutt.”
Each word has properties to it. A headbutt deals 1 damage, but if you throw a few extra modifiers on top of it, it can do more damage and even have an elemental affinity to it. It was pretty underwhelming, though. I felt like the amount of damage I could output and the amount of damage my enemies could output were wildly different. There are also a lot of enemies resistant to fire in the episode I played, which made my only elemental affinity of fire kind of useless. I think the concept is cool, and the art and animation is really cool, but the execution suffers.
There are four slots to stick in words. You don’t click and drag, you just click. So the game determines where the word goes. So if you pick ‘super’, for example, that takes up one slot. Because it’s not an action word, it goes in the first modifier word slot, which is directly above the single slot for the action word. Say I choose jab, a word that takes up two slots. Instead of moving ‘super’ up one slot, it just tells me the word is invalid, despite having two open slots above ‘super.’
There were a lot of little things like this that kind of bothered me throughout the playthrough. Along with a few weird bugs that made the game a little more frustrating than it had to be. At one point, I went to use an item and decided the item would be better used next turn. So I waited, and when I went back into my items, the item was just gone. When you hit an enemy with an elemental word that they’re immune to, you get a big ‘INMMUNE’ word showing up over the enemy.
One of the big things about the game that I loved is that enemies have an HP range that shows below their primary HP bar. If you manage to knock the enemy’s hit points into that range, they’ll submit, and you can click a lil’ peace button. Peace means you make friends with the enemy. Making friends with an enemy adds them to your ‘pep-up’ menu, which is like a badge in a Mario & Luigi game. It’s a little modifier for battle that also gives you access to another word. Allowing me to switch up my regular attacks with slightly modified ones or giving me access to new elemental words had me focusing on peace with my enemies instead of KOing them.
Wander Stars Shines Bright—But Needs More Time
Wander Stars is very cool conceptually. The art and animation are on point, and I get the feeling a lot of anime enthusiasts would really dig the style Paper Castle Games is going for. Unfortunately, Wander Stars just doesn’t seem ready for the big show just yet. There’s a lot of time left in the year to get it together and, honestly, with a few balance changes and some bug cleanup, Wander Stars could be really excellent. I wish Paper Castle Games the best of luck, Wander Stars could really be something special.
