Influences for games can be so unapologetic in their aesthetics, marketing, and tone, in the most sincere and genuine way. Wander Stars uses shounen anime/manga from the ‘70s, ’80s, and early ’90s, with Dragon Ball at the forefront of its influence, to craft a grand space adventure with its turn-based combat, combining verbs and adverbs to chain powerful attacks, and a boisterous/exuberant child lead. Unfortunately, constant game-breaking bugs in every boss fight, losing save data multiple times, and an unfinished menu system with stuttering left me saddened by this promised grand RPG adventure.
Wander Stars
Developer: Paper Castle Games
Price: $32.50 CAD
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Steam.
The writer was provided a Nintendo Switch for review.
Ringo lives on an island with her grandmother, and though her brother left a few years ago, she stays and hopes he will come back. The call to a grand space adventure startles Ringo with Wolfe landing his spaceship on the island to search for a piece of the map Ringo has in her possession. Ringo is a naive teenager, but can fight by combining words into Kiai to subdue and befriend foes. Becoming friends and rivals with these enemies allows Ringo to add Pep-Ups in the form of passives and additional words to carry on the will of rivals to fight further.
Each chapter has multiple maps and paths to choose from, with no backtracking until a chapter is completed. It adds a sense of urgency, and different paths offer options such as choosing additional words, increasing health, and adding different Pep-Ups to your journey. After completing a chapter, you will be able to use Honor gained from bouts to increase stats, such as health or SP, but where Wander Stars shines is in being able to improve your capacity to hold additional words that can provide standard damage, elemental attacks, modifiers, and actions.
With how tough the game quickly gets, these were a welcome relief after completing a chapter, and I would attempt to replay a chapter on a greater difficulty to earn extra Honor. But since greater difficulties add more resistances to enemies and add more weaknesses to Ringo, I could never get too far in the replays of chapters to receive all of that glorious additional Honor.
Wander Stars has Great Combat, Great Characters, and Terrible Switch Performance
For example, you will have different words to use in three categories, as mentioned before. ACTs, which are your endpoint of a combination, such as Kick, Punch, or Slash. ELEs, which can add elemental capabilities to deal status effects such as Fire, Thunder, and Ice. Then there are MODs, which are your modifier words to increase the ACTs or ELEs, such as Powerful, Big, and Extra. By using these categories together with the allotted tools at your disposal, you can create a Super Big Electric Punch, which will take the base Punch that only inflicts one damage, and the Super MOD will increase this damage by one.
The Big MOD will increase the damage by three with a whopping five damage attack imbued with electricity that can shock opponents to inflict damage over time. It sounds complex, but by using words, verbs, adverbs, and nouns, the game gives you so many ways to create your own unique attacks that will never be the same each turn. Each enemy has its own health and a health threshold. It’s not about making your foes’ health drop to zero, but about dealing enough damage in between this threshold so that you can create a truce or in-game Peace with your opponent.
By doing this, you’ll gain additional Honor from a bout rather than having just dropped their health to zero. They may be your enemies in a bout, but they can become your rivals, granting you Pep-Ups to use throughout the chapter. Weaknesses and resistances play a big role in determining what each enemy can exploit or soak up. Getting to tactfully join words together by honing in on those weaknesses always had me on edge and made me glad in my successful attempts. It’s a fascinatingly slick turn-based endeavour and very much elicits the sometimes corny/hilarious, but potent attacks we see from child protagonists in media or at anime/manga at large that audiences tend to love.
Chapter progression goes pretty smoothly, choosing different paths, fighting soon-to-be rivals, taking some decisions on the overworld grid – should I do this fight or buy something from the vending machine instead? There are always multiple routes to choose from, and replaying chapters provides a boon when coming back stronger or having more word slots to use. I loved that skipping cutscenes made them go quickly, like a television fast-forwarded, with visual static overlaying the cutscenes I had already watched. It oozes a Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe in ways few games do.
Brilliant Shounen RPG Undone by Game-Breaking Switch Bugs
My largest issue with the game is the constant glitchiness and unplayable mess that many of the boss fights were for me on Nintendo Switch. This led to me losing save data, redoing full chapters, and being put into an unavoidable barrage from a boss fight, where I began losing health on my turn for not pressing any buttons. This happened to me in multiple chapters. I became fed up with this experience on Nintendo Switch. It really put a massive damper on my experience, and sometimes, when selecting words in the menu, it does not correctly register or highlight what I want.
As I have seen online, these problems don’t seem to be an issue on other platforms for Wander Stars, such as on Steam, and were what I continually had to suffer through during my playthrough. I reached my breaking point several hours into the game, so I just had to stop.
The Final Word
I love the combat, aesthetics, and banter between characters. I had an extremely rough time in the boss fights due to technical qualms. I tried pushing forward, but losing at an unplayable mess of a boss fight takes you back to the start of the chapter to do everything all over again—a loss of progress. After dealing with this, I gave up and am waiting for fixes. I suggest playing Wander Stars on Steam, because there is something so special here with this RPG teasing well-known anime tropes with a dark-skinned girl of colour lead–a rarity in the shounen genre. But for me, the unplayable mess it became has driven me away from the game’s Nintendo Switch version.
MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
