July 10/2023 Cosmic Star Heroine

Well that took too long.

Not the game, to be clear, this is a breezy fifteenish hour playthrough, but me sitting down to actually put my thoughts down took too damn long. Turns out, summer with small kids can be just as hectic as the school year. Anyway.

I recently finished Chrono Trigger, which I won’t be covering here, but suffice to say I really enjoyed it. In the wake of that I was suffering a bit of post-game dreariness, and decided to do something very unlike me and dive into another JRPG. SNESDrunk (a YouTube channel I strongly recommend if you like 16-bit gaming) had recommended Cosmic Star Heroine as a modern game with a similar feel to Chrono Trigger, and having already bounced off Chrono Cross like a very bouncy thing against a very hard thing, I decided to give it a try.

Let me first say that CSH is not Chrono Trigger – the story doesn’t have the emotional depth, the music isn’t as weird and gripping, the whole vibe doesn’t grab you by the huevos and drag you through the way Chrono Trigger does. If you’re looking for that particular hit, find another dealer.

That said, Cosmic Star Heroine is just so much fun – the art is gorgeous and cute, the music has a really cool jazzy/EDM thing that feels very futuristic and puts me in mind of Cowboy Bebop, and the story, while pretty formulaic, is well told. Let’s be honest, we’re not going to JRPG’s for unique story concepts anyway. At least here we’re not a group of teenagers on a mission to kill God.

On the other hand, I think CSH suffers a bit from trying to funnel the player through the main story. There’s very little in the way of side quests, or even areas to explore outside of the main mission path. If you go look at howlongtobeat, the spread between just finishing the game and seeing every scrap of content it has to offer is only 5 hours, so this is a pretty linear game. That’s not in and of itself a bad thing, but I just was enjoying this world so much that the lack of opportunities to hang out in it felt a little disappointing.

Also, and this might be something that I noticed more from years of tweaking emulators than anything else, but I kept running into screen-tearing as I was playing through. Nothing game breaking, but on what’s basically a 32bit JRPG running on a fairly modern PC, it felt weird to see what seemed like performance issues.

I picked this game up from Steam on sale for around 5 bucks, and that feels infinitely fair. It’s a great chill, relaxing world to explore and exist in, the equivalent of lo-fi beats to JRPG with, but I just wish there was a tiny bit more of it.