Stella Glow - Thoughts

From the word "go", Stella Glow shoots itself in the foot. For a handheld game, its offers a tantalizing package: a fun bundle of anime characters, an item crafting system, battlefields that make good use of height, some downtime relationship management, and hours of cutscenes to sit back and watch... er, read. But for every cool feature hides an ugly flaw, some so terrible that it makes it impossible to recommend Stella Glow to those that would admire it most. Which is a shame, because it can be an enjoyable experience when all the pieces finally come together...

... but to get to that point, you have to suffer through eight hours of the worst the game has to offer.

Stella Glow's introduction is interminably long. For the first five combats you'll be relegated to 1-2 characters, with only the main character capable of using special abilities. This keeps battles woefully basic, imitating oldschool RPGs where most encounters are optimally solved via attack spam. Except instead of battles lasting under a minute, Stella Glow's scuffles are painstakingly lengthy, filled with a lot of movement animations, buff/debuff notifications, and languid battlefield effects. By the second fight you'll be wondering when the game picks up; by the fifth you'll be dreading that it won't.

Finally assembling the core cast in Chapter 1 doesn't alleviate matters either, as they're too frequently separated from one another and lack diversity. While it helps having more characters on the battlefield to control, it will take some time for each character to learn an ability other than "big attack"—and since you'll be facing the same enemies for the entire game (there's a total of like, 20 monsters), battles won't feel more interesting as much as they'll just feel longer. Stella Glow touts itself as a strategy RPG, but there's very little "strategy" involved in its first quarter: simply whack enemies from the side and heal if low on health. Combat isn't just simple—it's rudimentary and lacking.

By the time you reach Amatsu (the game's Japanese-style "fire" city) your feelings on Stella Glow will likely settle. Most of the mechanics and systems finally plateau here: you'll get accustomed to the free time system, understand how to craft and use orbs, know what "tuning" entails, have a good grasp on the story, and know how to handle combat by this point. Each party member will have 1-2 abilities to alternate between during battles and you'll finally be given the chance to switch out party members for one another, curating a team you prefer. However, none of these ever coalesce to form a satisfying hook; Stella Glow will waffle for too long between mediocre and decent, rarely breaking out of those bounds in either direction. Ultimately I'd describe it as an "okay" game—and sometimes, "okay" can be worse than both good or bad.

Yet one categorically bad thing about Stella Glow—which will irritate you like a toothpick caught in your throat—is that the game is slow as molasses. I mentioned before that the animations were languid, but another baffling issue is how enemies will loiter in the turn order queue. Every creature on the map gets a place in the queue, and those that do less actions on their turn will have their next turn pop up quicker. But Stella Glow's enemies are the patient sort, calmly waiting until your characters approaches their doorstep to act... which constantly places them ahead of your active characters in the queue. Over and over again the camera will pan over to these slackers and wait a beat, obsessively reminding you how much of the battle still remains.

This may start off as a minor annoyance but it becomes downright vexing later, with entire turn order rows clogged with inactive enemies (seriously, try Sakuya's 2nd tuning mission and tell me with a straight face that it doesn't intentionally seek to waste your time). It never lets up either, with even the endgame missions featuring legions of enemies that will lazily sit on their hands and watch the fight unfold. This grievance alone is so exhausting that it dooms Stella Glow to the "do not play" dustbin, which is a shame because the solution is so simple (warp them in later or just skip their turns!) The only saving grace is that while you're in Amatsu, you at least get to while your time away with its awesome battle theme, the best theme in the game (outside of the final boss).

The conducting ability is perhaps the most novel concept Stella Glow brings to the table, but it's equal parts inventive and bewildering. As a battle unfolds, a five-tiered status bar at the top of the screen will slowly accumulate levels, which can be spent on powerful AoE abilities. The lower tiers can dish out devastating attacks or multi-target buffs, while the higher tiers are legitimately game-changing, granting a full-party HP/MP restore or disabling every enemy on the map for four turns straight. The problem with this is that the non-witch party members (those that can't be conducted) lose a lot of their value as the game goes on, and even then witches like Sakuya and Mordimort have flat-out worse songs than Lisette and Popo (the full-team-heal, full-enemy-shutdown duo respectively). I appreciate the options that conducting adds to a strategy-light game like this, but it only serves to remind me that more could and should have been done to broaden the playing field.

Although I've spent an ample amount of time bemoaning Stella Glow's failures as a SRPG, I should note that the game is actually half RPG, half visual novel—that is, expect to read it just as much as you play it. In the story-department Stella Glow fares much better (the protagonist in particular is thankfully level-headed and proactive), but I still wouldn't describe it as captivating, well-written, or deep. Expect some decent characters (Klaus, Rusty, and Hilda), some stupid characters (Keith, Marie, Nonoka), and some that fall in-between that you can't help but love how annoying they are (Popo, Archibald). It's moe-heavy, rebel-against-god fluff at the end of the day, even if the story does throw out some cool ideas here and there. For instance, the most ambitious portion of the story upheaves the happy-go-lucky status quo, dangling some serious stakes in front of the player. Sadly you'll likely see it coming a stage or two beforehand, and its melodramatic after-effects can linger for a little too long.

I had basically no experience with developer Imageepoch before playing Stella Glow, and now learning that this was their last title released, I'm not sure what to think after hitting the credits on their portable swan song. In a way, it leaves me kind of curious: this was their culmination after 10 years of video game development? Did they peak early with Luminous Arc? Do they even have any die-hard fans? In any case, none of this changes the fact that Stella Glow lacks the luster to be called a hidden gem. I think the best thing you can say about it is that it at least tries to be its own "thing", even if that thing is a housed inside a box of trite anime nonsense mixed with some of the slowest, dullest SRPG combat I've ever experienced. Oh well.

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Images obtained from: imdb.com, outcyders.net, gematsu.com, myshopville.com