Game Review: Stellar Blade
Wow, a game review! Yep, I have some colorful thoughts about this game I have been non-stop grinding for a while now. A love-hate relationship of magical proportions! Major spoilers ahead for the story.
Picked up the demo as soon as it came out, and even though I had some gripes with the VA, I enjoyed the gameplay so much that I bought the full game. Now, after a week of straight up not being able to put this game down, I have finished the game with the 'Making new memories' ending.
First off, I loved the story concept. The mystery took a while to intrigue me, but the more questions arose the more invested I became in it. Searching for lore bits and basically collecting every document like a hawk. In all honesty, I loved this. The written wills and documents just give so much more context to the world and had me constantly begging to uncover some new kind of super secret truth.
Of course, this goes hand in hand with the exploration and combat. I had so much fun exploring literally every meter of the map, that I didn't even progress the main quest until it was absolutely necessary. I fished all fish (Best NPC Clyde, fucking fight me), collected all cans and did every side quest. It was an absolute blast. I cant remember the last time I had so much fun just exploring shit. This is the first game in a while I have bothered to play as well, so I put all my time into it.
Before I start with combat, I do wanna give a shoutout filled with hatred to the people who designed some of the platforming/parkour in this game. While I loved some it and it was very reminiscent of HZD, it was janky at best, completely annoying at its worst. For example Raphael Space Center, in the laser room, you'll be forced to learn that EVE's jump distance is a bit far. Once you get over that however, you need to quickly press a button before you are laser'd to death. The button however is right next to a laser, you also have a laser coming from behind, so you have limited space to move and this game's tolerance for interaction is so goddamn narrow, that if EVE's face isn't planted into the button, you cannot activate it. To maneuver her into a suitable position, you have to turn her very slightly. Turns, which she does in big angles or in a way that makes her run into said lasers. Second shoutout is to the Hints team who literally had a hint for everything that didn't need one, but left out the triple wall run in the wasteland. Would've been good to know before spending 20 minutes trying to cross without double-jump!
On the combat side, I had a lot to learn. And while I still haven't completely mastered the entire system, I have become pretty good compared to when I started and got absolutely destroyed by like every single enemy I came across. My gripes here are the controls and hit registration. For example, I barely used any of the burst skills/functions. They look absolutely cool, but considering how hard the game already is, reaching to the ALT key and one of the four numbers is just impossible while in a constant forward momentum confrontation with bigger enemies or bosses. Especially considering that usually beta skills are all I needed combined with the dodge burst counterattack. Enemies felt frustrating, but never unfair- yeah no, fuck those gun-headed robots. Honestly, they just stun-lock you and the devs put swarms of them next to each other to increase difficulty. Not to mention that those robots, like a select few enemies in the game, cannot be stealth attacked! They just know that you're behind them and begin combat. Pretty frustrating.
Now bosses (generally). They were fun, and forced me to become better and better as I progressed. Like combat checkpoints. At the very end of the game however, they become pure bullshit, which I will get to later. For now, what I would like to say is that Tachy mode was at times critical for me to succeed, yet it didn't always work. For example, a lot of the time, using Tachy skills/attacks while a boss is in animation (which they are all the goddamn time) the hits don't register, it's basically up to chance if it puts a dent in the boss HP bar. Not to mention when bosses enter another stage and I have Tachy active, they won't play their stage progression animation unless I stop hitting them. Which results in me doing absolutely zero fucking damage to the boss, getting my Tachy energy depleted and immediately get thrown into some kind of stage-starter bullshit attack. Not cool.
Lastly, parry and dodging. The concept of using upgrades, better gears or better spines to increase the chances of a 'perfect' parry or dodge just seem off to me. Shouldn't the actual performance of the player matter here? What if someone doesn't spec into that vs someone who does? It seems like something I think should have been a static thing and not something to 'upgrade'.
Musically, the game is excellent. I love the soundtrack and through multiple 8+ hour sessions, I never got tired of it. Which is amazing considering that every area has one song playing most of the time. But all of them have this calm, soothing vibe that will not annoy you and are actually able to be on repeat for hours. Add the little variations, like how in some parts of the wasteland the song becomes more vocal and in others more instrumental, I can only praise the musicians and the people who thought out the entire sound planning in this game.
Now to the three parts which I loathed and just find the most depressing. The story, dialogue and the VA. I'll start with the VA, it's bad. I think the only person who really improved over the game is EVE, but even then she has so much tonally inconsistent dialogue. The worst offender of this is Lily. As for Adam, same issue, but a lot worse considering how most of his dialogue has a 'sly' beginning or end tonally. It doesn't just sound uncanny, but also sounds like he is inches away from gaining an asian accent. Still, the biggest issue remains the tone, how it sounds and where it's used. A lot of exclamations sound dry, are not correctly timed within the cutscene or are too over the top for the context. I don't want to dog on the VAs much however, for all I know they could've gotten bad descriptors in their scripts with bad equipment. But I do want to say that this ruins most if not all scenes in the game. Whenever I played the main quest, my immersion was broken.
And that's not the end of it. The dialogue is atrocious! EVE is relatively free of this, because she usually just reacts to whatever is happening at the moment. But Adam and Lily's dialogues are just painful to hear. It's a combination of out-of-the-blue lore-dumping, third person narration of events the player IS ALREADY SEEING HAPPEN and inappropriate/over the top reactions to a certain context.
This combined with the already terrible gestures (which again, just almost always don't fit the context or are over-the-top) creates a waterfall of terribly executed scenes, almost all of which that make up the main storyline of the game. For example, people cheer, Lily does an over the top happy jump, a second later the VA says “yes” in a tone completely different from the scene and then painful silence until the next person says something.
Overall, VA, dialogue and gestures had broken much of the immersion I could've gotten. Every scene felt, fake, had no emotions behind it due to how it was executed. The inconsistency in these three critical pillars just didn't make me connect with the characters in the moments I should've. I'm not taking the piss, but I genuinely felt more emotion reading Legionnaire logs than the main story. A story which, oh boy.
For the story, again, the execution was just bad. I loved the sets, the maps, the enemies, the logs and everything around it. Up until the moment the game had to execute it and take the whole thing home. The story, in my opinion, was too lore dumpy. We got three fetch quests and at then the game was over (In simple terms). Take for example Orcal. Mysterious, cool introduction. Who is he? What is the giant repository in Xion, who built it?
Outside of Xion we have literal swaths of logs speculating that he is up to something evil or that the sentinels are doing human/naytiba experimentations, or that the cradle is a lie. We even had a guy give us a side quest that put Orcal at the end in a very bad light. But all EVE does whenever she finds something like this is “Hmm, interesting”. Like those Free Xion people who were massacred by Sentinels. EVE goes “May your memories live on” and then just doesn't confront Orcal. Why? This happens all the time. Like with the Raven logs, EVE just seems very weak-minded, like an adult who doesn't know that 2+2 is an equation and not a type of food.
But at the end of the day, the main quest kicks in, Orcal is suddenly at his death bed and then he lore bombs his entire existence onto us with no buildup whatsoever, and the player is supposed to go “oh no”. And that's the crux of my issue, nothing in this story gets sufficient buildup to have a meaningful end. I just “don't care” that much, y'know? Adam being another great example of this. Constantly monologuing, annoying me with tips and insanely obvious remarks to the point of me wanting to strangle him.
He was supposed to be the magnum opus of buildups in this story, yet all we got was him acting like a chunni every once in a while before fucking off to the main nest and then, again, lore bomb his entire existence. We never really got to know the guy, no heart to hearts, the game just tells you that you're inseparable friends but the connection was never made. Tell, don't show. And it's just pathetic as well how he poses as this goodie-“I did everything for humanity, sowwy”-guy, but goes “whoops” when he is confronted with the potential millions of humans he has killed by proxy of the naytiba. Not mentioning that being the Elder, he does fuckall to stop it and no one care, because the writers tell you he is 'good'. (Also, he literally knows that raven is about to and is massacring Xionians and does nothing. Like, what the fuck?) Same with Lily, all these side quests about other people's stories and not one for her? Heck, multiple? How am I supposed to connect if she acts like a puppet on strings (my earlier critique on the behaviors) and then literally 2 seconds before the ending goes “Oh, I have a sister I guess.”
The end boss, which I got, was the robot one. Yes, I took Adam's hand, because as much as I've come to absolutely despise him, the logs of all the dead people made me hate Mother Sphere much more. Anyhow, fuck this boss. Seriously. Hey, I even had fun beating the shit out of Raven, but this boss was just pure bullshit. Poor attack signaling, too much forward momentum and an absolutely absurd HP pool. This was not a “fun and challenging” boss, this was a fucking annoyance. I got it down to about 30% health, which is where I gave up (consult what I've said about combat/Tachy mode) and just gave EVE god mode.
I usually don't cheat and frustrating bosses/enemies are part of playing games. But this was enough bullshit for me and I decided that I would rather like to “have fun” and complete the game, rather than remember this boss more than the amazing hours of exploration leading up to it.
This is the leadup to the biggest disappointment in the game so far, Mother Sphere. I hate her, but I want to get to know her. I read so much about her, the reverence, the irreverence and the speculations. Mother Sphere was hands down the biggest overarching plot element, and what did I get in the end? Jackshit.
She just shows up, tells you that you half-succeeded and half-fucked up and then leaves without elaborating. Which again, is ruined by horrible dialogue making me think she is open to co-existence and then the next moment we get an entire airborne squad sent on our asses. Like, WHAT IS IT? The truth of the naytiba should not be the only thing answered in the entire game. I want to hear the other side too or just anything so that I could get a better read on her!
Leaving one of the two overarching points in the plot completely without an answer just makes Mother Sphere an unreasonable and purely evil character by the end of the game. It's so goddamn frustrating that we never interact with her, let alone get the opportunity to do something about her smug ass sitting up there in space.
There is certainly a charm to open endings, but like everything within the main story, this is executed terribly! You can't tell me that you had literally every person under the sun lore dump their entire story within two sentences of meeting you or on their death, but the MOST important character doesn't even get their fucking motivations revealed? Adam coming out should literally be the half-way point, the second half hearing Mother Sphere for what she has to say. But no, we never get any meaningful info. Mother Sphere in its entirety has got to be the biggest letdown for a character I have ever experienced, bar none.
I even hear that in other endings, it is revealed that earth is surrounded, so what's the point of ending it here. All-in-all we literally just had a city massacred to merge with a chunni to become some human demigod, meanwhile Mother Sphere is still out there doing who knows what and the Naytiba are still just roaming around and making earth a living hell. How is this a good ending? How is this any ending at all?
Haaa, in conclusion, I loved the mystery of this game, I loved every single piece of collectible lore that I found and most of the NPCs like Rox or Clyde. The exploration made me fall in love and overall I can say that I had an absolute blast playing this game. The graphics were amazing and spectacles like the orbital elevator were just awesome to explore. On the other hand, the main story, which all of said environmental story telling is linked back to, is terribly executed, rushed and unsatisfying. The Beginning was weak, the middle part is where the game shone brighter than any other, and the end is where it all returned to an absolute letdown.
Please don't misunderstand, I love this game very much, probably a game I will 100%, but I think I enjoyed the 'written' story and the concept of it more than what was executed. If we get a second installment of this game, I wish for Shift Up to invest way more effort into their voice design, dialogue and their story direction. And especially with how disappointed I am with the lack of Mother Sphere, I really do want a second installment.
TL;DR: I really love this game, it's environmental story-telling, but I think it heavily lacks in good execution and direction.