"Hoshigami was a niche hit when released on the PSone originally, garnering cult support from strategy RPG fans. Now the game has been remixed for the DS and is heading to Europe in just over a month. Cubed³ caught up with Aksys Games, the team that worked hard on the English localisation and worked closely with Arc System Works, the actual developer of the title."
"Some titles beg to be remade or rereleased; Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth, the PlayStation strategy role-playing game, is not one of them. It's not that Hoshigami Remix is bad, but it's wildly inconsistent and harshly demanding even on normal difficulty. It's also not a very good choice for a gamer on the go: Battles are long and the learning curve is steep, so short sessions are not only unsatisfying, they are often impossible. There are some good ideas at work here, but the game asks a lot of you and doesn't give a lot back, which makes playing it feel more like work than fun."
"Like the GBA, Nintendo DS is now getting the Strategy Role-Playing Game bug. Hoshigami Remix is leading the pack, soon-to-be followed by Luminous Arc, and then topped off with the triumphant return of Final Fantasy Tactics for Nintendo's touch system. So while the first title out the gate by Aksys Games isn't a complete wash of a game - it will be quite the contrary for some of the more hardcore SRPG fans - it's a tough sell for a little-utilized genre on DS that's set to explode. Hoshigami Remix takes the original PS2 cult classic and reworks it with new branching stories, new music, new characters, and over 50 hours of gameplay, but in the end it creates a niche so small that many of even the most diehard DS fans will want to pass this up for future pocket glory."
"The original PlayStation played home to a feast of role-playing games. Some were good, some were great, and a lot of them just downright sucked. Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth is a hard one to classify. This strategy-RPG rode the wave of popularity the genre enjoyed following the release of Final Fantasy Tactics and did a lot of things right. It was also one of the most difficult games most of us had ever played; something that overshadowed the title almost completely and earned it the critical panning it suffered.
This updated, portable version addresses Hoshigami's ridiculous difficulty, mostly in the form of three different difficulty settings. On easy, the game is actually playable; on normal, it feels more like the original PlayStation game; and on the highest setting, Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix will leave you crying like a little girl."
"From previous experiences, we know that remakes can go one of two directions: they can either be a faithful recreation with enough new elements to make it worth revisiting, or it can be a waste of time and money.
Port-able
But rather than repackaging the old game and calling it a day, Remix boasts new characters, missions, music and a revised interface. There are even three different difficulty settings to choose from this time around. And yet, when we hunched over our DS and got down to business, it felt like we were back in 2001."
"When Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth was released on the PSOne a decade ago, it was quickly decried as an abject failure. Even today, the original Hoshigami is noted for being meaninglessly difficult, with horrible control and irritating music. This remake fixes a number of these problems, but the base it's all built on is still highly unbalanced, a fact which makes Hoshigami Remix a hard game to recommend. Much of the original title's difficulty has been mitigated by the introduction of abundant revive magic and a streamlined interface, but the game is still weighted heavily in favor of magic, a fact which sadly renders most character development possibilities moot. A player who doesn't follow a specific plan of character and magic development will have a great deal of difficulty passing some of the later battles, as magic can easily wipe out physical fighters, main character included. While Hoshigami Remix is undoubtedly a much better version of the original, the game still has plenty of flaws and can be highly frustrating for a player who goes in without foreknowledge of how the system will develop."
