It’s so rare we get a brand new IP in the JRPG world. And even rarer when we get one this cool. Starbites was developed by IKINAGAMES and published by NIS America, and thanks to NIS for providing the review code. Now, one other piece of disclosure, aside from the review code. Last year, I sat on a panel at PAX West to interview the producer of this game, Junho Bae. NIS America paid me for THAT, but they’re not paying me for THIS. These are my unfiltered opinions after finally getting to play through the entire game. Starbites is a turn-based, science fiction RPG about a group of salvagers living on the rundown planet Bitter. It’s got a super inviting, almost Dreamworks-like visual style that just feels fun right from the get-go, and being turn-based, it’s a lot more about strategy than it is about reflexes. This is the first release from IKINAGAMES, so how is it? I’m glad I asked. In my opinion, Starbites is an incredible first effort, and it bodes well for this team and this series going forward. That’s not to say it’s perfect, though.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Now, I know the popular advice would say that I should build this review up gradually, lay the groundwork and crescendo with my final thoughts for the audience to take away. But I also know how the internet works, and I know that only 30% of you will still be reading by the end. And I want to be sure the vast majority of you know my final thoughts, because they’re important. So here goes: I love this game. I love this story, these characters, this world. I love everything that’s presented and the implication of so much more existing in this universe. I love the way the story is told, just dropping us into the middle of things where character relationships are already established, inside jokes already exist, and the writer trusts us enough to follow along without having to be spoonfed everything. The gameplay is tight and fun and just complex enough to remain interesting for the entire runtime. I can also really easily imagine it being iterated on in future titles, of which I hope there will be many, many more. This has the chance of becoming the next Trails. I don’t say that lightly, because Trails is my favorite JRPG series. And true, in terms of gameplay this couldn’t be more different than Trails, and in story, too. But the scale of it, the feeling like this game is the first step on a long journey, it gives me Trails in the Sky vibes all over again. So yes, I love this game. Now that I’ve got all that out of my system, I can get into more detail, even criticize it in places. But bottom line, I’m very here for what Starbites is doing.
GAMEPLAY
Story’s the most important thing to me when it comes to this genre, so I’m gonna save that for the end. To start, let’s talk about how it plays. Starbites is a turn-based RPG in a very modern style. By that, I mean you can see the turn order prior to issuing a command so that you can plan accordingly, and there are plenty of ways to mess around with the order, either by slowing an enemy down with a status effect or by having a character cut in line using Driver’s High. More on that in a minute. The most notable thing about combat straight away is that your characters all fight using big old honking machines called Motorbots. These are all radically different from each other, which gives each character an even stronger sense of individuality. Lukida rides around on the back of a big bipedal monstrosity, and Gwendoll’s out here just casually side-saddling a kick-ass hoverbike, just as two examples.
It uses an enemy weakness mechanic similar to something like Octopath Traveler, where enemies can be weak to any number of different types of attacks. Each character’s standard attack does one type of damage, and they each have special moves that do a variety of other types of damages, too, so you’re never going to find yourself locked out of the ability to weaken an enemy based on which characters are in your party. Hitting an enemy’s weakness is a key part of battle strategy, since doing it enough puts an enemy in Break status. If you’ve played modern turn-based games, this will feel familiar, but Starbites puts its own spin on things by encouraging you to break enemies in order to activate backup attacks from your support characters. You’ll get six characters in your party in total, but only three can be on the front lines. The other three can be assigned as Support for each of the frontline characters. When a character Breaks an enemy, their assigned support character will jump in and perform a powerful attack as a follow-up. Aside from just being a nice and cool thing for that character to do, it really adds a lot of extra depth to the combat system. There will be plenty of times where you find yourself sort of racing against the clock, not literally but just like in the thick of a battle with your HP running low, and you know if you can just break this enemy and get your support character in to kick butt you’ll be okay. Particularly in some of the later-game boss fights, strategizing around when and if to break a boss becomes absolutely vital.
Honestly, this is a super fun and engaging combat system. The characters’ personalities all shine through in their special moves, which are all really great, and if you’re like me and prefer turn-based battles to be faster, you can hit a button to double the speed whenever you want. There really aren’t many downsides I can think of. Maybe one thing that bugs me a bit, your support characters only gain half the experience. I mean, I guess it’s fair, they’re not helping as much as the frontline team, but man I hated having a ten-level discrepancy between my main squad and my backup crew by the end of the game. That just… it makes my skin crawl. Also, it might have been cool to implement some sort of character swapping mid-battle. Like if the active character could switch places with their support character. I can imagine there might be even more opportunities to strategize if you had that option. Maybe that’ll find its way into the next game. Fingers crossed.
Your characters level up in the traditional JRPG way, and each one has access to a Talent tree. You know the routine, character levels up, gets talent points, and you can spend those on upgrading stats. A lot of the talent tree is actually made up of enhancements to your special skills, and even skills used specifically when in the Driver’s High state. Oh right, Driver’s High. So, as your characters attack and receive damage, their Driver’s High meter will fill up. When it’s maxed out, you can hold down the right trigger and press a button at any time to have that character cut the turn order and act next no matter what. Unlike similar systems found in other games, though, you’re not restricted to a particular move when you activate Driver’s High; you can actually do any attack or special move you want. Interestingly, when in Driver’s High, your moves will sometimes have different attributes than when you’re just fighting normally. Like a move that might decrease an enemy’s defense by 20% will decrease it by 30% while in Driver’s High, or a skill that does a particular damage type in standard combat will do a different type in Driver’s High. As you play, you’ll learn all of your characters’ moves and how they differ in Driver’s High, and that all becomes part of the strategy of play. You could just use Driver’s High immediately as soon as it becomes available, sure, but it might be more useful if you wait until just the right moment, because you know you’ll have access to something different that will come in handy then. It’s pretty cool.
Outside of battles, you’ll traverse a series of dungeons that unfortunately borrow from the standard, modern JRPG design. By that I mean a bunch of boring rooms connected by boring hallways. Starbites isn’t necessarily worse than something like Trails, for example, but it’s not better, either. It’s an area that I feel like the industry really needs a wake-up call about. It’s really just, like, Persona 5 out there having cool-ass dungeons. And that game is super old. We need better dungeons in JRPGs. But having said that, the dungeons weren’t ever frustrating, even the ones that were set up like mazes. And that says something, because mazes typically frustrate me to no end. These dungeons aren’t overly long, they respect your time, and they usually contain some character dialog at various points along the way to keep things interesting.
When you’re not in dungeons, you’re either running around the surface of the planet Bitter or you’re in one of the various settlements. There’s a limited fast travel system that will let you jump straight to any settlement you’ve been to. This is good, though at a couple of points I found myself wishing it was a bit more robust. Bitter isn’t an open world, it’s a bunch of interconnected zones, and there are times where you’ll have to backtrack to an area out in the wilds you’ve been to previously. Sadly, you can’t fast travel to those locations – your best bet is to travel to the nearest settlement and then make the hike out from there. The ability to jump straight to any explored zone would’ve helped alleviate this. Now, the game world is far from massive, so this isn’t really a huge deal, but worth mentioning.
All in all, this game is a blast to play. It’s further proof, along with Clair Obscur Expedition 33, that turn-based RPGs aren’t dead, they never have been and they never will be. Well-designed turn-based games like this give me hope that we’re really entering into a new renaissance for this genre. It’s really excellent stuff.
PRESENTATION
Starbites is definitely a AA title. But what it might lack in raw polygon count, it more than makes up for with style. Like I said, there’s an almost DreamWorks quality to the graphics, something that makes the characters and environments feel sort of whimsical but not silly. It’s a fine line, and you can definitely make something so cartoony that it loses some emotional weight, but Starbites walks that line really well. Most of the game is presented from a three quarters top-down perspective with a fixed camera, meaning you can move into the foreground or background, but you can’t rotate the camera around yourself. What you’re looking at from that perspective, unfortunately, is fairly dull. And to be fair, that’s kind of the point. The story revolves around the rundown dullness of the planet Bitter, and how Lukida desperately wants to break free and travel the stars. So the game does a good job of helping you empathize with her, because you’re not gonna love the environments, either. It’s good from a narrative perspective, but unfortunately, the reality of it means that you’ll be trekking back and forth through a lot of brownish areas. This is another reason the whimsy of the characters is such a good thing, because it really helps to balance things out and keep it interesting.
There are fairly frequent but brief cutscenes that allow the characters a bit more movement and expression, which goes a long way toward making them feel real and complete. The rest of the time, conversations play out with characters standing in-scene and talking with minimal animation. That’s actually not too bad, though, since every line is fully voiced. Really, it’s just some NPC and side quest dialog that’s not voiced, besides that every single line is spoken, and that is HUGE for immersion. And it helps that the voice work is so freaking good. I played in English, of course, and the cast is really phenomenal. There were a couple of voices I recognized from other games and anime, but there were plenty I was unfamiliar with, too, and everyone does a fantastic job. I want to highlight the voice of the main character, Lukida. Despite seeming at first like your stereotypical go-getter, super enthusiastic main female lead, the actress really adds a lot of nuance and depth to her performance, which highlights just how well-rounded Lukida is. More on the characters later, though. We’re still talking presentation.
The restrictiveness of the environments and the camera has the unfortunate side effect of making the game world feel smaller than it should. We’re told that there are a ton of people here, that the city of Delight is full of scavengers and mechanics and rich snobs and everyone in between, but you have to use your imagination to fill in the gap between what you’re told and what you’re shown. No doubt this is a budget constraint, and it’s a bit of a bummer, but it’s nothing insurmountable. It didn’t detract from the experience for me. Here’s hoping future titles can show a bit more of the scale that the story is working with.
The music is hit or miss for me, mostly miss if I’m honest. There are a handful of tracks that I really enjoyed and found myself humming while cooking dinner or mowing the lawn or waxing my ear hair. The rest of them are bland. It’s all fitting for the setting, much more industrial-type tracks given this is a hard sci-fi story about the little guy struggling against overwhelming powers. Just not enough bangers for me to give it a full-throated musical endorsement.
There are some real peaks and valleys in the overall presentation. The graphical styling is excellent, but the environments are bland. The voice work is top notch, but the music is kind of meh. The peaks are significantly higher than the valleys are low, though, so I still walk away feeling overall positive about the presentation. It’s a strong start.
EXTRA CONTENT AND NITPICKS
I’ll say, playing with every battle on high speed, the game took me around 20 hours to complete. If you don’t use high speed, I can see that being a few hours longer, and if you are a true completionist and go for every side quest, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear you spent 30 hours in this game. Now, that’s not massive by JRPG standards, and I for one am very happy with that. This is an expertly paced game, at least the way I played it. Having said that, I probably only did 10-15% of the side quests. These are your standard “go here, kill that,” sort of thing that most JRPGs have. Nothing particularly innovative, but they do help flesh out the world a bit, at least from what I saw.
One thing I unfortunately have to note is that I did encounter a number of bugs in my playthrough. Nothing gamebreaking, nothing more than some minor annoyances, and I will say that the game will have a day-one patch on PlayStation 5, which is where I played it, so hopefully many or most of those issues will be fixed. The issues I ran into were things like the camera getting stuck in place after a cutscene, requiring me to exit the area without being able to see where I was going. Sounds harder than it ended up being, there’s a minimap and icons on screen indicating your destination and distance. Or one other time when the subject of a side quest I needed to talk to randomly walked inside a wall and I couldn’t get to him, even after resetting the game. I eventually found him wandering around later on, but that was definitely a sticky situation. I have a feeling these are the sorts of issues that will be addressed by the patch, though. It’s just one of the downsides to playing games a bit early, you typically aren’t getting the fully polished product. I just want to mention it in the event that my issues weren’t the ones addressed by the patch. I don’t want you to think I’m keeping information from you. But here’s the thing – even if those issues were to remain in the game, I still prefer a game like this that has a tiny amount of jank, when it’s got so much creativity and style. I prefer that over the most polished AAA experiences most of the time. There’s soul in it. It feels like a piece of art made by humans, not like a product made by robots. Not everyone is gonna agree with that, but I stand by it.
STORY
Starbites is the story of Lukida, a young woman who lives on the planet Bitter and is essentially an indentured servant to the de facto ruler of the planet, a woman named Fennec. When the game opens, she’s just gotten her hands on a ticket that will get her onboard a starship, meaning she can finally escape from this barren wasteland she’s called home for her entire life. See, she isn’t technically allowed to leave, because her parents passed away when she was a baby, leaving her with their crippling debt, and Fennec isn’t the sort of person to let something like that go. Despite the antagonistic relationship Lukida has with Fennec, though, there’s more to them than meets the eye. Almost a mother-daughter relationship, in a really twisted way. Fennec absolutely sucks, and I’m sure I would hate her if she were real, but I love the dynamic between the two of them. Lukida is joined by her friends Gwendoll and Badger. Gwendoll is an alcoholic bounty hunter who rides a hover bike, and Badger is a mercenary with a shady past. They both seem perfectly content to go along with whatever hairbrained scheme Lukida comes up with, which in the beginning involves tracking down the giant robot that attacked her and stole her one-way ticket off of Bitter. You’ll be joined by three other people as the story progresses, a genius little girl with a big robot friend and two mercenaries on a secret mission. What follows is a game in five acts that establishes the groundwork for what will hopefully be a truly epic story. But even though it does seem to have aspirations beyond this single title, it does an excellent job of introducing story points and wrapping them up in a satisfying way. This isn’t a game with a cliffhanger ending that will leave you on the edge of your seat, hoping against hope that another game comes out to resolve the plot. I mean, you’ll still be hoping against hope for another game, but only because you’ll want to spend more time with these characters and see more of this universe.
Act 3 is where things really start to heat up. The first two acts feel almost like standalone adventures with some threads that connect them together, and acts 3 through 5 feel like the full realization of the main story. But honestly, that feels right to me. It’s paced correctly. We get several hours of stories introducing the major characters and their world and their situation, and then we dive into the meat of the plot that ties everything up in a bow. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that despite how the game shows certain things as maybe not needing more of an explanation than the surface details would suggest, there’s often way more complexity to them. It unfolds beautifully across the 20 hours of storytelling.
CONCLUSION
We need more JRPGs like Starbites. Like I said, this is the first game from IKINAGAMES, a South Korean studio, and the fact that they came in with a JRPG like this as their debut effort is remarkable. And yes, I said JRPG. If you’re someone who believes a game’s genre should be determined by the street address where it was made, let me know down in the comments. It’s an argument I just… I really love to have. It’s fun, and not old at all. It’s fresh and new as a spring day. What was I saying? Right, they knocked it out of the park. It’s far from perfect, as I think you can tell from what I’ve said in this very review. But every sin it commits is absolutely forgivable, they might even be seen as no big deal by a lot of people. They’re things that will be iterated upon as the team continues, hopefully to make more games in this series. Because despite wrapping up quite nicely, Starbites leaves a few juicy tidbits behind that are begging for more exploration. When I compared it to Trails in the Sky, I want to say again, I’m not exaggerating or making it up – I genuinely have a similar feeling here that I had after that game. Not because of the epic cliffhanger that Sky had, but because I had just witnessed a team scatter a ton of seeds all across an enormous field, and while some of them have sprouted quite nicely, there are so many others yet to come. There’s a broader world that’s only hinted at here, again, just like the Trails series. I want more Starbites. I want it now, please. If not now, then… soon? As soon as possible, if you don’t mind. Thanks.