 Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss Like most of you watching this, I was pretty excited to see the announcement for a Super Mario RPG remake because I think it's one of the five best roleplaying games, on a system best known for roleplaying games. You also got Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Earthbound, Luffyab 2, Breath of Fire 2, Secret of Mana Pteranigma, Soulblazer on and on, But you never notice there's one RPG nobody ever mentions it's made by Tecmo called Secret of the Stars. Hey, Tecmo made some pretty sweet sports games back in the day, plus Ninja Gaiden and plenty of other good stuff, so this must be pretty good, right? Nope, it sucks. Like, bad. It was originally made in November 1993, but it wasn't released overseas until July 1995, and it's kind of amazing when you compare the footage of something like Breath of Fire 2, which also came out in 95, to Secret of the Stars. All I'm doing in the former is fighting a tree stump, and it still looks like a friggin' Ferrari while Secret of the Stars still has its training wheels on. Meh, I don't want this to just be a video of me dunking on this game as tempting as that is, because there are some good things here, but you have to start with the bad, because, you know, the game doesn't really give you any other choice. The translation immediately hits you in the face with confusion and ambiguity. All the dialogue is spoken in these big sweeping generalities, so everything comes across as just this totally nondescript and boring vanilla story. And I know translating can be a thankless job, and there are things that people don't even realize that get in the way, like font size and the amount of pixel space that you have for each letter. But man, the way the story was translated reads like something I would have written in like second grade. It's not even all that entertaining in a bad way either, it's mostly just stuff like, go to this town, west of this town, you will get something. But here's how your giant sweeping epic tale starts. You talk to your mom who says you're looking for something called a star crest, and that there's earthquakes sometimes. Some kid tells you to wander over to the next town where you learn about something called the Humm Cruise. What kind of a name is that? It just looks like a typo. This guy says you must seek out the crest of stars soon. You know, just work it into your schedule sometime this week. Then you can change your job title to Octolion Warrior. Only when you become the Octolion will you be able to defeat Humm Cruise, okay? Then you go talk to this guy and he says, oh hey, sometimes people lie to you and stuff. Come on, man, this translation sucks enough as it is. Now I can't trust what people say. Maybe the original Japanese script is modern Shakespeare or something, who knows, but the English script we got here in the States, wolf, it sucks. Here's another good example of the kind of crap you get to deal with in games like this. You're climbing Jeep Mountain and you get a treasure, a rat tail. What is that? Like some kind of armor that protects the back of your neck? Alright, let's use it, and it sends you back to the bottom of the mountain. So you gotta grind your way all the way back up to where you were. Now, should I have looked up what that was first? Yeah, maybe, but should I have to? Just to avoid simple annoying stuff like this? No. There's also a lot of options presented in the dialogue that makes it look like it actually matters what option you choose when it really doesn't. H.C. Bailey refers to this as a but thou must scenario, referring to the first Dragon Warrior. And there's a ton of that in this game, which just goes to show how little thought went into the story and all the dialogue that you have to sit through. It's especially glaring considering what else was out there, like can you imagine getting stuck with this game? While knowing that stuff like Chrono Trigger or Earthbound or Soul Blazer was out there, I would be inconsolable. The main gimmick that this game has to make itself stand out is being able to switch between two different parties, with the catch being that one party has access to certain areas while the other does not and vice versa. There's up to five members for your party that you eventually get, but there are eleven different party members that you can switch between and for the Kustara party, who serve as kind of a supplemental unit that helps you out here and there. It's nothing remotely complex. It's just, oh no, we can't go this way. Oh, but we can, you know, that sort of thing. The combat itself is as dull as dishwater. It's extremely vanilla. It looks serviceable at least, and there are some cool-looking enemies, but I mean, this is bare-bones stuff, just weapons, armor, items, magic, all the basics, and not much else. There are dual magic spells you can do between characters, and that's helpful, but that's pretty far into a game where there's just no incentive to get that far. Since this is an old JRPG, then you know the encounter rate is terrible. It's a regular occurrence to get two or three battles within the span of four or five steps on the world map, and there's no run button here. There is an auto-battle button, but it's like if you added a self-driving option to a 1976 Ford Pinto. Okay, I'm not gonna lie, they'd be pretty cool, but the point is it doesn't add a whole lot to this one, since you're mostly just smashing the A button the whole time anyway. There's also an inventory limit, so the game has you stash items away in various places in various towns, so the game at least makes up for being bad by being really annoyingly inconvenient. I also gotta mention the difficulty, and this is one of those games that is not well-balanced at all, and by the time you get to the end of the game, if you're into that sort of thing, the battles are just brutally difficult, and even if you stop to grind, if you're into that sort of thing. Combine that with the fact that the combat is just this generic boilerplate crap, and you're gonna have a bad time. It's not all bad, though. The music in this one is surprisingly a much higher quality than the rest of the game. That's good stuff right there, and I also gotta give the game credit for at least trying to do some story sequences, like this one here. But come on, man, these are NES graphics and a Super Nintendo game published in 1995. What are we doing here? So yeah, Secret of the Stars is bad, or to phrase it like how the game would say it, it is a bad game. Bad game is not good in the kingdom of bad. It's bad all the way around, and these aren't simple fixes either. Like, even if you give this game a better translation, some quality of life items, and a way to make the combat even marginally interesting, then yeah, well, if I had wheels, I'd be a wagon. Even with all those hypothetical improvements, that still puts Secret of the Stars in a lower tier, beneath games like Robotrack and Paladin's Quest, and I'd much rather play those than this game, let alone all the other RPGs that are better than those two. I mean, I'd rather play Lagoon than this game. Even if you want to maximize any forgiveness you want to give Secret of the Stars, it's definitely not a classic or a hidden gem waiting to be fixed up or anything like that. And if you're really thinking of putting any kind of meaningful time into Secret of the Stars, I just hope you've taken at least the time to consider, like, I don't know, 50 other Super Nintendo or Super Famicom role-playing games that you could be playing instead, that are a heck of a lot better than this one. Avoid this game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.