Starlight Legacy Review | RPGFan
Starlight Legacy is a retro-inspired turn-based JRPG from indie Japanese developer Decafesoft and publisher Eastasiasoft. It features obvious nods to many classic 1990s Japanese RPGs and anime while sporting its own personality. Starlight Legacy may look and feel familiar, yet it gave me a few subtle surprises over its ten-ish hour course. Let’s explore a little further.
Starlight Legacy’s setting, the kingdom of Evaria, feels like those of classic Pokémon games where the towns and “overworld” are continuous; they don’t feel like the disconnected entities of proverbial JRPGs. However, when the party gains the ability to fly everywhere, you’ll see the world via a Mode-7-style pseudo-3D paradigm similar to classic SNES RPGs. I liked seeing Evaria’s lands from these contrasting perspectives.
Starlight Legacy is pleasing to look at with its vibrant colors and classic style, but its SNES-inspired sprite and tile graphics do not stand out among the plethora of retro-styled RPGs all drawing from the same wellspring of inspiration. The generic-looking artwork, as seen on the headers of the game’s official website and Steam page, also make this game easy to pass over. There are subtly cool aspects in Starlight Legacy’s visuals, including some creatively designed enemies, but seeing all the good stuff requires taking a chance on — and diving deeply into — a game that does not make a great first impression.
The music, on the other hand, is quite good from the start. The compositions draw from several music genres, and this soundtrack would not be out of place in classic JRPGs. Every piece of music fits its intended environment and scenario, and several have catchy hooks that stayed with me after I shut the game off. Most pieces, including the battle themes, have slow to mid-level tempos, encouraging you to take the time to patiently explore and fight.
Three protagonists comprise Starlight Legacy’s main party. We first meet Ignus, an out-of-work warrior idling away in her podunk hometown. With her mom’s encouragement, Ignus accompanies her neighbor/childhood friend Teryl on an errand to the royal capital. Teryl hopes his connections there can help Ignus find a job. An explosive incident occurs at the capital, during which Ignus and Teryl meet Frida, a merchant with serious fighting skills. Soon, Ignus, Teryl, and Frida become embroiled in a typical RPG quest involving magical McGuffins and malicious monarchs.
The straightforward story follows familiar plot beats and is fine for what it is, but I would have liked more character development and deeper world-building. For example, beyond a brief mention or two that Frida is a merchant who travels between Evaria and several other kingdoms, nothing within the story or gameplay builds upon Frida’s occupation or her travels. It’s too bad, because those would be interesting developments to follow.
Starlight Legacy offers nothing in the way of handholding or tutorials, so I had to approach this game with a SaGa mentality and figure things out for myself. I felt stupid when it took me several battles to discover that I could press a button to make certain magic spells target all enemies; no wonder I was getting decimated by hordes early on! It wasn’t because the game was cheap, but because I needed to figure out how to play it.
There are not many systems to keep track of, and none are complicated, but mastering these simple systems is crucial for progressing through Starlight Legacy. For example, experimenting with elemental affinities for attacking and defending can mean the difference between victory and defeat, especially during the merciless boss battles. I could not just “hack-and-heal” with my brain on autopilot. I needed to think each action through and alter my character builds for each situation.
Starlight Legacy’s desire to maintain an old-school feel while offering some quality-of-life conveniences yields mixed results. I like that defeat in battle does not result in a Game Over. The party simply gets warped back to the last inn where they slept, and you don’t lose all prior progress. This is helpful because Starlight Legacy has no auto-save feature. You can manually save anywhere outside of battle and save reminder points heal the party, but I still would have liked an auto-save option as a backup.
Along with auto-save, I also wanted an auto-run option in the settings menu. Holding down a button to make my characters run is fatiguing. The item menu is a disorganized mess, and the “sort” option only allows for laborious manual sorting. Auto-sort options would have been most welcome.
The random encounter rate is annoyingly high, though it is possible to turn them off. However, overusing encounter-off leaves the party weak (even with enemy scaling) and broke (because everything is expensive). A third option to halve the encounter rate, when used with the available experience multipliers, would have given me my preferred play experience.
Starlight Legacy is a game I needed to spend time with before its unique subtleties grew on me. Overall, I enjoyed the experience but was left wanting more. I wanted more world-building, lore, and character development. In addition, several gameplay flaws are difficult, if not impossible, to overlook. Starlight Legacy is not for everyone, but the robust Steam demo provides a good metric to determine whether Starlight Legacy is your kind of game.
