Stella Glow Review

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There are some games that end up passing under people's radar, yet are gems waiting to be played. Stella Glow is one of those gems. Stella Glow is a strategy role-playing game (commonly known as tactics games or SRPGs) that revolves around the theme of music and magic. The distinguishing factor is how this is all presented within the game.

The Witch of Destruction is going around crystallizing denizens of various towns, and the Queen of the capitol wants to put a team together to stop her. Witches are looked at in a similar fashion as Jedi within Star Wars. They are rare, and have powers. As a result of this, the average person has misconceived notions about them. To top it off, the witches are the only people who actually know how to sing. This means that within the game universe, music has become limited to a select few people. Singing is the way that the witches ultimately release their power. The queen decides to create a group of witches along with some knights to sing a sort of counter-song to the Witch of Destruction's song. That's the premise of the story. Along the way, there are a few twists and there's even a nice nod the fantasy makes to our own reality. Many of the overall themes are standard (faith, trust, good vs evil, failings of man, etc.), but the presentation and development is what makes this game special.

©Atlus Co., Ltd. © Imageepoch Inc

Particularly, the characters. Each character is designed to fill a very specific archetype, which means that they are mostly rigid by design. This may sound boring, but the draw is that you get a large variety of characters who have very interesting interactions with each other. That doesn't mean there isn't development, because there absolutely is. Each character has their own inner demons to deal with and you get to deal with each one individually, if you so choose. That's where the affinity system comes in. As you play through the game you can spend time with characters to develop your relationship with them. This will further develop their characters and provide insight into why they are the way they are. As an added bonus, this development comes with actual combat bonuses. So you have more than just a story interest in getting to know your party. The trick, is that you only get a limited amount of time to develop them so you have to be picky about who you develop. I liked this because it really gives a sense of reality, where you can't possibly have the time to get to know everyone in your life. So you pick people who are the most important to you and build relationships with them as best you can. The game works the same.

Speaking of limited time, for better or worse, the game revolves around this concept. Each chapter of the game has a set number of time slots for you to do things. There are Missions and Free Time. During Mission time you can explore the world map and do various fights to grind for levels (more on that later), buy/sell equipment and do the story mission. Doing the story mission will cause time to pass and end that specific time slot. During Free Time, you are able to do a variety of things. You are allotted 3 'events' per time slot to do things, and each thing uses up 1 event. You can use that time to develop relationships with characters, 'explore' (which merely uses up time and gives you a chance of getting an ultimate character specific accessory at complete random), take on a part-time job (allows you to make money and raise your rank with the shops which will result in special items or discounts) or just pass the time doing nothing. You can also do something called tuning. As you develop your relationship with the witches in your party, sometimes relationship progress gets blocked by emotional 'chains'. You take them to this special spot in the city and 'tune' them, which essentially involves facing their inner demons through unique battle scenarios.

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Regarding battle, the combat is actually quite fun. If you have played a tactics game before, then you know exactly what to expect. It's a turn-based system where you have a grid-based battlefield to move your characters. You can flank enemies and environment height effects combat. Each individual character represents a unique class. For example, Rusty is the rogue, Ewan is the gunner and Alto is the swordsman (warrior). They each get abilities to represent their classes as they level up, which helps to make each character an asset in his/her own way. This also means that you will likely get attached to characters more likely based on their combat class rather than their personality, since you'll use them so much. The combat is designed to be approachable for the newcomer to the genre, so you won’t see the same type of complexity as a game like Final Fantasy Tactics. That doesn't mean the game can't be challenging. There are many battle scenarios with some fun battle conditions or gimmicks that really help make things interesting. In fact, most of the battles follow this idea and thus the combat doesn't usually feel repetitive since you need to approach situations differently all the time.

Luckily, the game is made even more enjoyable with exceptional voice acting. Each of the actors captures the character beautifully and it sounds like a well-done anime dub. In my experience, Japanese games tend to have mediocre voice acting at best (especially non-AAA titles like this), so this came as a very pleasant surprise to me. During conversations, you can press an 'auto' button to have the text progress at the same pace as the speech, so when there is actual talking you can have the dialogue flow smoothly. About 60% of the game has voice-overs, which is really nice. To top it off, it has some pretty catchy music which will help make sure your ears don't feel bored. When you conduct songs with the witches on the battlefield, they each have songs with actual vocals that play as you are in the battle. For the most part, these songs are well sung and are fun. It's an interesting way to present vocal music in a video game, and I really loved it. The game also looks nice, with some varied environments, good character design and some nice attention to detail.

©Atlus Co., Ltd. © Imageepoch Inc

As I mentioned earlier, you are given a limited amount of time to do side quests in this game, which means you can't actually 100% it on your initial play through. Once you beat the game, you are given a New Game + that allows you to keep your money on a fresh run. The added bonus is that you get double experience points (meaning there is no need to grind as you play) and you also get triple the amount of free time throughout the game, allowing you to do anything you may have missed the first time through. It was a very clever way to add replayability, and I never felt like it cheapened the adventure (which tends to be the case in most New Game + scenarios for me). The game is reasonably lengthy as well. For my initial play through, it took me about 60 hours while my total play time (initial play through and New Game + play through) was 96 hours. So you can expect a good amount of game time out of this gem.

I originally bought this game on a whim without knowing anything about it. I'm really happy I did, because the game ended up being one of my most beloved games of 2015. It may not be quite as challenging as games like Fire Emblem, but it makes up for this in its other qualities. It has well-done art, fantastic voice-acting, an interesting story and fun gameplay. I couldn't ask for more from a game. If you like tactics games and are looking for a new game for your 3DS, I can't recommend Stella Glow enough.
 
Gameplay: AMAZING
Sound: PERFECT
Graphics: GREAT
Value: AMAZING
 
OVERALL: AMAZING
 
- Teepu