Hoshigami:
Ruining Blue Earth

OK, this is one for the books in how I ended up purchasing it. I was hard up for another sucess like Final Fantasy Tactics, so any isometric strategy RPG was fair game in my mind. I had gone and tried Tactics Ogre, but that proved to be fruitless. It wasn't engaging or anything. Whereas with Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth, that was different. So it seemed from the cover, and with that I picked it up.

Your character(Fazz) is kinda cool and stuff, staying true to the sucess of a previous RPG hero by providing unruly blonde anime hair. You have a brother/partner(Leimrey) who is cooler than you and together you guys are an unstoppable team until stuff starts to get hairy. When that was over, you paired up with a brawler type dude and several other friends you meet in your travels. Of course, you have to fight some dude and beat his ass and stuff, but I didn't get far enough in the game due to the fact that my brother got a hold of it and cannot find it. He enjoyed the game that much.
My brother couldn't get enough of the coin magic system, coinfeign, used in Hoshigami. It's somewhat complicated, but you can create coins with more powerful magic in them as the game progresses. My brother also was addicted to the management of gaining skills in the game. As your character levels up, you learn skills depending on the god you serve. Most of them are support skills, but a great deal of them are devastating equalizers in battle. You can only switch to compatible gods when you wish to obtain good skills, but there are some snags to it: you can only use a certain weapon when you serve a certain god. Also, you can only use 3 skills at a time. It can pigeonhole a person into low HP for the rest of the game or make them proficient in only one weapon, usually to their detriment.

Above: Leimrey(center) sets up to punk some fools. The blonde boy to the right of him is the main character, Fazz.

The game had one feature in it that was a major plus when it came to battlling: sessions. You can set up your crew to make a session line and when you push an enemy(a fun tactic)into your buddy who's set up for session, he pushes them for more damage. The more people set up for session, the more damage you are capable of. The only problem is that characters set up for session take double damage when attacked and are knocked out of session stance.
I never did figure out how to revive a dead character, so I did the next best thing. I learned how the enemy moved in the towers. I figured where they could move, where I could move and with whom I could move. I also made a point to level the boys and get 'em skills. The main character my brother and I shared was a great warrior and his magic wasn't that bad. He was also a tanker compared to the others I had recruited.

I wish I could have played more, but I'm not spending any more money on that game. I don't care if you paid me, I'm not gonna play that game again, due to many of the problems built into the game that prevent this game from getting a 10. It's getting a 4; it'll get a better score as soon as Atlus decides to come out with a sequel along the lines of Vagrant Story called "Hoshigami: Lone Mission." If you've made the mistake of buying this game and pumped your main guy to a good level and played with him alone, you'll understand…

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