Starlight Legacy

As someone who grew up in the NES and Super NES eras of gaming, it took me a while before I fully got into RPGs. As a Mario fan my first RPG was Super Mario RPG on the Super NES, and that was followed by Chrono Trigger a few years later. At that point, RPGs became one of my favorite genres and to this day, I still like playing classic and classic-style RPGs. Thankfully it just so happens that today I get to check out a 16-bit RPG in Starlight Legacy.

A separatist movement has arisen in the Evaria Kingdom after King Lennox chose to uphold a law that forbids the teaching of magic in Sky Province, with some citizens siding with the King while others sympathize with the separatists and their cause. Ignus, who wants to become a freelance warrior for the king, goes with her friend Teryl to deliver a package to the king, giving her a good chance to get in some training. After delivering the package to the king, one of the king’s assistants, Caden, kidnaps the king’s daughter and says he’ll return her if the king breaks the protection seal on the Eternity Tree, revealing himself to be the separatist’s leader. The king breaks the seal to save his daughter, after which Caden burns down the Eternity Tree as well as the whole forest. The King says there are contingency plans to restore the Eternity Tree and they return to the castle to make plans.

Everything up to this point basically serves to get you used to how everything works. While there’s no tutorial, you have plenty of time to learn the combat system, how items, spells, and skills work, and check out and fine tune the options. The options give you the chance to change how the menus and options work in combat (I went with Classic which is your standard JRPG menu system), as well as changing the number of random encounters and how much experience you get from battles.

For my playthrough I left random encounters on (you can set it to on or off) as well as 1.0x experience (you can set this to 0.5x, 1.0x, 1.5x or 2.0x), so anything I mention regarding things such as difficulty and leveling use these default options. The story itself basically revolves around gathering the four Starlight Relics to stop Caden from doing any more damage. My one issue with the story is that there is a twist that happens a ways into the game which is highly telegraphed to the point that once certain dialogue happened part way into the game, I immediately knew what would happen.

The combat is turn based and you have several options, such as a basic attack, using magic and items, running away, and using a character’s skills. Each character will learn many skills over the course of the game and each can have one equipped at a time. Some will automatically be used depending on the skill while others have to be specifically chosen during that character’s turn to act. Each character can also learn many spells, typically by finding or using magic tomes to learn a spell. While each character can learn many spells, only four can be active at a time to be used in battle. This, combined with the various armor and weapons you’ll find, gives you a lot of options when it comes to customizing each character and what you want them to focus on.

One thing that sets Starlight Legacy apart from other JRPGs I’ve played is how story progression works. Once the Eternity Tree burns to the ground, you’re given a Bridge Token that you can use to visit one of four areas: the Forest, Desert, Sky or Mountain Province. Each area has several roads to traverse and a goal or two to complete before you make it to that province’s temple. After traversing the temple you’ll face off against a boss and defeating it will give you a Starlight Relic. Taking that back to King Lennox will net you another Bridge Token, you pick another path to take, and repeat.

I was initially curious how the enemy encounters would scale since you can take on any province in any order, and from what I can tell it seems to be tied into how many Starlight Relics you have. Another thing tied into the number of Starlight Relics you have are certain chests that have numbers on them. Chests with no number can be opened just fine, but those with a number require that many Starlight Relics to open and usually contain better items including more powerful weapons and accessories.

The difficulty of Starlight Legacy is balanced for the most part. Outside of a couple of specific instances where I turned off random encounters just until I got to a specific destination, I fought every random encounter I came across, so leveling up was never an issue except for right near the start. Once I was able to choose my first bridge to cross, I went to the Forest Province and the very first random encounter pretty much wrecked me. I ended up going back to the forest in the starting area and just grinding for a while to level up a few times, and that made a huge difference. When I reached the boss of the Forest Temple, again I got wrecked.

However, enemies will come in one of four elements: Fire, Ice, Earth, and Normal. Fire, Ice, and Earth work like Rock, Paper, Scissors when it comes to what’s effective against what, and your attacks, spells, and even the characters themselves are associated with those elements. You can purchase items that will let you change a character’s element so while a boss might seem intimidating at first, once you know what element(s) it uses you can change your characters’ elements to whatever resists the boss’s attacks and it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there.

That said though, it’s not perfect. A lot of the enemies can use attacks that can inflict status ailments on your party (and your spells can also do the same). While that’s not uncommon for RPGs, at least at the start of the game it seemed like it was happening quite a bit. The good news is that if you tackle every random encounter you come across, you will end up with a lot of money, called mali. Some items might seem like they’re expensive, but even with buying a good amount of healing items and the occasional new weapon or item, I still had a lot of mali about halfway through to just stock up on healing items and status ailment removers. This also ties in with the items that let you change your element and dealing with bosses.

When I first faced off against the boss of the Forest Temple I got annihilated within 30 seconds, but I did notice what element it tended to use, and thanks to being able to save anywhere I didn’t lose any progress. Before challenging the boss again, I just changed each characters’ elements to Earth and the boss did considerably less damage to me, allowing me to take it down with little effort.

In terms of presentation the game looks and sounds pretty good. Again, I’m a sucker for anything from the 8 and 16-bit eras so something like Starlight Legacy tends to draw me in pretty quickly. The occasional use of Mode-7 to show off the overworld map is impressive, as it always was back on the Super NES, and when just viewing the map from the menu it bears a striking resemblance to another popular RPG series and had me wondering if random encounters would only occur if I walked into tall grass.

The music does a good job of getting me into the game, or at least when I can hear it for more than a few seconds between random encounters. My only other complaint is a bit of a minor one, but the game can seem rather short compared to other JRPG-style games. I did a decent amount of grinding in a couple of spots, and I am probably the worst person when it comes to coming up with any kind of strategy for various situations, but if you know what you’re doing you can probably finish up the game in about ten hours or so. Not short by any means but it can kind of feel that way at times.

Starlight Legacy drew me in with its 16-bit style as a fan of that era and the gameplay kept me engaged. If you’ve played other JRPGs this one might be a bit easier for you, and those newer to the genre might find it a bit more difficult with the constant status ailments and having to change your elements to survive the boss fights. However, the ability to turn encounters off and on as well as change how much experience you earn from fights allows you to adjust things how you wish to change the difficulty of the game. I enjoyed playing through it and while it’s not my new favorite JRPG, it is one that I’ll go back through at some point. If you’re looking for a 16-bit JRPG to scratch an itch or just want to check out a game in the genre, Starlight Legacy is definitely worth it.