StarTropics is one of those games that definitely comes off as real strange and different. It’s certainly not your average title but at the same time this also means that it can often times be a little too ambitious for its own good. There are a whole lot of puzzles here after all and they tend to break up the gameplay. The gameplay itself isn’t bad for the most part but some of the bosses can randomly get annoying. It’s the type of game that you probably would not have had a whole lot of fun with if you had played it without the rewind feature.

The story is at least pretty crazy in a way you wouldn’t see in newer games. You have gods and monsters, robots and aliens. All kinds of different lores smashing together here where a kid has to basically contend with all of them as he travels across the world trying to find his uncle who went missing very suddenly. You’d think a boy and his yoyo would not go far but that would just mean you never played Earthbound. This main character is as tough as they get and even knows how to pilot a submarine.

The game is wacky and fast paced so if the gameplay could keep up then we would be all set. Mainly it uses a top down style like Legend of Zelda although some of the fights become more turn based. It’s a game that desperately needed more quality of life features though. For starters the game isn’t always very clear on where you are supposed to go next. It is extremely easy to get lost and the NPCs don’t tend to offer very clear advice.

It’s not as if the world is huge so you will eventually get unlost but it isn’t always even about the location. Sometimes you have to talk to people more than once in order to get them to open up and really talk to you. It puts you in a paranoid state where you have to keep on talking to people over and over again just in case something is different. I got stuck early on because I didn’t realize you had to talk to the chief twice in a row. Yes, you heard me right “Twice in a row”.

So if you talked to him and left the hut, when you got back he would still start with the first line. You had to click twice and I don’t understand how anyone is expected to reasonably know this. The game has a lot of moments like this where it feels like the rational move just wasn’t thought of. The game design just shouldn’t work like that as nobody normally talks to NPCs twice. At the very least, I can say that I don’t tend to go out of my way to do anything like that.

It’s why the best kind of puzzles are found in games like Professor Layton. You use clues and logical deduction to put the pieces together. It’s a puzzle that has a concrete beginning and ending. You aren’t just told to go find something in the distance. You have a puzzle in front of you to solve and then you solve it as smoothly as possible. It’s why puzzle games stick to their lane and you shouldn’t mix the genre with platforming. That just doesn’t tend to work.

The graphics aren’t all that bad. Yeah they definitely look super old but the game itself is very old. The art direction for it was about what you would expect and there’s nothing wrong with that. The soundtrack is on the forgettable side as well. In short, it’s not the kind of game you would generally pay money to play nowadays. I’m not sure if I would have paid much money to play it back in the day either to be honest but the times were different.

Overall, I want to emphasize that this isn’t a bad game. It’s just not a good one either. It’s the perfect example of a game that would end up falling right in the middle because it just goes through a lot of stretches where it isn’t very fun. It really can feel like work to solve those puzzles but at least the story was good and it could have been worse. The technical details don’t really help it either. So right in the middle makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe some tropical music could have helped the game at least be more memorable in the long run.

Overall 5/10