It's not THAT bad.

Still kinda sucks, though. 

If you scrounge through YouTube and look at all the vintage JRPG tubers, you'll find an excessive amount of "Best on the SNES" videos. No video has this game on those lists. In fact, it's widely regarded as trash; one of the worst in the genre. I'm, obviously, talking about the confusingly named Tecmo Secret of the Stars. 

The general consensus about Secret of the Stars involves critiquing the graphics, but they leave out some details. Firstly, yes, the overworld is hideous. Towns and dungeons aren't much better. However, battle graphics are stunning...mostly. Character models appear when they attack, and they look detailed and good. But enemy sprites fit in with any Final Fantasy on the system. Spell animations aren't as good, but they look distinct from one another and evolve, so that's fine. SotS was released in 1993, and the rest of the game looks great, so it's baffling why so much of it looks like NES RTX. I'll give that experience a 6, which means I like it more than most. 

On the flip side, I didn't enjoy the story. For starters, there's not much here. Many of the professional reviewers did like it, but maybe it's been the thirty years between then and now. It was more NES style exposition. Ray, you, randomly learn one day that you're related to a hero from the past, a fact everyone knows, and then your home is destroyed, sending you on a journey. Ray has to find four other heroic offspring heros to stop Homnicruze from destroying the world. Who's Tom Cruze? No clue? Who are the others? Also, no idea. Fortunately, they all know they're supposed to join you, so just walk around the linear world until you reach them. It's also a time travel nonsense... I can't see the appeal in these barebones. 0/10. 

The gameplay is actually fairly decent. All five characters bring something different to the group. Each has a different element magic, but I don't think enemies have elemental weaknesses... They all possess different buffs and debuffs, too. It's stupidly simple, but I found it fun, and I wanted to keep playing. And that's despite the story. I couldn't find any of the Combination Skills, though. My favorite parts were outside the dungeons. Not everything is advanced through caves. Sometimes you need to go on a scavenger hunt in town, and you'll run into zero enemies. Other times, you'll need to talk to a specific NPC. This is usually obvious, so it's a quick Fly By. This helps maintain the pacing and hides the monotony. More importantly, there's a B-plot of building your own town. I'm a sucker for that. 8/10. 

The sound is fine. Everything fits, but it, like the graphics, comes off a little NES premium quality. 7/10

The charm is, shockingly, mostly here. It runs the perfect length, but I'll never replay it. The world and NPCs are constantly changing, in large part due to building your own town. It's a bit shallow in those categories otherwise, but I can not stress enough how rad I think town building is. Exploration is also fun, due in part to another mechanic I haven't brought up. You see, there are actually two parties you can control. The five Aquatallions and five (out of eleven) Kustera. There are certain areas where the main five can't reach, but your allies can. It's never explained why, mind you. Sadly, it's not easy transferring items, and keeping the Kustera leveled and equipped is tedious and monotonous. But the devs knew this and made escaping battles a 95% success rate. Still, all the weird NES+ stuffs and clunkiness makes this hard to recommend. 8/10

As you may expect, there's a negative. Who wrote this? Maybe it's the terrible translation, but the way everything is written makes it seem like a grade schooler wrote this. The dying words of the final boss are a prime example. "Awe. Darn..." Maybe next time, with enthusiasm?

So the final score for (Tecmo) Secret of the Stars is 30 out of 50. I like the game more than the average reviewer by quite a lot, it turns out. But I can understand why the game is so detested, even if I don't think SotS deserves it. I'm not saying it's a hidden gem. I'm just saying it isn't that bad. It only kinda sucks! It's the worst D- game I've ever played, but it's still a D- 

Got one more true turn based game to go...