by David RodriguezSTARBITES is a simple game to contend with. Combat is fun, but not particularly challenging or revolutionary. It’s linear to what some would consider a fault, but it translates into a focused narrative and gameplay landscape. The story, while intriguing overall, doesn’t do anything particularly new or groundbreaking. And yet I still can’t help but be enamored of its charm.
STARBITES is a turn-based RPG that takes place on the planet Bitter. You’re a young lady named Lukida who, together with her pals, is looking to get off the planet by any means. It’s easy to see why — Bitter is kind of a shithole (one character even refers to it as such). It’s a barren ship graveyard and scrap heap that bore the brunt of cataclysmic loss and post-war waste, plunging the planet’s population into scavenging survivors instead of prosperous thrivers. An entire region of Bitter is even tainted by leaked chemicals and fuel from those fallen ships, rendering it a poisoned hell swamp.
Through hard work and probably a lot of luck, Lukida obtains a ticket off this planet, but she gets rolled and mugged on the way to finish an errand by a huge mech, and, well, the adventure begins. She itches for revenge, taking back what’s hers to get her off Bitter, and a hugely unraveling story that has you battling mercenary groups, AI bots, and capitalist slavers, placing the weight of the world on your shoulders as subjugation awaits. Really, like many RPGs, STARBITES is a story of ridiculous mission creep that starts with the personal and ends up a fight for the fate of countless people.
Tonally and aesthetically, there are two other series that are analogous to STARBITES. First, I saw someone compare it to Jak and Daxter. It’s a fitting comparison – both games have similar art direction and smartass characters in addition to mechs (called Motorbots here) that are more cartoony than realistic to match the rest of the world. The second series is Borderlands. Seeing Bitter and its places fashioned out of scrap and discarded parts, complete with an overworld run (badly) by Rockbot, a mercenary group that’s as haphazardly organized and dependent on a pirate lifestyle similar to Borderlands’ Psychos on the planet Pandora, is apt. All three games are also lighthearted with touches of humor to color in the writing and flesh out personalities. No Claptrap, though, STARBITES gets Ebony instead.
Your starting party consists of Lukida and two of her friends. Badger is a stoic, no-nonsense toughie with a good heart and dark past. He comforts Lukida when needed, but also keeps reason within the group when it’s lost (which is often). Gwendoll is comically alcoholic, but a sweetie who wants everyone to have a good time while making enough money for her next round of drinks. Her impulsiveness is only outdone by her beauty. Each member can be upgraded with skill trees to grant bigger stat boosts or alter their skills in big ways. RPG stuff!
As you get more party members (three others to be exact), they can become support for your main three members or traded out as a frontliner to dish out damage. The first new member you get early on is Makobo, a young girl whose penchant and savant-like intelligence for machinery and engineering proves quite useful. She’s also the youthful and innocent heart of the team, naive to a fault, but, come on, she’s a kid. She’s not annoying either, something young child characters in RPGs often teeter into with rapturous glee. Later on, the duo of Jerome and Marie joins, the former being a suave nice guy-type with a ton of power in his mech (and a unique battle mechanic), the latter an ice-cold tsundere lady focused on the mission with a hard-hitting sword-wielding style. A veritable motley crew, if I do say so myself.
Combat in STARBITES has strategy to it. All party members have a basic attack, several special skills, guard, and the ability to use items and escape from battle. Everyone fights in their Motorbots, all uniquely designed and customizable with parts. While the first two acts are pretty easy, you still have to think, which is nice. Each enemy has elemental weaknesses, and it’s up to you to discover them upon first meeting one. Luckily, they’re always displayed underneath an enemy’s health bar by a distinct icon that matches icons on your party’s attacks and skills. If you discover the weakness to one type of enemy, it persists throughout future encounters as well, which I must mention are gratefully not randomized, but engaged by physically running into enemies in the overworld.
The more important, and most enjoyable, thing in combat is breaking your opponent. Next to each enemy’s health is a number which represents the number of times it has to be hit with attacks it’s elementally weak to before breaking, after which it can’t attack and becomes more vulnerable to all attacks, but especially those weaknesses. Part of the combat flow of STARBITES is using your party to lead to as many enemies in a fight becoming broken so you can finish them off and prevent damage to your own side.
You can stack the deck in your favor in this manner by utilizing Driver’s High, a boosting ability you can activate for one turn after attacking and being attacked enough during a fight. Each party member builds DH meter on their own and can be activated independently, though it can’t be turned off, which is a shame. Sometimes I’d accidentally activate it or change my mind about using it, as it alters skill properties in ways that weren’t ideal. DH can alter the element of a skill, how many times it hits, or the number of enemies it hits, but it also has one big universal use: line skipping. Battles have turn queues based on the speed of your party and enemies. Using DH lets a party member skip the line and immediately act next, which means you can really destroy enemy groups if you do it right. If it’s Lukida’s turn now and the enemy’s next, but Badger and Gwendoll have DH available, you can activate it for both to use all three members before the enemy can do anything. Awesome stuff.
All of these combat mechanics together make party selection important — it’s locked for each fight, unable to swap out members — as well as knowledge of each character’s skill set imperative. Factor in later on when you have six members, three leads, and three supports, and things really start to open up. Support characters are assigned to each of the leads, no matter who they are (can’t swap Lukida out of the lead spot, though). When a lead breaks an enemy, the assigned support comes in with a powerful follow-up attack to really pummel them down in health and often kill. Play things right, and you can see massive dominoes fall into place as you flowchart through your party’s attacks to blow through groups of enemies before they can even attack, or sunder a boss without a single member dying. It’s incredibly fulfilling once you get a groove going.
Each Motorbot has an engine, some cores, and parts that it can be equipped with. All parts are interchangeable between party members, but obviously, certain ones will complement some more than others. You can still fit characters to play how you want, though. You can craft and upgrade cores using materials found throughout the game’s world or purchased from vendors. By the end of Act 2, I was flush with money with only minor grinding and side-mission completion, and could buy anything I wanted to my heart’s content. If only you could have Lukida use some of the money to pay off her hilariously huge debt to Fennec, Delight City’s number one creditor and your “boss.”
The story could have been paced better, some moments being a little awkwardly presented as a result, and the final two acts dragged quite a bit, but it’s still a notch in the “pros” column. RPGs rarely deal with the micro within their worlds the whole time, and STARBITES is no different. What starts as a personal story driven by dreams of a better life and escaping the dingleberry of a planet they’re on turns into a sci-fi epic teeming with rogue AI, vacuous corpos, and capitalists, and living in the shadow of a galactic war. Themes of betrayal, personal worth, found family and community, class struggle, equity, and destiny are all played with on different scales and mostly come out more on top than they sag the game down. Add in the liberal dashes of humor the game has and it’s a fun time! I was laughing about as much as I was stroking my chin in wonder at what the next big story beat would bring, only a couple toward the end feeling unearned or a little too convoluted for the game’s scale or presentation.
Speaking of presentation, the game bounces between solid enough for the sixth-generation gaming homage that it is and distractingly inconsistent. First off, some honesty: This is not a very traditionally pretty game. Its environments, while on theme, are still drab and flat. I’m far from a graphical fidelity nerd, so I don’t hold it against STARBITES much at all, but I do with the jarring uses of different presentations. You have the game’s gameplay presentation, where you see characters interact with mostly voiced interactions, text boxes, and emotive character portraits helping to color in the in-between. Nice!
Then you have frequent short cinematic cutscenes that zoom in a bit too much on assets and show an unflattering roughness. These are often reserved for more consequential or build-up moments before big fights or story turns, and while they run real well at 60 frames per second, they’re not executed particularly well. What I would have rathered, honestly, is the game to utilize the comic/anime-like presentation more. Now that’s pretty. I looked forward to moments where these would show up (not often enough!), much more than the fully animated cutscenes, as they showed more emotion, personality, and often literal conveyance of the moment. There’s one particular moment later in the game that’s so striking that it made the moment more memorable thanks to the art used and how it was presented.
Those unfortunately weren’t my only issues with STARBITES. Aside from the usual, almost expected text and subtitle flubs here and there that are usually easily fixed with a quick patch, a conversation later in Act 3 has two voice lines between two characters attributed to the opposite character, even using the wrong character’s name and portrait. A funny mistake, more than anything, very noticeable if you’re listening attentively, but a mistake nonetheless.
Technically speaking, I also found quite a few invisible barriers on the overworld that inhibited movement where it did not appear that would be the case. I don’t know if this is an issue with invisible terrain or objects, or the barrier itself. I just know that I saw parts of the ground that didn’t even have much of an incline, let alone visible impairment that were not traversable. Odd more than anything else and nothing game-breaking, but others will likely notice unless it’s fixed.
The action camera during some skills in combat is also a little too close to see what’s going on or the damage it’s doing to your opponent. While I did appreciate the little cutscenes for bigger skill executions — these were done very well — the smaller ones that have a character get up close to an enemy to attack, you can barely see the damage numbers from it. It’s a bit disorienting, and I would have preferred it to be pulled back. I don’t think the impact or power would be squandered by that; in fact, it might improve it as you could see the full and literal impact. Regardless, the fact that you can double the speed of combat was welcomed, especially toward the end of the game when you’ve seen it all and just want to expedite victory against enemy mobs.
STARBITES still has a lot going for it, though. If you yearn for the PS2/Gamecube era and are fine with smaller RPGs, this could be for you, or at least the genre diehards, as its price ($50) is right on that line of acceptable relative to its offerings. It’s no Sea of Stars, but it is a scrappy, solid edition to any fan’s roster. The combat is fun, easily the most consistent and entertaining aspect of the game, as it should be. The story is serviceable, carried by cool, funny characters and a decent, gradual upscaling of stakes relative to them. The things that bothered me with this game were not fundamental enough to keep me from playing to the very end, and that makes for an overall, convincing win. It has ample charisma, a good message, and plenty of heart.
STARBITES
