Stella Glow starts off in the sleepy village of Mithra, where main character Alto has come to live with young Lisette and her mother. Mirthra and its Kingdom of Regnant are a world without song. I had played Luminous Arc 2 and it was a fun game that I played through to the end, though it didn't stand out in any respect. Luckily, Stella Glow takes what was in Luminous Arc and turns everything up to 11, having better characters, graphics and gameplay than the Luminous Arc games on 3DS.
'There's a very solid little strategy RPG lurking underneath Stella Glow's surface, with thoughtful and creative ideas that could have stood proudly on their own without the game's sleazy pandering.' ImageEpoch is a developer that has not had the easiest of years. The Western release of didn't set any hearts ablaze, their, and finally just four weeks short of their ten year anniversary. Their latest release, Stella Glow, was intended to mark this decennial celebration, but instead became a farewell swansong.A spiritual successor to the Luminous Arc series, Stella Glow is a turn-based strategy RPG that tells the story of a world in which powerful magic is contained within music, but God has stripped humanity of the ability to sing due to past transgressions, leaving the art of song as the domain of heretical witches.
Players join the amnesiac Alto and his love-interest Lisette as they take up arms against Witch Hilda and her Harbingers of Destruction after the latter raze the former's village, turning their loved ones to crystal in the process. To save her family, Lisette herself awakens as the Water Witch, while Alto serves as her conductor. After fighting the Harbingers off, Alto and Lisette are taken into custody by Commander Klaus of the Regnant Knights. They are given some some training, then join the knights on a quest to conscript the world's remaining witches to stop Hilda once and for all.
What follows is a grand quest across the continent with a liberal peppering of harem hijinks as Alto endears himself to witches of various ages in various states of undress. Yes, it's one of those games.Every anime girl archetype is here for you to pick your favorite from: There's bossy tsundere Sakuya, excessively young genki girl Popo, emotionless Rei Ayanami-clone Mordimort and good ol' trusty girl-next-door Lisette. During free time, Stella Glow adopts a dating system not unlike the social links found in Persona 3/4 in which building up trust with a girl rewards you with new abilities for them to use in battle. Unfortunately, the girls here have much less personality than those found in Atlus' flagship series, with almost no interests outside of romance with Alto. In fact, they're so single-minded that it's occasionally disturbing: When given the choice to calm a panicked witch by telling her to believe in herself or to believe in me, imagine my surprise when I found that the former was in fact the wrong answer!
Have some self-respect, lady! Alternatively, in a nice move, you can elect to spend time with any of the game's male cast to gain their own bonuses. Hanging out with your bros may not lead to romance, but Stella Glow's fellas are an amusing bunch who are much more well-rounded than their female counterparts.When you're not wooing your compatriots, you're fighting alongside them on the battlefield. Battles take place from a fixed isometric perspective as you choose six of your units, represented by super-deformed bobbleheads, to face off against an opposing force. Attacks transition into a zoomed-in view of the action, but these animations can be turned off if you feel they add unnecessary length.
Each of your units functions similarly to a class: Alto the swordsman, Lisette doubling as both cleric and mage, Klaus a lancer and so forth. Turn order is decided not only by a character's speed stat but also by the intensity of the last move they used: If Alto lays into his foes with a powerful multi-target skill, his turn won't come around as quickly as it would if he'd simply attacked.
However, some units become quickly outpaced; heavy knight Archibald may be lovable, but his limited movement and glacial speed make him effectively useless as the battlefields become wider and the foes more numerous.Witches aren't just run-of-the-mill mage units; they also have access to powerful song magic. If Alto moves adjacent to a witch and selects the 'Conduct' command, they will spend the next three turns singing a character-specific song that affects the entire battlefield regardless of unit placement. Water Witch Lisette will heal all allies each turn, while Fire Witch Sakuya will ignite the party's passions, greatly increasing their chances to score critical hits. Some witches' song magic is slightly less elementally appropriate; Earth Witch Mordimort, for example, summons a giant sheep that puts all foes to sleep for some reason, but all song spells prove to be indispensable during the game's harder encounters, whether they make sense or not. Choosing to activate song magic leads to an unskippable cutscene in which Alto holds the struggling witch before tenderly plunging a dagger into her chest. The super-deformed characters makes it hard to get too het up over, but I found the implied sexual violence slightly uncomfortable to watch.In an unorthodox move for the genre, Stella Glow treats levelling up as a tactical manoeuvre as well: A unit that lands the finishing blow on an enemy stronger than itself will see a huge boost in experience points, and a unit that gains a level will see its HP and MP fully restored, so choosing who to send out into potential danger in favor of free healing becomes a risky but rewarding tactic.
Grinding is actively discouraged, as enemies on equal-or-lower footing to you will give far less experience points than stronger foes, but optional battles are available if you feel that any of your units need to play catch up. The toughest of these side battles require an entrance fee of a handful of Playcoins for seemingly arbitrary reasons, but they can be escaped from at any time if things start to go south, and you'll mercifully retain all experience and items gained.Stella Glow is a game that makes a terrible first impression: The story is a hodgepodge of several other JRPGs that telegraphs its twists from a mile away, its villains' motivations fall apart under any scrutiny, and the game's attitude towards its female cast is abhorrent at the best of times. And yet, something happened as I spent time with it: I started having fun. Kokugaku.
Turning the tide of battle with effective use of song magic and strategic level-ups was always a satisfying feeling, and even when things didn't go my way, I was always keen to jump back into the fray to try a different approach, switching up my characters to see if different roles would better suit the situation at hand. There's a very solid little strategy RPG lurking underneath Stella Glow's surface, with thoughtful and creative ideas that could have stood proudly on their own without the game's sleazy pandering. Stella Glow feels like the result of ImageEpoch finally coming into their own, which makes their shuttering feel all the more unfortunate.© 2015 Atlus, ImageEpoch. All rights reserved. © 1998—2020 RPGFan Media, LLC.
Stella Glow is Imageepoch’s final game following their closure last year and whilst they’ve had some less than stellar (heh) games, Stella Glow isn’t one of them.Time and Eternity was surely Imageepoch’s blot on their history, and likely one of the causes as to why sales continued to decline for their games despite the excellent Criminal Girls releasing after, and it’s a shame to see them go especially with Stella Glow being pretty damn good. Stella Glow follows hunter Alto who suffers from amnesia, leaving him with no memories of his past. Finding a new home in Mithra Village with his friend Lisette and her mother, his peaceful new life is disturbed when witch Hilda arrives and turns everyone bar Alto and Lisette into crystal statues.
Wanting to return Mithra Village back to its former self, the pair set out to defeat Hilda and find a way to bring everyone back to life.I like the characters and the plot does a good enough job at making you want to see what happens next, even if it isn’t anything particularly groundbreaking. It’s a solid SRPG for the 3DS that proved that Imageepoch could turn out a great JRPG and went out with a bang rather than a whimper. Some parts are very sweet, heartwarming and some can be pretty sad, and it had more depth than I honestly expected it to have.
It’s certainly something I would have liked to see a sequel for but, sadly, we’ll never see it happen and if we do it won’t be from Imageepoch.Stella Glow is more of a SRPG than JRPG with turn-based battles taking place on a square grid, and usually I’m pretty bad at SRPG’s (I still don’t know why though!) but Stella Glow wasn’t quite as punishing or drawn out as I find many SRPG’s can be. The combat is solid with normal attacks, skills, items, wait your turn out or to traverse the map being your options in battle, so it’s already off to a good start in being easily accessible. Positioning is important in ensuring that you don’t get surrounded and, with some moves covering differing ranges and being able to hit a different amount of people, you’ll want to position yourself in the best place to maximise damage – it’s also good to be near other party members in case you’ve got some quick healing to do! You also select which direction your character faces which has an effect on the damage you take and give, e.g, you’re going to take more damage if you’re facing away from an enemy.When you’re not going all slashy-slashy against enemies, you’ll spend the rest of your time in the city of Lambert where you’ll purchase items, equipment amongst other things. You’ll spend a lot of your time reading – or listening to – dialogue but with how charming the characters are, I can’t say I had a problem with it. I’m a big fan of bonding in RPG’s and being able to use my free time to better learn about my teammates (yes, there are alternate endings) is good fun, although you’ll have to prioritise how you spend your free time as you can’t bond with everyone, do free missions to gain experience, etc, all at once – you can get a generous amount done though!The 2D art in Stella Glow is nothing short of beautiful, and I absolutely adore it. The character design, portraits, CG images and cutscenes are amazing, breathtaking and it really is gorgeous.
The 3D chibi art is adorable too and is brimming with colour, proving to be a real delight for the eyes. If that wasn’t enough, then the varied locales and nature only push the point home further – it’s a game I was constantly impressed by visually which isn’t a huge surprise as Imageepoch have always had a good team of artists behind it.If you’re a fan of English dubs like I am then you’ll be pleased with the talent involved in Stella Glow. You’ve got a bunch of great talent including Robbie Daymond, Christine Marie Cabanos, Cristina Vee, Patrick Seitz, Kyle Hebert, Erin Fitzgerald, Matthew Mercer and, well, the list goes on! The cast is large and the dub does it justice and although there’s no option to switch to another language, nobody should have an issue with the game being in English as the dub is fantastic.
The OST has some catchy tunes although it’s not a largely memorable OST, but it provides a nice and fitting ambience along with a variety of songs for each occasion. The more I talk about it, the more shocking it is that Imageepoch really aren’t in business anymore when they’re capable of games such as Stella Glow.If you’re looking for a solid SPRG on 3DS then Stella Glow more than fits the bill, and it’ll have you wanting more from Imageepoch although that’ll never happen now, which is a huge shame. Stella Glow has a lovely cast of characters, absolutely beautiful visuals and an outstanding amount of voice talent behind it, and the gameplay is engaging and smooth. I recommend that you don’t look over Stella Glow and, as I may have wrongly assumed, it does a good job of not becoming a standard harem although it’s easy to ship Alto with another character (if you don’t ship him with Lisette though, then you’re shipping wrong), due to the bonding system and character development. Stella Glow is the perfect swansong for Imageepoch, and I’ll miss them. I’ve been gaming since a very young age and although I can’t remember my very first game, I fondly remember enjoying Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and being giddy with joy once I beat Dr.
My all-time favourite game is a tie between Persona 4 Golden and Final Fantasy IX. As you may have noticed, I have a love for JRPG’s although I dabble in all genres. My favourite genres are fighters, visual novels and, of course, JRPG’s. Follow me on Twitter @mitchjaylineham, and check me out on Open Critic as Mitch Jay.