The Positives
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Despite the oddities that Stella Glow’s narrative revels in, the story ends up working very well. It helps that the game eases you in with a very basic introduction to the characters and the world, and although some of the details are typical tropes (like the small town protagonist with no memory), it doesn’t really prove itself to be a negative. The rule of thumb here is that if you’re gonna go weird, at least start off grounded and familiar to get your audience’s feet wet, and Stella Glow does that very well.
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Statistical progression, cash flow and leveling up have a very consistent flow throughout the game and just about every battle you get into whether it’s a part of the story or simple grinding feels worthwhile. This is because there is a good chance that at least one of your characters is going to level up and the level recommendations that the game sets down for the story missions never feel too far out of reach.
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There are great grinding opportunities early in the game and they never feel like “too much work”. It was immensely satisfying to feel like I could get ahead of what the game was asking of me in a short time frame. Most of the time, all it really took was fighting 2-3 battles between story missions and I was powerful enough to defeat every enemy without having anyone fall. It also helped that the amount of coin I earned was enough to buy all of the latest weapons for every character, so I was never missing anything.
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This may sound like a trivial detail, but when you first begin the main quest to find all of the Witches, the main protagonist Alto and his long time friend Lisette, who are the first two characters you meet in the game, are fairly far behind most of the other characters you will play as in terms of level (they start at Level 1 while the others are between 6-8), given that their backstory is that they are simple small town folk. I can’t tell you how many RPG’s I have played where the game tried to tell me that certain characters had more battle experience in their pasts, yet all of the characters were about equal strength for the sake of game balance. Stella Glow is not afraid to upset this balance for the sake of narrative logic, and in the end Alto and Lisette’s level disadvantage isn’t really problem unless you are dumb enough to use them as your frontline fighters.
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Stella Glow takes a page out of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei handbook of how to handle downtime. Between missions, you are encouraged to spend time with your party members which come in the form of mini stories that give you insight into the true nature of the other characters. This ends up being some of the best storytelling in the game as it does a great job of turning your first impressions of the other characters on their heads, as you learn about what they are like away from the job. One the better side stories involves the fearless, strict and noble knight Archibald who turns into a scared, bumbling idiot when presented with the idea of an arranged marriage.
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On top of the story telling, the bonuses you get from spending time with your party members translate to in-game advantages. These can be anything from a critical hit boost when a character has low health to an increased chance to block incoming attacks.
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The free time is also an important aspect of the game in that you have to strategize how to use it. You are only granted three sessions of free time in between story missions, and the game gives you a variety of options to do with different rewards. Spending time with characters unlocks abilities, exploring on your own can net you rare items, and part time jobs give you extra cash that can give you that shiny new weapon with a +3 damage boost.
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When in battle, you will also encounter different field conditions that force you to consider your movement and placement more carefully. An example of this is that a lot of the battlefields will have tall grass that grant a 10% boost to defense and evasion. So one way to take advantage of this is to let the enemy come to you while you have one character sit and wait in the grass. This end up exposing the enemy’s weak spot (their back) which grants a damage boost and an instant tactical edge. It’s very satisfying to pull of the perfect plan and use the field to wipe out your foes.
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The Witches’ K-Pop songs are seriously catchy and will stick in your head long after you’ve shut off your 3DS. The songs also have a dramatic on battle as you will unlock various abilities that Alto and the Witches can combine to unleash for various buffs and debuffs. For example the first song you unlock eliminates the enemy’s ability to take any action against you while lowering their defense, so you are free to attack without consequence and serves as a great way to end a battle much quicker. Granted, this particular song requires you to build up a gauge which takes several turns, so it’s not like you can just use these songs at any time to break the game.
The Negatives
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Stella Glow doesn’t really utilize the 3DS’s capabilities much. There’s some basic depth during character dialog, but the characters in these segments are flat 2-D images, so all it really does is pop them up from the background. There are some 3-D character models used when you choose to attack enemies, but the effects aren’t anything you haven’t seen before or have been done better by other games. Stella Glow doesn’t really feel like it needed to be a 3DS game outside of the fact that the platform was probably the best combination of low development cost with a sizable user base.
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There are some moments of dialog that feel like the characters are too self aware which ends up hurting how the writers want them to be perceived. This is especially true with the protagonist, Alto. On more than one occasion, a character (particularly Lisette) will say something to the effect of “Oh Alto, you just try so hard to help people. That’s just the kind of person you are”. He will usually respond, “I know, and it ends up biting me.” The problem with this is that it makes the character look fraudulent, which I know isn’t the writers’ intent and they have to establish characters’ personalities in a timely manner. It’s one of those things where if you want your audience to feel for a character, show them that they “try so hard to help people”. Don’t say it.
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Piggy-backing off of the point above, the writers seemed to have a tendency to try too hard to make characters likeable. A lot of this can be attributed to the old “tropes and cheese” that a lot of JRPG narratives fall into. But it gets kind of old when you hear the “I’m going to do this for myself so I can be a stronger person” speech from the same character (or type of character) repeatedly. Again, there’s nothing wrong with a character arc of a person going from weak to strong, just show it to me. Whether it’s through battle or an alternative narrative event, it doesn’t matter, when a character tells you those things, it lessens their legitimacy.
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I noticed on a few occasions that the enemy A.I. would not take advantage of certain situations that I put myself in. There were a few moments where one of my characters was on the verge of being defeated, but for some reason (maybe they were just being nice), the enemy decided to attack a character with full health even though the weakened character was either in range or standing right next to them. But hey, I’ll take it.
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The “Tuning” events in the game weren’t very fun. Narratively, the idea behind tuning is that it helps Alto and one of the Witches to connect and unlock different spells to sing in battle. Unfortunately, the process to do this is basically a battle that ends up feeling regurgitated rather than unique. The battles feature moveable platforms, but that’s about the only thing that’s different. It just ends up feeling more time consuming then it ought to be for an event that’s done during your free time. I feel like a simple rhythm-based game would have sufficed just to make the whole thing more streamlined, and it would have fit the music theme the game so heavily leans on much better.
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There were a few gameplay opportunities that I felt that the game missed out on as well, most likely due to the sake of development time. For example, the character Ewan is a young merchant who runs a very successful business that deals all over the world. On several occasions during your travels, he remarks about how certain places were ripe with business opportunities. One of his lines during these segments was “sales exceeded by 130%, we can buy all sorts of stuff with the money we earned”. The problem with this line is that it only served as a means of establishing Ewan’s character, which by that point was already established. It would have been cool if there was a way for the player to use Ewan to make money. I kept wishing that I could see the cash that Ewan would so frequently reference either by selling off goods or old weapons that were rewards from battle.
