Legend of Starfi

Well I unfortunately haven't gotten a chance to try this yet, but I know that Neo should have his now... so where's the impressions?

I was just cheking out some of the Enemy art and the screens, and this game looks like a future classic. It just looks fantastic. I would also like some Impressions. Now all I need is a GBA.

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Originally posted by bbobb
Well I unfortunately haven't gotten a chance to try this yet, but I know that Neo should have his now... so where's the impressions?

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I played it for two hours last night. At work right now so I'll have impressions up in a few hours.

It's looking quite good though... *-neo

So I should buy it then?

Not the most complete impressions but I'll give this a shot.

Starfi is a platformer with some adventure elements here and there. The game puts you in cavernous levels and often requires you to find a character and give/recieve a item from them. For instance in one level you have these little animals frozen in ice crystals, you run across some monkeys in what was a hot spring after talking to them you open a door to a area where you rekindle several fires to warm the spring and melt the animals out of ice. There's a lot of text but everything is laid out in a straightforward manner, you see the items you recieve from a character and solutions to problems are fairly easy to see. The game's levels are expansive and provide alot of platforming. There's a boss at the end of each level.

Starfi controls very well. A good deal of the game takes place in water and Starfi swims in any direction with ease instead of the usual platforming gimmick of tapping a button to swim. His method of attack is a spin that later becomes a tornado that can shoot him in a given direction rebounding off walls and the like. On land, Starfi can do the usual running, jumping, his attacks, and he can glide in the air. I'm not sure if there's more to learn yet as there's some parts of the levels blocked by rocks I can't break with my attacks.

Graphics and music are quite good, the game reminds me of Kirby or one of Westone's titles. Everything is drawn nicely and there's plenty of variety within each level.

One thing I don't know is length. Looking in the manual there's a screenshot of a world map but I haven't seen this in the game yet. In fact so far I'm unable to go back to previous levels and within levels there's areas I can't access or at least haven't figured it out. I'm hoping the game branches out at some point and let's you go back to prior levels. Certain areas have outlines of special items you can use like the Bear suit Bbob linked to, but again I haven't gained the ablity or simply do not know how to access these parts.

Good game, if you enjoy platformers it's very well-made and actually sports a challenge. And outside of a blurb in EGM when this game was on Game Boy Color there's been no mention of it in a US publication. *-neo

Well I picked this up finally today also and I might as well drop in and give my 2 cents on it also. I've gotten through 4 levels so far and I am quite impressed. The levels are mostly pretty large, with quite a bit of exploration in them. I think Neo did a pretty good job of explaining how it worked. So far it's been straight forward with no level select for me also, I'm assuming either you get a level select later in the game or maybe after you beat it the first time. From analyzing the start up screen it appears to me that there are going to be about 20 levels in the game, which isn't bad for a platformer considering the levels have been fairly large. You learn new moves and get new outfits progressively as you play. Also one other thing to note, the game is incredibly cute. If you follow the above links you can see just how cute. Personally I love it, I'm a big fan of cute platformers. As mentioned, there is alot of text... but it's not really a problem as you can figure it out fairly easy. Oh and for all you people learning Japanese, it looks to these Gaijin eyes that most of the text is in Katakana and Hiragana with no Kanji, so it shouldn't be too hard for someone just learning Japanese to understand. All in all I would definately recommend this to any fans of cutesy platformers such as Klonoa and Kirby... hopefully this gets a US release, but if not you should definately look into getting the import.

...Why didn't I buy this 3 months ago.

I've searched every online import store I can think of. I checked eBay. I even tried some of those Hong Kong sites. NO PLACE has this game. I can't even find a listing for it telling me it's out of stock. Where the heck did it go? Anyone know a place I can buy it from? (Anyone know where I can buy Klonoa 2, also? That's another one that seems to have disappeared...)

Rummy, I've been looking for Starfi myself, I figured it would be getting a US release, being a very Kirby-ish sidescrolling platformer, so I didn't import it either. I'm also looking for it, can't seem to locate it either.

But if you're looking for Klonoa 2, looks like you can still get it from http://www.therage.com on special order. Hope that helps. Tell me if you find someone still stocking Starfi :)

Hrm.. this game looks pretty interesting... But I think Ristar can kick his arse. ;)

:p

For a Nintendo-made sidescroller, this game got little attention in NA. I'm going to get it for christmas.