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A Hamburger For The Cookoff

  • kumada
  • 08/14/2018 03:09 AM
  • 1093 views
Sometimes you don't want fancy. Sometimes you don't want experimental.

Sometimes what you want is meat plus fire. Grill marks and light char. Beef that's still seeping juices onto the bun.

Subterranean Starfield is a hamburger. It doesn't take any big risks, but what it does, it does well. And if it's not to your taste, that's because of what it is, and not how it was made.

Gameplay

SS is a linear, party-based dungeon-crawler with a lot of "yes and"s. It features permadeath, subclasses, a roster of replaceable party members, a Monster Hunteresque stat-boosting cafeteria, a customizable skill system, and a surprising wealth of bonus content.

The game-loop is tight, as a dungeon crawler's should be, and it goes: dive into the dungeon -> plow through levels until you hit a boss -> head back to town to re-gear, re-stock, and unlock -> dive again.

Party members feel competent and powerful and the sub-class system lets you flavor them however you want. Any member of your party can, by taking the right subclass, become your off-healer, or off-DPS, or off-tank. Add in gear bonuses and food choices, and the game feels very crunchy and tactical.

Boss fights, in particular, are a lot of fun, and even on normal difficulty will steamroll you if you take them lightly. SS is a little bit Person-like, in that its metagame revolves more around controlling combat through buffs and debuffs than by saturating the field with powerful attacks, but elemental weaknesses and resistances only play a minor role in SS. By the middle of the game, a typical combat with mooks will involve a couple of party buffs, and by the end of the game I had two party members whose sole function was to buff. This slows standard combat by a lot, but makes the boss fights stand out. Fighting a boss in SS isn't about exploiting a particular weakness and hammering it until the boss falls over. It's about gradually gaining control of the flow of the battle until the enemy is no longer able to kill you.

Unfortunately, permadeath can make some battles a little frustrating, as tanking is unreliable in SS, and won't always kick in to save your party members from being one-shotted. To offset this, you have equippable accessories that can resurrect a party member once. If they get one-shotted again during the same battle, they're dead for good, and you need to hire a new character to replace them.

In theory, this should mean that you should take care not to have any glass cannons on your squad, but the game doesn't warn you that this is how it's going to be, and even with highly optimized glass cannons, boss fights take a while.

Without them, I would imagine the battles really drag.

To further compound the problem, the encounter rate in SS is set extraordinarily high, and equipping the rare "1/2 encounter rate" accessory on one of your party members only makes the encounter rate very high. I've been jumped by enemy encounters less than seven steps from my last encounter, and this turned exploring a floor into a dangerous slog. Since any encounter could one-shot my DPS characters if the enemies used the right attacks in the right sequence, and since the game's resurrect items are expensive, I reloaded more outside of boss battles than I did during boss battles.

In addition to the high encounter rate, once you get out of the first two areas, the game's level design becomes highly frustrating. The fire section, in particular, uses a gimmick where an invisible crack marks certain tiles as a one-way trip to the wrong part of the next floor, and those cracked tiles are everywhere. After wasting an hour and change, I eventually gave up and save-scummed my way through. I have never regretted a decision less.

Of course, after the fire floors, you enter an area where your torch doesn't work, your view is restricted, and the level is constantly teleporting you back and forth between two almost-identical mazes without letting you know that it's doing this. All told, it's a struggle to get through any part of the lower dungeon with your level low enough to fight the boss.

And yes, you heard me right. Low enough to fight the boss.

SS uses a quest system that includes clear conditions and Ex Clear conditions for each quest, with Ex Clear conditions giving such drastically better rewards that it is almost vital that you avoid regular-clearing anything. Each main boss is tied to a quest that can be regular-cleared by defeating them, but can be Ex Cleared by defeating them at a low enough level. The Ex Clear reward is enough money to start outfitting your party with the next tier of equipment. The clear reward is enough money to maybe afford half of a hotdog, provided you wait until the hotdog is on sale, and then haggle aggressively. Stats in SS are highly gear-dependent, and farming for money raises your level and thereby reduces your chances of passing the next Ex Clear condition, so if you make a mistake and get screwed by the quest clear system, it's hard to get unscrewed.

The quest clear system does help ensure that the bosses are always challenging, since they remove grinding as a valid strategy. But then all the game's other decisions encourage grinding, which led to a lot of time spent running away from battles because they would have leveled me up.

Overall, I think SS would have played a little better as a modified boss rush. If you could enter the dungeon, face a few waves of baddies, tangle with a boss, and then come back out to restock and re-gear, the game would feel very tight. As-is, the mechanics are both frustrating and satisfying, and are recommended to people who like games like Elminage Gothic and Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne.

Fortunately, SS's story is much less complicated.

Story

SS's story is less complicated because there isn't a lot of it, but "not a lot" isn't the same as saying "none".

In SS, you're a party of plucky adventurers plumbing the mega-dungeon beneath your sleepy little backwoods town at the behest of the local guild. Your characters don't really have personalities, apart from some very short snippets on their status pages, but the town is surprisingly well developed, and the NPCs are either likeable or get to business with a minimum of talking, both of which I was grateful to see.

The overall arc of the story involves the dungeon being a little less innocent than it seems, but the plot doesn't really go full Made In Abyss on the player. The big story beats are hit satisfactorily, and there's enough color to keep the world interesting, but the story isn't in any danger of upstaging the mechanics for the part of the game that dominates the player's attention.

Overall

Despite its issues, SS is satisfying. It's a solid concept, perfectly playable, and good for picking up when what you want is uncomplicated gaming.

It probably will not appeal to anyone who is highly plot-focused, or to anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for frustration, but it's relatively rewarding to master, and might be interesting for blind speed-runs.

Not every meal needs to be a hamburger, but this is a hamburger for when you're craving one.

Posts

Pages: 1
Rhyme
Tear Harvester Rhyme
7582
Thank you very much for the review!

It's been a very long time since making Substar, and I've generally felt the same way about some of the dungeon gimmicks and the Ex Clear mechanic.

I remember when I'd actually be tolerant enough to play through my own game several times but retrying Substar now, I definitely feel the more frustrating side more often (hah).

Encounters were actually score-based, the tile you stepped on would increment an internal score that upon reaching a certain value, triggers a random encounter.
On average you'd have 15-20 steps to get a random encounter, but depending on which region you walk around it could be as low as 5-8 or as high as 30-40 steps.

A lot of the plot was left unfinished, unfortunately. There were plans on making NPCs appear in the dungeon, events triggering when you eat in the cafeteria, and a host of optional bosses with their respective quests (which never made it to the game - a lot was due to my excitement at having a game somewhat finished actually!)

I'm glad you find the game satisfying, however!
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