A point-and-click game of discovery,
Hoshi Saga revolves around finding stars. In each stage, you have to find a star and the fun is figuring out just what you need to do to uncover or create the star. The puzzles are many and varied, and range from the mind-numbingly easy to the hair-pullingly hard.
The
Hoshi Saga series has eight installments so far:
This game series contains the following tropes:
- Bullet Hell: A difficult iteration as stage 10000 [sic] in Dokuringo. After losing the first time, the game offers you a shield to make it easier. Of course, that locks you out of the 'good' ending.
- Call Back: Dokuringo is almost entirely made up of stages strongly resembling that of past installments but with very different (and more difficult) solutions.
- Easy Level Trick: Several stages have an inconspicuous solution to an otherwise difficult-looking puzzle.
- Stage 40 in Ringoame's esoteric solution does not involve the circles in it to reveal the star at all.
- The number of stars ranked as the difficulty can give it away, as in the stage 48, which initially appears to be a difficult Klotski, but is in fact, just a click-and-drag to the solution.
- Fanservice: In each of the first three installments, there's one stage that requires you to do something almost ecchi (pulling down underwear [but not that far down], blowing up women's skirts to reveal star-printed underwear, trying to get a woman to uncover her breasts so that they immediately get covered by stars...). The hints of fanservice disappear entirely after the third installment...until Dokuringo, where there are no less than four stages that feature almost naked women in full color, one requiring you to unzip a girl's Meido outfit, and the winning screen you get if you clear the final stage the hard way is a drawing of a naked woman whose nipples and crotch are just barely covered by other objects. Well, the game creator is Japanese...
- Genre Shift: Several final levels: Ringo's final level gives off RPG tones, and Dokuringo's final level is a flat out Shoot 'Em Up.
- Groin Attack: What you need to do in one of 3's stages.
- Kaizo Trap: On Stage 10000.
- Moon Logic Puzzle: Some of the stages qualify as this, giving you next to no indication of what to do in them. Especially prevalent in Dokuringo, where you often have to completely ignore the obvious puzzle to search for a completely non-obvious one.
- Oddly Named Sequel: All the installments after the third one, perhaps to signify that they're in color instead of black-and-white and are considerably easier than the first three installments (or harder, for the eighth one).
- Red Herring: Plenty in Dokuringo; for example, the clock puzzle (stage 21 in Ringo) turns out to be irrelevant to the corresponding stage 9991.
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: You can go from a 1-star puzzle that just requires you to mouse your cursor over star pieces to a 5-star puzzle that requires you to have almost superhuman reflexes.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop: There's a significant drop in difficulty in the installments after the third one.
- Shell Game: One of the stages in Ringoen. Gets a Call Back in Dokuringo where it's amped up in difficulty (instead of selecting the correct cup just once, you have to do it 3-5 times).
- Songs in the Key of Lock: One stage in the second installment requires you to play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on water-filled wine glasses.
- Star Shaped Coupon
- Waiting Puzzle: One stage in the third installment requires you to keep your cursor still (or keep it away from the game screen) for the star to form.
0 reviews 