"Now's your once in a lifetime chance to get down with the Foamstars! So let's party, bubble style!"
Foamstars is a competitive 4v4 online party Hero Shooter developed by Square Enix for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The game initially released on February 6th, 2024 exclusively for PlayStation Plus subscribers as part of the service's free "Monthly Games" list, before being made available as a paid title for all PlayStation owners on March 5th.
In a world where a segment of the population has the ability to secrete a foamy, soap-like substance from skin, some of these "Foamstars" have come together in the city of Bath Vegas to organize a large-scale party — a Foamstars Glorious Party, if you will — where they indulge their unique talent to shoot foam all over the place by engaging in friendly combat. Similar to ink in Splatoon, foam doubles as a mobility tool, with players being able to quickly traverse the stage by riding on their team's foam with a surfboard. However, foam can also stack, allowing players to create their own cover to hide behind or platforms to attack other players from. Lathering up your opponent isn't enough to knock them out of play though; once a player is covered up in enough foam, they become marked as a target for their teammates to save or for enemies to "chill" by smack into them with a surfboard; the latter causing the victim to uncontrollably roll around like a snowball until they crash into something.
Foamstars has three main multiplayer gameplay modes: Smash the Star, Happy Bath Survival, and Rubber Duck Party, with the latter two being timed modes that rotate in-and-out of availability every 30 minutes. Smash the Star is effectively team deathmatch, with each team having a pool of seven lives. Once a team loses all their lives, their best-performing member is labeled as the "star player", with the match ending once a team's star player is "chilled". Happy Bath Survival sees each team have two members duking it out in the arena, while the remaining members act as support from outside the battlefield. Rubber Duck Party sees players fight over a giant rubber duck in an attempt to escort it into the other player's base, and players are able to make it move faster by dancing on its head.
List of characters
- Soa: A perky pop star idol who brings her (literally) bubbly and positive energy anywhere she goes.
- ∆GITO: An esports champion who uses the tournament to chase clout for his career.
- Tonix: A genius inventor who is diligently studying the mysteries of the foam of their world.
- Jet Justice: A self-proclaimed part-time superhero who fights in the name of good and justice. (And making pizzas in his day job.)
- Penny Gwyn: A lone wolf (penguin) warrior who wants to save her home in Antarctica. (She's not actually a penguin though.)
- Rave Breaker: A Psychopathic Manchild who wants to rid the world of parties and party people.
- The Baristador: A refined barista who serves the competition with class.
- Mel T: A spunky girl who loves to sponsor her family business by serving up smiles with delicious ice cream.
- Coiff Guy: A muscular man themed after both disco and professional wrestling.
- Chloe Noir: A beautiful woman who's an art gallery director with a hidden shadowy side of her.
Tropes featured in Foamstars include:
- All-Loving Heroine: Soa .
- All of the Other Reindeer: This is part of Soa's backstory. She spent her childhood feeling like a freak because of her ability to produce foam, eventually becoming a recluse to avoid mockery. It wasn't until she was older and ran into a child who expressed that she'd love to have the power to make her own bubbles too that she gained self-confidence and soon found herself on the path of becoming a pop star.
- Alternate Company Equivalent: To Nintendo's Splatoon series. Both are 4v4 cooperative team-based Third-Person Shooter games where the main characters secrete their own ammunition, which can also double as a mobility option to help them traverse the stage quicker (and by proxy, inhibit the opposing team's ability to do the same).
- Animal Motifs: All of the characters have traits and elements based on their unique Bubble Beastie companion animal, the most obvious two being ∆GITO based on a shark and Penny Gwyn based on, well, a penguin.
- Animal Talk: Penny Gwyn, who was raised by penguins, can understand penguin and otter speak. Tonix can as well, due to having invented a translator that can also work with talking to sheep such as Ramzey's parents.
- Announcer Chatter: There's an announcer who says a few things before, during, and after the matches. He's also responsible for the quote under the page image, which plays at the beginning of matches.
- The Beastmaster: Dark Ramzey can command his flock of Bubble Beasties to attack at his whim and not just the sheep type along with his horned one that's implied to be his personal one, but also every other that is associated with each Foamstar. Ramzey can do this for good when he along his flock repairs the damage from the Energy Core he destroyed in the beginning before as part of his atonement in the "I'm so very sorry" picture.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Mel T, who works for an ice cream company, is all about dressing up like ice cream.
- Casino Park: The setting of much of the game's levels, as it takes place in the fictional Bath Vegas. Many parts of the world are themed after a giant casino.
- Concept Album: There are many lyrical songs in the game, and all of them, except one, are about baths, soap or bubbles.
- Cursed with Awesome: Soa's body started producing foam and bubbles on its own when she was a kid. While she spent much of her childhood hating this, it would later become a major factor of her pop star fame in adulthood.
- Dub Name Change: There's a handful of differences between the English and Japanese names for characters. Playing with Japanese voices leads the announcer, who speaks English, to use the Japanese names.
- Rave Breaker is known in Japan as Chaos Ender.
- The Baristador is The Master.
- Jet Justice is Great Jetter.
- Pen Gwynn is shortened to simply Gywnn.
- Mel T is Meltie.
- Easily Forgiven: In the aftermath of the final mission; the residents of Bath Vegas are quick to forgive Ramzey for his rampage as Dark Ramzey due to that he's already very apologetic for it, that the battles from it were already exciting to watch, and that he's just so cute.
- Escort Mission: Rubber Duck Party is a game mode in which each team fights over a giant rubber duck DJ who they must escort to the other team's base. When one player is standing on a platform above the duck, they can dance to speed it up.
- Fell Asleep Standing Up: Penny Gwynn has a habit of this due to being raised by penguins and even sleeptalks as well. As revealed in her story mission and on the third episode of radio broadcast Walking In Bath Vegas, Ramzey discovered this after taking walks with his parents to stay asleep and does this to become Dark Ramzey. Gwynn finds out what happened and despite not actually her fault for it, she immediately takes responsibility.
- Funny Animal: A rubber duck that doubles as a DJ is used as more or less the game's mascot, and also serves as the payload in the Escort Mission gameplay mode Rubber Duck Party.
- Fusion Dance: In the ??? mission added for Season 3, the boss fight is a fusion of Coiff Guy and Dark Ramzey who fell asleep again despite the special brew made by Mr. Vegas which results is Dark Ramzey wearing Coiff's afro and more disco-related attacks in the boss fight.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Tonix.
- Hopeless with Tech: Penny Gwyn, due to being raised by penguins, knows nothing about the internet. Ironically, the penguins do have a good understanding on it, having discovered it after she left home.
- Insistent Terminology: Discussed. Bublo Espuma guiding you through the tutorial points out this isn't like other competitive games where you score kills, but instead "chills" where you chill out opponents.
- Medium Blending: Penny Gwyn can communicate with various animals, and all of them are depicted as actual photographs.
- Mission Control: Tonix's grandmother Dr. Foamgood is this who summons the Foamstars to defend Bath Vegas from Dark Ramzey.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The reaction after the final boss fight from Ramzey when he turns back to normal and sees what his stint as his dark self caused from falling asleep.Ramzey: Did I.. Did I do this? Have I been baaad? Oh my fluffiness! I am so very sorry!
- Neon City: The background of the game's levels, due to the Bath Vegas setting. Lots of buildings and neon lights at night.
- Never Say "Die": Players aren't killed, they're chilled! The announcer even calls out the name of the player who carried out the, uh, chill, saying, "[Character name], nice chill!" Averted with Dark Ramzey who explicitly tells you to die when fighting him in the final mission.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The reveal from the second half of story mode for each character on what resulted Dark Ramzey from each of their actions causing Ramzey to fall asleep whether it was with intentional but with good intentions like with Soa singing him a lullaby or unintentional such as Rave Breaker tripping a breaker to end Bublo Espuma's party that Ramzey just happened to be attending to stay awake which ironically causes the "rave" or in Japanese, "chaos" he determined to break or end in the first place. As a result warned by his parents, the darkness within him takes over to become Dark Ramzey and he blames each of them for causing this. It took chilling him out in the final mission to finally get him back to his senses.
- No Social Skills: Rave Breaker has a worse case of this than Penny Gywnn as he is confused whenever any of the Foamstars show care for him like with Soa inviting to a future party after hearing his one bad experience, and he is stunned from how his one-sided Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Bublo Espuma doesn't hold any anger towards him for disrupting his party that led to Dark Ramzey rampaging in his story mission.
- Raised by Wolves: Penny Gwyn was discovered in the wild, floating in a basket, by penguins, who raised her to be a warrior who fights against climate change on their behalf. Not only does she reach adulthood not realizing she was adopted until her adoptive mother outright tells her at the end of her Season 1 story missions, but it has to be explained that she's actually a human as well, as her next thought was that her parents hatched her from a different penguin's egg.
- Revenue-Enhancing Devices: The game's store has a litany of cosmetics to purchase, with each character having several clothing sets.
- Rewards Pass: In a rare example from a non-"free to play" game, Foamstars has season passes with both a free tier and a paid Platinum tier.
- Superpowered Evil Side: Dark Ramzey is revealed to be this to the regular Ramzey.
- Sweet Sheep: Ramzey who's a kind sheep Bubble Beastie along with his two sweet sheep parents that try to raise him right. Dark Ramzey... not so sweet.
- Theme Naming: The game takes place in Bath Vegas. One of the characters is named Soa ("soap" minus a letter).
- Victory Fakeout: After Dark Ramzey is stopped a second time with him being chilled into the waters, the "Final Wave Clear!" pops up to signal the victory. Then, the ground and waters shake from where Dark Ramzey is under so the "Final Wave Clear!" turns into a ''Final Wave Clear?" meaning it's not over yet. Cue Dark Ramzey bursting out of the waters, becoming even bigger in Kaiju levels and roaring angrily to begin the true final phase of the fight.
