YMMV / Hoshi wo Miru Hito

• Bile Fascination: Its reputation as the "legendary shitty game" has drawn a lot of curious players.
• Good Bad Bugs: In several later areas in the game, collision suddenly becomes nonexistent, meaning you can simply walk through wall tiles and navigate to the intended exit directly. On top of that, walking through walls reduces the Random Encounter rate to zero, meaning you can entirely avoid combat in the areas.
• Obvious Beta: Try playing this and tell us this isn't the case. Sluggish movement, unbalanced enemies, the last digit of your health is invisible in battle, you cannot run from battles except by deliberately miscasting a teleport skill, et cetera.
• Remade and Improved: The Fan Remakes STARGAZER and especially Romancing StellaVisor, despite their relative obscurity compared to the original, are often held up as superior in quality to their Famicom origin, with many praising their improved graphics, music and gameplay, alongside several instances of Adaptation Expansion.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Really, nearly all of the game's mechanics are so scuffed that they could be a solid demonstration on how not to make an RPG, but to specify several of the most noteworthy cases:
  • Overworld navigation is a massive pain, with several key landmarks, including towns and dungeons, being invisible (weirdly, it's a deliberate choice; NPCs in the town explicitly describe it as being invisible), which makes actually moving anywhere a Luck-Based Mission. Combined with the ridiculously slow scrolling speed, this game will very quickly test your patience.
  • Acquiring new items and equipment automatically discards whatever a given character has at any given time, and there's no indication of whether the new item is actually better than the previous one until it's too late. You also can't swap items between characters or remove them entirely until replaced, meaning it's very likely that you'll grind excessively for a new weapon, realize it's actually a straight downgrade, and you'll be left stuck with it for the rest of the campaign.
  • Combat menus have no back button anywhere, meaning even if you choose an option by mistake, you have to commit to doing something through it. The game defaults to the ESP/spells menu, and if you select it but don't have any MP to cast anything, you automatically lose your turn.
  • The Password Save system features 131 possible symbols (letters, hiragana, katakana, numbers, the copyright symbol, a "FIN" end marker, and space) — your best bet of accurately keeping your password is to take a photo of the screen for later. Even worse is that it doesn't save your level, gold, and rounds down your experience.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Ray Gun is infamous for being a pretty nasty wake-up call in terms of how the game handles progression. It's the cheapest available weapon for purchase, which would imply that it's better than fighting unarmed... except it objectively does less damage than fighting with Good Old Fisticuffs, making it a straight downgrade. Even worse is that the game makes no effort to inform you of the weapon's stats before you purchase it, and once you do, it's impossible to unequip unless you have a new weapon to replace it, but good luck farming enough for that to happen.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's a practically unplayable game with a surprisingly fervent following. The fact that it even got a re-release on the Nintendo Switch says enough.
• So Bad, It Was Better: The original Hoshi wo Miru Hito, despite being the most unplayable, is the most well-known incarnation, enough to see a port on the Nintendo Switch. The Fan Remakes STARGAZER and Romancing StellaVisor, despite both being widely accepted as Remade and Improved, are comparatively obscure.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The plot and setting of the game is very ambitious for the time, and one that conceptually could've genuinely rivalled that of Dragon Quest: a sci-fi RPG about a ragtag group of Psychic Children in a dystopian future joining to save the world from an evil supercomputer? Sounds great! A pity that the actual game itself is such a car crash that the wasted potential of the plot in the gameplay is the least of its problems.

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