stella glow

Stella Glow is a strategy JRPG by Imageepoch before they were dissolved. 

It focuses on Alto who must unite the musical witches he comes across to save the land from evil. It is an average story with a below average cast. The game had a lot of locations that were mentioned but never showed up. It is as if there is a sequel that is yet to be published.  

The more you spend time with your party members the more bonuses they are granted to help out in combat. You can  take on part time jobs in the game for extra cash to pass the time and explore during free time for new items, You can also grind during mission mode to help you out. You can also get and create orbs for bonuses during combat. There is the tuning witch which is another way to gain bonuses for combat. Each witch in the game has their own unique powers to help you during combat. 

It becomes annoying when hits don’t land often even with accuracy buffs. Fighting the same bosses over and over seems to be filler and is very tiresome. The AI of the other guest members can really be annoying with them sometimes jumping head on through danger at the worst times possible. 

Many of the enemies were reskins of another with different abilities. The ending varies based on which characters you spend time with and the game encourages replay value to see other endings in order to reach to the true ending. The dialogue choices play out the same way. This is a symptom of many Atlus games that’s really just beyond annoying as I often complain about with that artificial gameplay design choice. 

The voice acting and dialogue, is what you can expect from anything under ATLUS, are substandard and cheesy.  The music, artstyle and graphics were all fairly good. The gameplay is straightforward enough but slow with no way to speed things up during combat. This is frustrating as it can be a long wait for your turn in combat. The other big part of the game is its Fire Emblem 3 Houses mixed with Devil Survivor styled story choices.   

It is a lengthy game but not entirely for the right reasons, one part of it comes from a considerable amount of grinding you have to do and another part comes from sidestepping and filler. 

Overall it was an alright game. 

It gets 3 out of 5 stars.