Stellar Blade Review

Brother this game rules. Gameplay, music, setting, story – every element of the production is awesome. I still remember back when “Project EVE” was just a cgi teaser about an android girl with a big butt. It always remained somewhere on my radar, in that once or twice a year I’d think to myself “Wait a second, what was the name of that one trailer with like the space pod and the girl again? Wonder if it has a release date yet.” To see it finally out after all this time is amazing, and the game did not disappoint. Hard to believe that this massive 3D action RPG comes from the NIKKE people. I’m late to the party, but playing this and FFVII Rebirth in the same year must have been wild.

Aesthetically I find it very fresh to get this type of 3D action game inside of an urban post-apocalypse instead of the usual high fantasy world. Gargantuan marble statues being interwoven between modern skyscrapers in the opening mission creates such a strong sense of unease right out the gate. A mere glance at the environment you find yourself in is enough to feel its implication of religious cataclysm weighing heavy upon you, and it doesn’t take long before you hear tell of the Final War and can infer what the last days of mankind must have looked like. The cities in particular have gotta be some of the most unique landscapes I’ve ever seen. World design was one of Stellar Blade’s highlight in general. Photo Mode has become one of my favourite features of modern JRPGs, so having such an elaborate system with filters & lights in was a treat. They let you go pretty far with the freecam too, which imo is easily the best way to really appreciate the scale and the geographical intricacies of vast environments like this, Xenoblade or FFVII Rebirth. Exploring each region was amazing with so many cool setpieces in each; Xion was a rather elaborate and believable hub town, the forest-like junkyards in the canyon were strange and unique, that monolithic drawbridge which Eve has to climb in the train graveyard awed me, the maze of hallways in the sewers get progressively more disturbing the deeper you reach, etc. And there’s an orbital elevator! Shout out to anime RPG orbital elevators, gotta be one of my favourite genders. The game starts out strong…and it simply just remains strong.

Its soundtrack is every bit as phenomenal as I’d been lead to believe as well. I’ve heard a lot of chatter surrounding Stellar Blade’s music and now that I’ve heard it for myself I get why. It’s fantastic. At 189 tracks & 10 hours in length, Stellar Blade lands firmly among the RPG high tiers. Hub regions like the Wasteland and the Great Desert have those relaxing vocal tracks that seamlessly transition into their battle edits, while action regions like Eidos 7 and the Orbit Elevator were good at finding the musical middle ground to capture both Eve’s unease about the desolate state of civilisation and the energy necessary for a fast-paced hack-n-slash game. Though obviously since I’ve just finished the game that which is most fresh on my mind are the two major boss tracks from the endgame: Democrawler’s operatic theme was stunning and really made you feel the divinity as he starts firing off Evangelion-styled crucifix explosions from his halo, and secondly the unexpected kawaii-core that accompanied the penultimate boss was one of the boldest musical decisions I’ve seen in an RPG of this caliber. Standing before the final dungeon staring down the girl that murdered your ally and nearly destroyed your town, then the boss theme is that. Not an orchestral rampage or aggressive metal performance, but a soft-spoken bop. My jaw is on the floor. It’s wild, and brave, and crazy that it actually works so well too. Both the chill electronic vocal tracks and the stronger symphonics felt very reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIII-2 or NieR Automata, but with more of a kpop kick.

Production value was very high across the board. The way in which it would swing the camera over Eve’s shoulder to move into cutscenes brought to mind the FFVII Remake games. In fact speaking of FFVII, I arrived at the Ancient Water Filtration System and immediately said “this reminds me of Mako Reactor 0”. A short jog over to trigger the Tachy boss fight at the centre, I said “Original hero returns as a cosmic horror, okay she’s this game’s obligatory Sephiroth nod”…then she descends to the battlefield, puts on a dark cape and brings out her giant katana…then that iconic black wing emerges from her right shoulder, she rushes at me with a slash barrage and starts blasting off blade beams, even going so far as to knock Eve to the layer below and then slowly float down like Sephiroth during the Crisis Core battle. My mind is full of Sephiroth homage and I cannot stop winning. A lot about the presentation and game design reminded me of FFVII:R actually. I guess it’s a result of both being these massive worlds built in Unreal Engine?

Gameplay is very well-paced I would say. Not overly difficult like most of its peers, so it was fun roaming around and actually seeking out enemies to fight as opposed to avoid unnecessary combat like I would in Elden Ring. Stellar Blade’s combat is addicting, even though I don’t generally enjoy Soulslikes. A big factor being that difficulty here was never too much of a barrier, which is what always prevents me from getting into the Dark Souls series. I adored Bloodborne on my first playthrough in high school, but ever since I just haven’t been able to enjoy those games where you spend 40 minutes trekking to a boss and then get curbstomped tens of times over the next hour until a stray hit wins the day. The only notably high-difficulty title I can really think of liking ever since is Back 4 Blood, but that was heavily influenced by the group I played it with, it lacks mass appeal but was tailor-made for us. In Stellar Blade however it is apparent that enemies are designed with the intent of letting you defeat them. Challenges to overcome rather than exploit (ie bosses don’t unceremoniously oneshot you from a kilometre away with a 5-frame attack telegraphed only by the slight arm twitch like happens in Elden Ring). You don’t lose anything upon death and they’re more generous with respawn points. In some senses Dark Souls probably isn’t even the right comparison, the combat is much more expressive than that. Rather the various combo routes here might make Stellar Blade the chosen one – the one game to finally recapture the essence of Metal Gear Rising. I’ve been waiting on Platinum to make another game with hack-n-slash combat as engaging as MGR ever since, but at this point it just seems like they either can’t or don’t want to. So it’s good of ShiftUp to pick up that slack instead. There are even a few bosses encounters which really play into MGR’s signature metalcore vocal themes. But then there’s also those dungeons where you have to use your gun, which I appreciated since I’m always the kind to reserve resources and so was never really going to use it otherwise (for example I can never bring myself to use Copy Abilities in Mega Man).

Everything about this game is fun, creative and well thought out. Any grievances I have are minor, such as wishing I could quick-travel directly to a camp on a different map, everyone may have been a bit too pretty to to a degree that would sometimes ruin immersion (for example a sidequest about some guy’s 11 year old daughter…who for some reason has lip filler and heavy eye makeup on if you actually zoom to her face), or that the game perhaps crashed just one too many times to ignore (doesn’t matter too much because of the generous autosaves). The plot twists were generic (I am in fact awake enough to recognise that “Naytiba” = “Native” the first time it gets said), but the story and its lore intricacies were compelling enough that I accepted them. And I did like how Orcal and the Elder Naytiba ended up not being blanket evils either. Fusing with Adam at the end seemed like the right option for the plot revelations and themes of the game, so I’m glad that ended up being the route to the true ending as well (though I would have liked to fight the Elder Naytiba anyway). In every way that matters, Stellar Blade is brilliant. I played this game for 37 hours and I had fun for 37 hours. I’ll call it a masterpiece. I’m not a pessimist about the industry, I personally think that gaming is better than it’s ever been, but it has also been quite a while since the last time I dished out an unexpected five stars. I haven’t given many games full marks in general, but most of my five star catalogue comes from series I’ve carried lifelong bias for like Final Fantasy and Sonic. Yet it’s precisely because Stellar Blade was an unexpected, unpredictable new IP that it was able to blindside me this much. There’s reason to compare it to NieR Automata (obviously), but also Metal Gear Rising, Xenogears, Final Fantasy VII Remake and more. Stellar Blade is very much its own thing, but I do like how you can just feel that the people who developed this have good taste in games. If you gave a video game fanatic millions of dollars for their passion project, I could imagine it coming out exactly like Stellar Blade. This is someone’s dream. As someone who mostly plays franchised JRPGs, very refreshing to get a new standalone game with this much budget behind it. I expected to like it – I didn’t expect to lock in a 10/10 rating as quickly as I did and then never have that sentiment challenged for the remainder of the game though. But, well, Stellar Blade delivered. That 30 second teaser clip of an anime girl’s ass became a sci-fi RPG for the ages.