I remember watching the PlayStation showcase when Stellar Blade was announced in 2022 and thinking it looked like a cross between Bayonetta and Nier Automata and being incredibly excited about it. I’m not particularly good at them, but I love character action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, and Nier Automata is one of my favourite video game stories ever.
As Stellar Blade’s release grew closer a demo was released, and I heard that the combat was more similar to something like Sekiro, with a high focus on parrying and tough bosses. This wasn’t a negative in my book as I like those types of games too but I was alarmed by how much focus seemed to be placed on the main character’s appearance, rather than how fun the game was to actually play. I decided not to buy the game on day one and waited to see what the overall reception was, and when I saw it was positive, I grabbed the game the Saturday after release, and after looking through the trophy list decided to try and make it my 249th Platinum Trophy. So how good was Stellar Blade, was it all looks and no substance as I feared it might have been, how difficult was the Platinum in a game that had drawn comparisons to Sekiro? Let’s find out.
Stellar Blade is an action RPG, its combat-focused gameplay sitting somewhere between Nier and Sekiro. You play as Eve, a woman sent to Earth to battle horrific monsters called Naytiba, and you spend the majority of the game fighting your way through these creatures.
Offensively, you have many options, you have a few basic melee combos you can do, achieved by different combinations of the light and heavy attack buttons. This is similar to Nier Automata’s melee combat, which is good but I was disappointed that combos weren’t as free-form or expressive as something like Bayonetta. I know this was an expectation I mistakenly had from the trailer, but it would have been nice for the basic combat options to be a bit more interesting. Thankfully though you do have a range of other abilities to thread in between your basic combos in a similar fashion to something like FF16. As you progress you unlock Beta Skills and Burst Skills. These are activated by pressing one of the shoulder buttons, and one of the face buttons. These skills are quick, and fun to use with each having different use cases, like L1 and X, which is a beta skill that helps you break through enemy shields, whereas L1 and triangle is a nice AOE skill to give you some space if you get surrounded. These skills have a cost though, with both Beta and Burst having their own meter that you need to manage. These two meters recharge in different ways too which I found a really interesting decision. The Beta meter recharges as you deal and take damage, and offers less powerful but more consistent usage of skills in return. The burst meter, however, is recharged by perfect defensive actions.
Defensively you have two main options, Dodging and Blocking. This is where Sekiro’s influence comes in, when you block at the right moment you do a parry, and this has multiple pretty great benefits. If you manage to parry the last hit of an enemy combo, it will leave them a little bit staggered for half a second, giving you a chance to begin your counterattack, which is great but more importantly, most enemies have a stagger bar under their health and shield bars. This depletes by one for every parry you successfully do, and when the parry bar is empty, you can do a massively damaging Retribution attack, this almost always insta-kills regular enemies too. This always feels fun to pull off, and each enemy type is different, some having large stagger bars that make you feel like you are wearing the enemy down slowly, while otherwise might take 2 or three parries before they are dead.
Dodging has a similar mechanic too, if you dodge at the right time the world slows down and glows red a bit, and a few counter-attacking options become open to you if you have unlocked them.
As you progress through the game, the enemies will start to throw moves at you that have to be dealt with a certain way. If the enemy glows yellow, it signifies an unblockable move that you will need to dodge away from, if the glow is red, it is a move that can only be parried but not blocked. You unlock other skills too, one gives you a chance to dodge behind an enemy at the perfect moment, stunning them for a few seconds when they glow blue and another makes them glow purple and lets you do a repulsive counter, which reveals a weak point you can shoot with your little gun droid for some nice extra damage. All of these also charge the burst meter I mentioned earlier so even with the base combos being quite basic, the flow of combat feels really good, switching between dodges, blocks and parries before launching your counterattack.
It all looks great too. Graphically the game is really good, and the enemy designs are great, with a few exceptions. Bosses all have some cool designs and are fun to fight, and the game introduces interesting boss mechanics all the way up to the very end of the game, which I liked. Most of the areas you visit and fight your way through are interesting and impressive visually, however a lot of them so feel repetitive. There are two areas you go to, around the midpoint of the game that look and feel exactly the same. I think this was probably intentional as they are both sealed-off research facilities, but with a few variations, it felt like I was doing the same part of the game twice. They had the same gimmick where you can only use your gun, the same boss at the end of it, the same enemies inside and it felt, very boring to go through these bits. There are also two large open areas you can go to, that I wish felt more different. One is a large brown-coloured wasteland filled with junk, and the other is a great desert, filled with ruins and junk. If you are going for trophies, you will be spending a lot of time in these areas looking for the hundreds of boxes and notes here, and I wish they had made them more different and varied. And I know they can because some of the areas are great. The first area you go to Eidos 7, is a cool overgrown abandoned city that changes as you move through it, tall cramped streets turn into a flooded plaza which turns into a construction site that leads to sewers, a full journey and experience of the city that I enjoyed, and there are other areas like this too. It just felt like a shame that the games swung so wildly in the quality of their locations.
One place where the quality of the game is pretty constantly low though, is the game’s story and characters. When a game, claims to be inspired by Nier Automata, I hope the story will come close to exploring the same themes or emotions that the original work does. Stellar Blade, I think sometimes reaches for this, but it gets nowhere close. Most of this is just because the story felt like an interesting idea, but badly executed. The premise is this, Eve is sent to Earth as part of an army to retake Earth from the Naytiba, a monstrous race of creatures that have been at war with humanity, and forced the humans to abandon Earth. Upon landing on Earth though, Eve finds herself the last survivor of the attack and is rescued by a man named Adam, who reveals to her there is a city of survivors called Xion, led by a man named Orcal, who can help her find the Elder Naytiba, and if she kills them, they will win the war.
It is not a bad premise at all, even if it does take its matrix inspiration a bit too far, and honestly, it felt the same as the premise of Nier Automata, so I was on board but the issue is the characters. They don’t sell the story, there’s no emotion to it, even when characters die. It felt like the actors had been told to just read their lines without context. I couldn’t even really tell what Eve’s personality is beyond “I have a job and its to save the earth and help people”. This is venturing into spoiler territory but even when the game tries to raise questions about the mission and what it all means, the characters barely react, it’s always “we still don’t know enough” or “it doesn’t matter”.
In most games in this genre, where you play as a set character, the best ones have a personality that is meant to carry the story of the game along. Even in games where the story isn’t meant to be the appeal, it falls on the character to elevate the game and make it memorable. The wolf’s devotion and sense of duty to Kuro in Sekiro, Dante’s woohoo whacky pizza man antics in Devil May Cry and Bayonetta’s dommy mommy persona, all do so much heavy lifting in making their games more than just fun combat systems. Eve does none of these things. She’s practically a blank slate that just says yes to everything, and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of development or desire. This might be intentional, as the game wants her to just be a jiggling doll that the player can dress up in the impressive number of outfits you can unlock for her, ranging from cute office outfits to robot-stripper.
This overall is why I found a lot of Stellar Blade to be disappointing. There is so much in the game that is actually good, like some of the environmental puzzles and the way the game mixes them up so they never become boring, but most of these are hidden in large samey looking areas where you have to go looking for them. There are the bones of a decent story and sometimes they do reveal themselves but most of the time, they are hidden under stilted dialogue and emotionless delivery, and despite me having a great time with the combat, this is my overall feeling of Stellar Blade, it just doesn’t do enough to make itself stand out.
The trophy list for Stellar Blade isn’t so bad. It took me around 50 hours and requires two playthroughs with some save backup shenanigans. There are three endings to Stellar Blade each with their own trophy, and two of them depend on how much side questing you have done so can’t be earned on the same playthrough.
At the end of the game, you are given a choice, with each choice leading to a different ending and a boss fight. You can either accept or reject this choice. Rejecting it leads to one ending, whereas accepting it will lead to one of two endings depending on Lily’s affinity.
When playing through the game and doing sidequests, every so often a bar will appear in the top left of the screen with Lily’s face. If this bar reaches 100%, you will unlock an extra area of the game to travel to, called Eidos 9. You have to get the bar to 100% before heading to Spire-4 which is around 75% through the game, and the point of no return. Adam will say something to this effect before you leave as an extra warning. The ending you receive when you accept the final choice will differ depending on whether you went to Eidos-9 or not.
Other than the three ending trophies, and the trophies for each unique boss, Stellar Blade is mostly a collectathon. There are over 600 things to collect in the game, spread out across various types. Luckily you don’t need to collect all of them, just most of them. The majority of these are found in the crates you find dotted around the world. You need to open at least 200 of these crates for “Box Hunter”
You need 30 out of 37 outfits for “Nano Suit Collector” Most of these are in the crates, but some can be bought from vendors, or are sidequest rewards. You also need to find at least 200 memory sticks for “Records Collector”. These are from random bodies that are everywhere, there are 321 of these in total so you can miss quite a few, however, some of them do have passcodes you will need for opening doors or crates. There are also 49 cans of drink you will need to collect for “Can Collector”. Some of these are very well hidden, or locked inside crates as well. These offer useful rewards as you reach certain collection milestones, like carrying more bombs or revival items, and one of the outfits for collecting them all.
There is a fishing minigame you unlock in the desert, and you need to catch 20 out of 25 fish for “Lonely Fisherman”. There are also a few things you do need to find 100% of in the game, like all 91 camps for “Meticulous explorer”, and have killed at least one of each enemy type for “Naytiba Researcher”.
You also need to fully upgrade your Health, Beta Energy, Health Tumblers and your Weapon, and upgrade 10 of the Exospines you can find to the maximum. You also need to learn every skill in the skill tree. Weapon Upgrades drop from bosses, the Exospines can be found in the many crates around the world. Health and Beta upgrades are hidden on bodies and Health Tumbler upgrades can be found on little drones that need to be killed to drop them.
It is a lot of stuff to keep on top of, and I would recommend using a guide if you are doing a collectable run. The bulk of the game’s time is spent looking for these, as you spend hours running around the desert and wasteland areas every nook and cranny looking for boxes or drones.
There are also quite a few combat-related trophies, but unless you are going out of your way to not use the mechanics they are not missable and you will have most of them by the end of your first playthrough. They involve doing a number of perfect dodges, parries and kills with burst and beta skills. The only ones you might need to pay attention to are using the limit break skill you unlock at halfway through the game to kill 50 enemies and execute 50 enemies. Executions are counted as Retribution kills, or by Ambush kills which is nice.
There are a lot of sidequests in Stellar Blade, and Request Board missions and while you will need to do most of these to get Lily’s affinity up to 100% there are a couple of quest lines that make up small stories that you need to make sure you complete.
One of these is for Digger, the small robot you can meet in the wasteland, if you fulfil the quests he gives you, you can unlock “Beep”. The second is for Kaya, the girl who runs the store called Sister’s Junk in Xion. You will meet her as part of the story but her quest involves looking for her sister. Completing all of her quests will get you the “Sisterly Love” trophy. This side quest is also needed for a secret boss that you need to beat for the Naytiba researcher trophy.
Lastly, there is Enya and Su’s questline. Enya is a singing robot that lives in a bar in Xion, there will be three quests involving these two, and the last one doesn’t unlock until you have finished Diggers questline. Once you have completed this last quest to visit an opera house, you will earn “Beyond Fate”.
Overall, the game isn’t that hard, despite its influences. The trophies are more of a slog collecting things than being hard in any real way, and on normal difficulty, most of the bosses were not too difficult. I also wish that skipping cutscenes was more consistently available in the game, especially on New Game Plus. You can skip some, but not all of the cutscenes, and some cutscenes that you can’t skip, you can mash X to skip through dialogue quicker but even this isn’t an option all the time. It’s actually quite annoying when you are trying to blitz through the game a second time.
Towards the end of the game, I found myself thinking a lot about another game that shares a lot of similarities with Stellar Blade. It is inspired by another of my favourite games and is an AA game with South Korean Devs. The Lies of P takes its inspiration and runs with it, doing its own thing, improving and changing until it became something all its own, and I loved that. It felt like Lies of P understood what made Bloodborne and the Souls genre so great and wrote a love letter to it.
With Stellar Blade, I honestly feel like they didn’t understand why people rave about Nier so much. It isn’t because of 2B’s arse, or Kaine’s outfit, although these things don’t hurt, it’s because of the questions it asks you in the way only a game can. Asking you to examine your actions and recontextualise the things the characters thought they knew. Stellar Blade tries to do the same thing, almost beat for beat but because of the way it’s delivered, with its flat characters and bad dialogue, it loses so much of that impact because it doesn’t make you believe that Eve, Adam or Lily care, so why should the player.
I think Stellar Blade is worth a shot maybe at a cheaper price, the gameplay is really good, and it looks fantastic, but it just wasn’t all that I wanted it to be, and it’s a shame because there are hints of what it could be just underneath the surface.
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