About halfway into “Stellar Blade,” the lead character Eve encounters an enemy and fights it. The enemy, towering a foot or so above Eve, spurts out one black wing and uses a long blade.
The enemy visually looks, attacks, and moves similar to Sephiroth, the antagonist of another franchise called “Final Fantasy VII.” After dying a few times, the player, Eve, eventually beats the enemy.
The reason I brought up “Stellar Blade” cribbing off another game is because it happens a lot. Much of “Stellar Blade” is inspired by elements from other popular games. Its entire skeletal premise is similar to “Nier: Automata.”
From the heavens
In Shift Up’s “Stellar Blade,” Earth is a dying wasteland primarily occupied by monstrous creatures called the Naytiba. After losing against the monsters in what is called the Final War a long time ago, most of humanity escaped into space and created the colony, an off-world station.
During the years that followed, the colony would repeatedly send its android soldiers, called Angels, down to Earth to fight losing skirmishes against the Naytiba. The game’s events start with the colony sending its seventh Airborne Squad on yet another one of these missions.
From the get-go, the mission is a failure, as the various space shuttles carrying the Angels are attacked mid-flight and land on the planet in fiery crashes.
Players take control of Eve, one of the survivors, as she and her comrade Tachy are attacked by an Alpha Naytiba, separating them. Eve is then rescued by Adam, one of the survivors living on the dying planet.
“Stellar Blade” then starts properly, with Eve setting off to complete her primary mission from the colony while helping Adam and Xion, the last human city on Earth.
Accessible, fun, and not difficult
As much as “Stellar Blade” was marketed as a “Souls-like” game, it is more like that “Well yes, but no” meme. The game does have elements from games like “Dark Souls,” such as checkpoints that refill health canisters while simultaneously respawning enemies and split-second parrying and counter-attack punishments.
That is about where it stops, as the game leans more in the “Devil May Cry” and “Nier: Automata” direction instead of being a story-focused game with flashy action and characters. The only real problem with “Stellar Blade” is that it does not commit to the difficulty of these games, but I’ll get to this later.
The game does introduce small elements that add variety beyond just parrying and attacking enemies with light-heavy combo attacks. Several hours into the game, players will be able to unlock abilities on their Eve, which will introduce different combat strategies, like the ability to “flash” dodge around enemies and leap backwards to evade attacks.
These are welcome additions, but the issue that makes these gameplay elements pointless is how easy “Stellar Blade” is. As varied as the regular enemies are, they can be powered through relatively easily in the game’s “Normal Mode.”
Then there are the bosses, who are somehow easier than the regular enemies, and most of them are not aggressive enough to keep the tempo up in battle. In one encounter I had with a boss inside a circular arena, the boss, an Alpha Naytiba, just circled my Eve without attacking for as long as 10 to 20 seconds.
As fun and tight as the combat is, several hours into the game, the dents start to show. The skill tree is just a way to introduce new moves but has no significant bearing on the overall gameplay. For an action game like this, there is no variety in the weapons beyond Eve’s hairpin that transforms into a sword and a drone that transforms into a gun.
Due to only having two weapons, there are no combat styles, as both are used the same way for the same thing in every fight. There is also the issue of custom-building Eve through different gears, but there is no depth here other than using the biggest number of gears.
These are all reasons why the game can’t be played with the big boys in the Souls-like mixed martial arts cage because its difficulty is akin to a sandbox for children.
Missed a few marks, but solid nonetheless
From the tight clothing that heavily emphasizes her feminine figure to how Eve’s porcelain-perfect face looks like that of a 15-year-old girl’s face, the outrage before and after the game’s release seems largely unwarranted due to how harmless it all is in the grand scheme of “Stellar Blade.”
Though Eve and the rest of the good-looking cast have their sex appeal turned up to eleven, the game is very sexless and tame. “Stellar Blade” does not push the envelope, or push anything, beyond the eye candy of its characters, and maybe that’s just another small shortcoming with the game.
It sprints up the hill in its skin-tight suit but stops short of reaching the peak and flashing the world with anything more than superficial fan service. That said, from a purely barebones gameplay perspective, Shift Up’s jump from a mobile game to a console debut like “Stellar Blade” is impressive.
“Stellar Blade” is available exclusively on the PlayStation 5.
