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 So Star of Life was this old RPG from the late '80s, partially riffing off of the RPG boom of the time.
The pretty basic story of this game is that you play as Question who has accidentally unleashed an ancient evil inside a milk can, and this evil entity, Schlera, has shattered the Star of Life into 6 pieces. The Star of Life is what helps power the Quiles (pronounced 'Que Isles') and, without it, the world will turn to ruin. So now Question has to collect all of the pieces before Schlera does or... I think he'll destroy the world? Of course, if you don't have the manual with you to explain all of that, you just start up in a field and you have to collect the 6 Star Pieces. Right in the action! A big difference between Star of Life and some of the other RPGs of the time was the hotch-potch of locations the Quiles had. You had a pretty urban city, close to it a jungle, an evil European-style castle, a rocky field with living "pet rocks", a ruined city home to robots, and yet somehow all of these locations were intertwined with eachother if you read all of the NPC dialogue. Like, the ruined city is where the people of the urban city used to live. The bad guy inside the castle is implied to have built the robots. The pet rocks are apparently quite ancient and helped build everything, including the stone golem protecting the jungle since ancient times. There's quite some depth to the madness. 
What also sets this game apart is how it handles battles. Y'see, the first area you're forced to visit is the jungle, where you meet Tribal and she joins your party. She's this sheltered lemur living in the jungle who doesn't like seeing people harming what's part of the cycle of life. The problem here is that most of the enemies you'll encounter are stuff like coyotes and spirits, who are a part of this cycle.
If you do let Question fight these enemies, then Tribal will just straight up refuse to listen to your commands, which is a pretty big deal as she's pretty powerful with her spear against bosses (who aren't part of the cycle of life by the way). The game gives her all of the powerful weapons, so you're pretty screwed if you get impatient. So, what you have to do in these fights is have Tribal pacify the enemies. The problem with that is that pacifying enemies takes up a few turns, so you have to let yourself get damaged by the animals before they fully pacify. This is where defenses and items come in, because you can dress up Question in a bunch of armor with high defenses. Only Question though. Not Tribal. So when she gets hurt, she'll have to be healed by Question. Tribal is the character most likely to be downed by enemies throughout your playthrough... And that seems to be done by design. In cutscenes, Tribal grows to trust Question, always saying that he's got her back when she's in pain, which reflects the gameplay loop the game puts you through. Even if you do hurt the animals, you'll still need to heal her frequently for her to damage the bosses (if she cooperates). It's pretty revolutionary gameplay-story integration at the time if I'm being honest. "How much are you willing to hurt eachother to work together", y'know? Most gamers don't really like constantly being in this near-fail state, so this was pretty panned on release. Later on, the 2000s were ruthless towards Tribal as a character because of that. Oh yeah. After the jungle area, you're free to explore any of the areas of the Quiles in any order. This is the '80s, so all of the areas are pretty tough equally, so there's not necessarily an 'easiest-hardest' order in completing the areas. Then again, most people do the rocky field first to get the Rock Spear which is a pretty powerful mid-game weapon to have when tackling the other areas. Tribal's weapons can be found in the wild, while Question's a city boy, so most of his armor must be bought in shops. All of the armor's already available at the start, but they're pretty pricey if you're just starting to play. So, unless you grind in the jungle for like 2 hours for cash to get the Thorny Helmet, you're expected to slowly accumulate cash as you climb from gear to gear. The ending is not really all that much to write home about for being an RPG for the NES. You defeat Schlera, get the final Star Piece, and the Star of Life is fixed and the world is all clean up.  As far as I could search, no follow-up to Star of Life happened. People did like the characters of Question and Tribal though. I think they appeared as spirits in Smash Ultimate, but as like one of those Spirit Board things. Question was Cloud. Because of the spiky hair looking like his quills. Tribal was a green Lucina I think 4/5 |
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