Mega Man Star Force: Pegasus
Year: 2007
Rating: E
Time Played: 17.30 hours
I have fond memories of playing the Mega Man Battle Network games in high school. I liked the RPG/Action/Card mechanics of this series and always wanted more. When the pseudo-spin-off series, Mega Man Star Force, arrived on the Nintendo DS, it seemed like a good evolution of the formula. However, I resisted buying a DS for so long that eventually, I had to come back and play these games a decade after they came out. With this amount of hindsight, I don’t know if I was viewing a series I never played through nostalgia or the evolved gaming landscape of today.
Since I had watched the anime based on these games, I was already familiar with the basic story and plot structure. Additionally, not much had changed since the Battle Network games, other than a slight perspective shift and some modifications to the chip system. Even with this familiarity, I found myself stuck and backtracking through areas far more often than I would have liked. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention to the cues the NPCs were giving me, but plenty of moments didn’t feel intuitive or were just plain tedious to accomplish.
It’s also unfortunate that certain aspects of the chip system from Battle Network didn’t transfer over into the Star Force games. One of the strategies of building a strong chip deck was to factor in which chips could trigger combination attacks, which were powerful game-changing techniques that often saw me through plenty of fierce battles. Star Force didn’t have this combo potential, so there wasn’t much strategy other than including whatever most powerful chips I had at my disposal. Despite all this, Star Force still satisfied my itch for another Battle Network-like game even if it felt like a step backward.
A slight step backward from the Battle Network games, I give Mega Man Star Force: Pegasus 3.0 stars out of 5.
