Densetsu No Starfy 4 (Nintendo DS) Review

Densetsu no Starfy (Legend Of Starfy) is a series about a little starfish's adventures, and is the only series that ninja developers Tose like to put their name to as a joint venture with Nintendo, otherwise choosing to cloak themselves and develop games in secret for others. By this, you'd expect the Starfy franchise to be good, good enough to give Tose the recognition it deserves, to make up for all the other accolades they may not have been given in the public eye for all their secrecy. Here's some good news: yes, it does. The Starfy series is an excellent set of platformers, and Starfy 4 is no exception.

The first thing that will strike you is possibly exactly the thing that prevents Nintendo from releasing the series over in the west - the looks. Simply put, it’s too darn cute; take the cutest Nintendo character you can currently think of (no, that would not be Wario) and up the adorability-meter (patent pending) by a few notches. Now you have Starfy. Served in a deliciously cartoony style, with a healthy dollop of colourful backdrops and garnished with fiendishly sweet little characters for extra taste (including the enemies), it’s possibly too rich for a market where guns and cars dominate as Nintendo tries to rid itself of its silly, mislabelled ‘kiddy image’. You might counter this with retorts of ‘Kirby!’, but there’s a difference here: Kirby came when Nintendo was still considered ‘cool’, and was accepted as part of the family with open arms, allowed to continue on with few people batting an eyelid at it. Starfy is a relatively new property, which happened to come along as Nintendo were taking an extended battering. Perhaps as the company begin to regain ground, they will stop ignoring Starfy and bring him over, especially with DS as popular as it is right now. Perhaps not – it’s difficult to know how our overlords work sometimes.

Anyway, ignore all the cuteness for a second. It's a gorgeous looking title and could even be considered to be one of the best lookers on the DS - well, 2D-wise, anyhow, especially on the sun-rivalling screen that is DS Lite’s. In addition to looking great in still form, it also has some of the greatest animation that we’ve seen, with exceptional attention to detail. We know that we said you should ignore the cuteness, but when you see Starfy flying about with a look of pure rapture upon his little yellow mug with his legs/arms/whatever starfish are supposed to have flapping about in the air in glee (and presumably helping with his gliding, too) you can’t help but let your heart melt for a split second, before you regain your composure and remember that you’re saying ‘awww’ to a handheld video games console.

While it's pleasant on the audio side, we know that what you really want to hear about is how the game plays. The Starfy series is quite unique in the platform genre in that part of the game takes place on land and behaves like a standard(ish) platformer, while the other half takes part in water. 'What's so unique about that?' you might cry. Well, while in other platformers it can be a chore to swim about, in Starfy it's the easiest thing in the world, perhaps even more so than the land-based sections. When you look at the character, it's obvious why: well, he's a starfish, isn't he? Rather than having to press action buttons constantly to keep afloat as in Mario, you can swim around freely and at a greater speed than you can walk. Across both environment types Starfy has a nice range of moves, from running, sliding, double jumping and spin-attacking on the surface, to boosting, spinning and drill attacking underwater. Starfy isn't the only 'star' (groan) of this game, though...

Starpy, Starfy's pink, hair-bowed little sister, makes a return from Densetsu No Starfy 3. Players never choose between the two characters, with the game forcing you to play as a specific fish on each level. On some levels you will actually end up controlling both, starting in different sections of the stage and progressing alternately (you switch by moving onto a special platform located at set points on both sides of the level.

Tose have done a good job with the game, being a very solid platformer indeed. There're some fun design elements, and the boss characters are excellent (the last battle, in particular, with a character that spreads all over the screen regularly, is brilliant). It might be best described as a combination of the Mario and Kirby series with some added fishy goodness. It also speaks volumes about good design too, being pretty much understandable to us despite being entirely in Japanese, a variety of images or facial expressions showing what needs to be done (though it is considerably more difficult in the second playthrough, where you have to find certain objects and enemies - and obviously we didn't understand all the dialogue, only a rudimentary understanding of what was going on). It wouldn't be entirely unfair to describe it as a game for children, as we assumed the role of the child unable to read while playing, and we still managed to get through it with ease. We also got quite a few laughs out of it, as the gist of some of the jokes are clearly shown in the characters' actions (they are all made harsh victims of unrequited love at some point throughout the story).