Past meets present: Star Luster

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

In some ways, sure, Star Luster isn’t that innovative, in the sense that it’s pretty much Star Raiders again, nearly six years later. That’s really flattening things, however, in kind of the same way saying why did anyone bother making Kirby’s Adventure when we already had Super Mario Bros. would be. Namco’s take on a space combat simulator owes a tremendous debt to Atari’s Star Raiders, and there’s no way to tell this story without acknowledging that. However, it also came out on more powerful hardware while being able to build on the impressive foundation of its forebear, which all led to a game that critics mostly deemed confusing and difficult to grasp.

Is Star Luster confusing and difficult to grasp? Well, maybe in 1985 it was, but consider that when its similar-enough sequel Star Ixiom released on the Playstation 15 years later, it was criticized for being too simple. Star Luster was more ahead of its time than anything; it picked up the baton after Star Raiders so lovingly placed it on the track, and it ran with it. It’s not really its fault that a bunch of people couldn’t understand just where it was running to with it in hand.

As I put it when writing about Star Raiders a couple of years back:

The difference between Star Raiders and the game it inspired isn’t quite that stark, but instead of part of the difference between the two games being a defined little guy vs. a large pixel square, here you’ve got “game that runs smoothly” vs. “game that does not do that.” If Star Luster was ahead of its time, Star Raiders needs its own kind of description that gives us the exponential version of that idea.

Atari’s array of 8-bit hardware was the home of Star Raiders, but that’s because of who developed it and the available technology of 1980. As an ambitious first-person space combat simulator using an early version of a faux 3D that would still be in place when id got moving on Wolfenstein 3D, with a number of ship systems to keep an eye on and an ever-shifting galactic battlefield, it was very much a fish that had outgrown its tank. Consider that Star Raiders slowed to a crawl whenever you did… basically anything. Fired too many shots? Blew something up? Oh boy I hope you like single-digit frames per second, because you are going to get them, even on the later Atari 5200 release of the game:

Compare all of that to the smoothness of Star Luster’s gameplay:

Now, does that difference take away from what Star Raiders did, or its legacy, or how it inspired a generation of developers and created a genre? Not at all! You’re reading someone who has defended Perfect Dark for 25 years now. Star Raiders accomplished all of that in spite of these performance issues, because it was so ahead of the curve that you couldn’t help but look at it and be wowed, slowdown be damned. Star Luster arrived on the scene on hardware that could handle the ambition of Star Raiders. While Star Raiders might not have played like the developers hoped it would until it got the Atari 50 enhanced and overclocked treatment courtesy of Digital Eclipse, Star Luster had Namco in 1985, and it had the Famicom.

Star Raiders directly inspired Star Luster, as well as Elite and Wing Commander, but Star Luster has its own family tree, too. The funny thing is that some of this has only somewhat recently been revealed, for reasons that will become clear in a hurry: Star Luster had only released in Japan until the late-spring of 2024, when the Nintendo VS. edition of the game launched worldwide on Switch and Playstation 4 via Arcade Archives. Before that, the best you could do was using a Japanese Switch account to download it from the digital storefront for the Namcot Collection, which is Japan’s version of Namco Museum Archives, and, unlike that worldwide release, it includes Star Luster as an option.

It was included in a Japan-only collection of Famicom console titles released for the Playstation, alongside some updated versions of those games that leveraged the 32-bit hardware. It was included in Star Fox Assault on the GameCube, but only the Japanese edition of it. That was both a nod to Star Fox’s own space combat, as well as the fact that Star Luster was a heavy inspiration for Star Fox 2… which remained unreleased until 2017, when Nintendo included it in the SNES Classic mini console, decades after canceling the completed project.

Argonaut Software’s Dylan Cuthbert explained in a history of Star Fox 2 how vital Star Luster was to that game’s change in gameplay from the original SNES title:

If Star Fox 2 had released, it’s possible that Namco would have thought a little sooner about bringing Star Luster back in some way, and to a global audience for the first time — maybe even just as an unlockable in Star Fox Assault worldwide instead of only in Japan. Star Fox 2 was shelved, though, since the 3D graphics of the SNES weren’t exactly on par with those of the Playstation or Saturn, and Shigeru Miyamoto was concerned that releasing the game at that point would damage the brand, as he explained in an Iwata Asks discussion years before Nintendo would release the game: “And other companies’ game consoles were using polygons all over the place, so we didn’t think we could catch up even if we stuck this expensive [Super FX Chip 2] in the cartridge, so we rethought it.”

That’s nearly getting off-topic, though; you get that there were multiple avenues from which the wider world could of learned about Namco’s little gem, so, back to Star Luster. This was the first of the Namcot — Namco’s console publishing line — games for the Famicom that, rather than being ports of popular arcade games brought over to the Famicom like Xevious, Dig Dug, and so on, was developed specifically for that home audience as an original production. Those arcade conversions had been massive successes for Namco to the point that they realized that the Famicom had a real future, and that Namco as a “third-party” company — a concept that didn’t quite exist yet as we know it today — made a ton of sense for them to continue that success. Making original games for the Famicom instead of just ports was part of that evolution of the business model for both parties.

Star Luster is set in the same universe as the underrated Bosconian, but as was the Namco way of the day, that doesn’t mean this “sequel” is anything like Bosconian at all. Sure, you’ve got some similar enemy shapes and designs and that fit together and all, but that was a top-down multidirectional shooter where you fired out the front and back of your ship simultaneously, and did so in eight directions, with a heavy emphasis on rank guiding the gameplay and your decision-making.

Just like in Star Raiders, in Star Luster, you’ve got a first-person, pseudo 3D view of space from your cockpit, and you need to concern yourself with your energy levels. Protecting bases scattered around the star system is necessary in order for you to refill your energy, which depletes with every action you take — warping, firing your weapons, taking damage, or local travel via your thrusters. Your ship, the Gaia, also has a shield: if you take damage while your shields are down, that’s game, but they do refill over time. That is, unless your shield systems are damaged. You’ll notice on the left of your cockpit are Energy and Shield indicators, and on the right, RAD, COM, and ENG, which stand for radar, combat computer, and energy core, respectively.

What Bosconian and Star Luster are more connected by than a shared universe is the emphasis on radar. In Bosconian, you use the radar to find where on the map your foes are, and to check the alert level of the enemy Bosconian forces, which will also let you know what kind of enemy ships and formations you can expect to encounter as you approach the various space stations you need to destroy. In Star Luster, rather than traveling around one map at a time until you clear it out, you’ve got a radar that details what different regions of space are full of, and where the ever-encroaching Batturan enemy fleets are traveling to. Rather than constantly being in motion, a la Bosconian, you’re instead warping from region to region, defending bases and planets and preemptively wiping out enemy wings whenever you’ve got the chance to do so without sacrificing one of those other two destinations in the process.

Your RAD, COM, and ENG are displayed with a status, which, if everything is normal, will read as “OK”. Each of those has a dual function, and if one of those functions has been taken out by enemy fire, the readout will change to “DA” for “damaged”. If both functions are down, you’ll see "NG,” which, in very technical terms, means “no good”. The radar shows you enemy positions in local space, so you can see where you need to point the nose of the Gaia to head towards them, and it also serves to show you the larger galactic map, which will update in real time. Losing either of those functions is a problem, but the second one, especially, since you can’t figure out where a base to get your radar (or anything else) repaired is if you can’t see it on the map.

The combat computer has an aim-assist crosshair that allows you to lead your shots to enemies that aren’t directly in front of your ship, as well as controls your ability to fire long-range photon torpedoes. Losing the aim-assist doesn’t make the game impossible, but it does make it much more difficult because of the way you have to move your ship in reaction to the enemy fire: you’re basically dodging and weaving to avoid the shots fired right at you, which you can do while also maintaining a lock on your foes to a degree in order to return fire while you are constantly in motion. If you can’t do that, then things get much more difficult. Similarly, the lack of torpedoes won’t entirely doom you, but it’ll make the game significantly more difficult: torpedoes are fired at enemies that aren’t in the same region of space you are. So, for instance, if you see two bases under attack at the same time, and know that in the time it takes you to travel and defeat one of the enemy wings that one base will be lost, you can choose to fire a volley of photon torpedoes at one of them to severely weaken one force, and buy yourself some time to save both bases. You have a limited number of torpedoes available, though, if you get lucky sometimes — and luck is what it takes — those will refill at a base when you refuel. But you won’t know if it’s the base that does this until it happens.

Last, there’s the energy core, which powers the Gaia’s shields and allows them to recharge, and allow you to use the full range of your thrusters. Without shields, your ship explodes and you lose, and without max thrusters, you’re going to be moving through space real slow. Given this is a race against time to save as much of this star system as you can before it’s all destroyed, that would be a real problem.

You’ll spend your time in-game split between Combat Mode and Galactic Map Mode. Combat Mode is exactly what it sounds like, in that it’s when you’ll be flying around as a space fighter taking down enemies, using your thrusters, and observing your local radar. Galactic Map mode is how you see where enemies, bases, planets, and so on are relative to your position in space, and how you’ll choose where to warp to. It’s also where you can fire off your photon torpedoes, assuming you have any in stock. You can switch between the two modes at any time with the select button, which also means you can bail on a particular engagement to go somewhere more high priority — if you’ve sufficiently weakened an enemy wing, for instance, but then hear an alert that a planet is under attack, you might want to come back and mop them up later after taking care of the other, larger threat first.

There are three difficulty levels in Star Luster, named Training, Command, and Adventure. Those sound more like game modes, which also isn’t far from the truth. Training strips away most of the complexity of Star Luster and makes the game seem a little boring, but that’s because it’s familiarizing you with the way the game’s two main systems, Combat Mode, and Galactic Map Mode, work, without any of the real pressures of those system in place. Enemies are easier and less numerous, and you don’t need to worry about bases or planets or asteroid fields like you do in Command, which includes all of those things as well as more enemies, or collecting the planet keys, which is an Adventure-exclusive thing that kind of changes how the game works in its final form.

Your game start is randomized, so you might very well load up a round of Adventure, look at the map, and go “nah” because things start out with bases and planets and such already basically overwhelmed, and you too far away to save them all. You can always randomize again, at least, until you get something more palatable — you’re never going to roll an “easy” map on Adventure or anything, so don’t feel like you’re cheating by doing this. The more you play, the more you’ll recognize that there are some maps that are just going to be basically impossible to win unless you’re a master of the game.

Here’s what the start screen looks like for the three different difficulties — that map fills up in a hurry:

In Training, all you’ve got are bases and enemies. There are just four enemies here at the start — labeled as “E” on the map. While those are actually representative of an entire wing of enemies and not a single foe, it’s still not all that many to take on, and you’ll win so long as both bases aren’t destroyed before the Batturan ships are.

Command adds in asteroid fields and planets, as well as more foes, both in terms of wings as well as how many are contained within each wing. You have more bases you can travel to, but that also means you have more bases to defend. The asterisks are planets, while the asteroid fields are those slashes. You don’t want to travel to asteroid fields, since there’s nothing there for you and they aren’t worth any points, either, but they do represent a portion of the map that your enemies can’t go through. So, keep their position and the enemy’s relative position to them in mind when making decisions about the paths they might be taking while you’re warping around space and fighting other wings. While planets are included in Command mode and saving them does score you points — twice as many as bases do — their survival isn’t required here.

And last you’ve got Adventure mode, which, in this instance, includes 26 different items on the Galactic Map compared to Command mode’s 20 and Training’s six. Here, the planets mean something beyond just points, if you want to get the game’s true ending. You can simply defeat all of the enemy squadrons before they destroy your bases and planets and achieve victory that way, or, you can go to the seven non-Earth planets, receive their respective planet key, bring those keys to Earth, and reveal the location of a hidden planet. Once you warp to that hidden planet, a final battle begins, and it’s a doozy, since the game keeps launching the toughest foes, Disruptors, against you. Eventually, you can find the actual dark planet here while you’re not fighting for your life quite as aggressively, but it’s also going to fire at you. You’ll have to do all of the moving around and dodging here, since the planet is stationary, but if you manage to defeat it, then you’ve completed Star Luster for real. This is no simple task — even defeating Adventure mode just by clearing out the enemy squadrons you can see on the map is a challenge, and going after the hidden dark planet is significantly tougher even just in terms of unlocking it on your map, never mind surviving that battle.

To help you along the way, you can find upgrades for the Gaia. There are a couple of secret ones hidden in asteroid fields in Adventure mode — one temporarily slows down all enemy ships, and another restores any damaged planets back to full health — that might be worth seeking out if you’re desperate, since they do take quite a bit of time to locate. In Command and Adventure modes, you’ll more likely want to focus on getting the power-ups for your beam attack, shields, and reactor, which make you stronger, increase your defense, and make your energy expenditures more efficient, respectively. You receive these upgrades by visiting the bases to refuel, but, like with the photon torpedo refuel, it’s unclear which base will give you which before it happens. To dock with a base, you line it up in your sights, then stop the Gaia once you see a message that says “BASE LOCKED ON” on your screen. A small ship will come out and interact with you, refueling and upgrading your ship, though, the latter only happens the first time you make it to that base. You “dock” with planets similarly in Adventure mode in order to receive their keys.

Time moves forward in Star Luster constantly, and enemies move on the map after a set amount of time — when the in-game clock has counted off 50 on the star date, an action happens. So, enemies next to a base will then attack that base after the date jumps ahead another 50, and after another 50, if you do not defeat them, the base will then be destroyed. It all happens so much faster than you think it does. Which is why it might not feel like there’s all that much Star Luster to get through: what is here is going to take you a long time to master, because it expects a ton from you. Which is also why the scoring setup has such a varied list of results.

Your score is based on the actual points you get from defeating foes, plus bonuses for remaining bases, planets, minus the time it took to complete a round, divided by how much energy you used (with an additional and massive bonus for defeating the dark planet in Adventure mode). Your ranking ranges from “Marshal of Force Paragon” if you’re essentially the most efficient and perfect you can possibly be, down to, 40 ranks later, “Cadet Wang.” No, I am not making that up, the game calls you a wang if you somehow manage to score negative points. You probably want something more in a “Hawk” or “Pegasus” or “Gilgamesh” instead of “Wang” or “Mosquito,” you know?

Star Luster received mixed reviews when it released, but, retrospectively, it’s considered both an impressive and important work, with it being listed as one of the “masterpieces” of the Famicom in a feature Yuge ran in 2003, and in a 20th anniversary retrospective at Continue, it was listed among the top 100 games for the system, which is no small thing for a console with nearly 1,400 of the things. Star Luster is responsible for the direction of Star Fox 2, and Castlevania mainstay Koji Igarashi listed it as his second-favorite game for the Famicom — behind Castlevania, naturally, and two spots ahead of The Legend of Zelda — in a 2005 retrospective of the NES in Play magazine. And despite all of this — and despite the entirety of the game being in English already — it just never got around to releasing internationally, even if certain people with excellent taste posted about the game regularly or wrote about how much you need to check it out at outlets like Paste. That’s finally changed now, however, since you can snag the VS. System edition via Arcade Archives, or, again, go the more convoluted (but previously only) route of buying it through Namcot Collection with a Japanese Switch account. You should: some of the presentation might show its age at this point 40 years on, but the general gameplay can still challenge and astound four decades on.

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