8-Colors Star Guardians +

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

8-Colors Star Guardians + is a Turn-Based JRPG released in 2023 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game puts players in charge of a 5-member team of Super Sentai-style superheroes (along similar lines as the Power Rangers) who must contend with 8 monsters currently attacking different spots in the city.

The “8-Colors” in the title is a reference to this game’s visuals, which use retro-style 2D pixel art visuals with only 8 colors on a black background, with these visuals backed by a decent chiptune soundtrack. If Power Rangers had been around during the MS-DOS days and RPGs were as popular then as they are now, I could see a game like this existing at that time.

Rather than wandering through hordes of smaller enemies or going from town to town, all of this game’s battles play out like a boss rush where you select who to fight via a Mega Man-style stage select screen. And while there are five characters on your team, you’ll only be able to fight with three of them at a time, at least at first. With each character having their own special moves, you’ll need to be shrewd about who you bring into each battle and how best to put them to use, though later in the game you’ll bring all five team members into battle, presumably by this point knowing how best to use all of them.

The problem is that 8-Colors Star Guardians + spends little time explaining to players how its game mechanics work, and figuring out these abilities can sometimes require some trial and error to figure out just how to use them effectively. It doesn’t help that much of this information is conveyed via team chatter that you can’t reference again after you’ve gotten past that point in the story.

Speaking of team chatter, this is almost exclusively how you’ll be getting all of the game’s story, before and after each fight as your teammates squabble among each other. This is all delivered in medias res, meaning that you have no real introduction to any of these characters. And while everyone seems to have a pretty well-established personality, this feels very much like jumping into a TV show ten minutes into its season one finale – you can’t help but feel like you missed out on a lot of important story you can only partly glean from the characters’ dialogue.

Overall, 8-Colors Star Guardians + has a lot of personality and charm, and I can definitely see this being a clever and ambitious approach to the genre. It’s only a few hours long, but for $5 that’s easily forgivable. However, what’s harder to forgive is the truncated storytelling and how poor it is at conveying information to the player. This feels like it was cut from a larger game, and without that framework, this feels like an incomplete product that’s difficult to recommend.

tl;dr – 8-Colors Star Guardians + is a Turn-Based JRPG with a Super Sentai-style theme and a “boss rush” structure. There are some clever ideas here, and a lot of personality, but the way this game skips important parts of the story’s framework and doesn’t explain mechanics very well really hurts this game and makes it hard to recommend.

Grade: C-

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