Hoshi wo Miru Hito

Developed in 1987 for the Famicom by Another (developers behind The Black Bass) and published by Hot-B, this game involves four kids with ESP powers who must stop a computer which went insane and now threatens the world. These four are very decent main characters in the game, plus they have really good character designs too. Their battle sprites also change depending on their experience level, which is a pretty unique mechanic. So you can nowadays balance the game, improve its graphics and story, add some clever puzzles, and that's what you have to like about it? Unfortunately, that's where it abruptly comes to an end because this game is very well known for how bad it is.

Although the game is supposed to have a dystopian cyberpunk theme, you wouldn't notice just by playing the game because of how primitive the graphics are. The graphics are fugly and the soundtrack is ear-bleeding, even by 1987 standards. It is often difficult to make out what the textures are supposed to represent, and each screen just uses the same handful of tiles over and over again.

Speaking of tiles, some of them can poison you if you step on them, but the game will not warn you about this, meaning that you can die in matter of seconds for no apparent reason. In fact the gameplay is incredibly slow since it takes seconds to move from one tile to another. Some tiles can be jumped over after obtaining a specific ability, but which ones you can is totally unclear.

Towns and dungeons are invisible on the map. Treasure chests are also invisible. What's worse is that whenever you leave a town or dungeon, you're teleported back to the beginning of the game for no reason. The game also has no save feature and uses passwords, but whenever you restart a game your level is reset to 0. You actually start the game at Level 0, meaning you can barely do any damage at the beginning, and you can't even run away from battles.

The difficulty is unbalanced to the point that enemies at the beginning of the game go from overpowered to dying in a single hit after leveling up only a couple of times, only for the enemies in the next area to be overpowered all over again. During battles the last digit of your character's hit points is not shown. For example if it says that your character has 10 hit points that means they have anywhere from 100 to 109 hit points remaining. There's also no option to cancel during battle, meaning if you accidentally select the wrong option in the menu, there's no way to go back.

When you buy new equipment for one of your characters, the currently equipped item is automatically discarded, and there is no way to know if the new item will be better than the previous one. In addition items cannot be transferred between characters, and key items disappear after a single use, so if you need the item more than once you will have to buy another, which always cost a ridiculous amount of money, this and the level up problem is because the game saves the money in pack of 256, and the levels in packs of 4, for example if you save while being on level 5 the password that you will be given will start you at level 4, the same with the money (but with 256) and the items.

There's a ridiculous plot twist in the ending (although it may be a redeeming factor for some). Worse, the final boss was not programmed into the game. If you make the decision to fight, you immediately are skipped to a bad ending screen saying that you lost the battle.

There is a password system, but it is a complete disaster, since it uses a strange mix of the katakana alphabet and Latin characters.

The more I think about it, the worse this game is. It's lacking everything you'd expect and it's just about as boring as a middle-school science class.