One of the interesting quirks of playing a fuckton of RPG Maker games is how intimate I've gotten with the quirks of various different developers that nobody else knows about. Segawa's END ROLL was the game that kickstarted my RPG Maker game marathon. It wasn't an amazing game by any means, but was incredibly breezy with so many fun little events to constantly be doing. Now 14 games into it, it felt very comfortable coming back to this style in their next game, Walking on Star Unknown.

The whole game is about helping people out and making connections with them, wandering the unknown world, and discovering new things around every corner. Much like its predecessor, you spend the bulk of your time going through each location, doing bite-sized task after bite-sized task. Almost everything outside of each day's fairly short questline is completely optional, but there's a lot of joy in walking around finding out everything there is to do each in-game day. This was definitely tightened up a bit from End Roll; this time I only had to consult a guide for one or two things total and saw the vast majority of the game's content. The fast travel system is pretty ridiculous considering how densely packed the world is, with some fast travel points being mere seconds apart from each other. It's not an issue, but the overkill is reall funny.

A big improvement from End Roll: the music! It was one of the most frustrating issues of that game, with a lot of short tracks that looped very badly (looking at you beach festival theme). What was here wasn't particularly stand-out, but it was generally nice and the looping issue was entirely fixed! The graphics are, well, about the game. They're nice, they work, the character designs are pretty fun, can't really complain!

The characters and world are really this game's core, always a joy to experience. The friendship system with the main 12 NPCs is fleshed out and paced well enough that it pulls off the all-too-hard-to-pull-off feeling of building up a rapport with the characters, despite the time between meeting these characters and finishing the game being fairly short both in-universe and playtime-wise. I appreciated the variety of ways you built up this friendship: sometimes giving them various food items, partaking in multi-staged sidequests, or even just talking to them.

Every character and area has a nice little story to it I appreciated, and the world felt like it had a thematic history to it. When streaming the game to my partner, there were several areas I went to that made me explain what exactly was up with the place, and they're all pretty interesting explanations! The casual macabre vibes tucked throughout the world were super interesting. Most of the game is fairly lighthearted, but there's a surprising number of locations where you interact with something and the vibes degrade instantly as you learn about a dark part of the world's history. I guess their last game was a horror game.

Getting towards the ending, there were a lot of particularly sweet sidequests capping off character storylines, and via them I realized the game has a really nice thematic throughline of our connections with others in a temporal life. Whether it be about grieving for the dead, making friendships before leaving a planet, or even what happens to a god if the everyone who worships them passes; the game talks about a lot of interesting ideas in this space. With its bite-sized approach to each event, it never lingers on any of these ideas much or makes any profound statements about them, but felt really nice to experience these things in spite of that. Just short of being something really special, but a wonderful little game that I came out of impressed and extremely satisfied.