This game is the ABSOLUTE definition of wasted potential.

It has top-notch world-building, art and sound design. Even when I wasn't completely sold on the universe they built, I couldn't help but admire it. Even if there were holes in the lore, I was eager to learn more.

There are, however, inconsistencies in other departments. By inconsistencies, I mean utter failures. And those other departments are the story, the gameplay and the characters.

The one that, I could agree, is more up to debate, is the characters' department. There are plenty of reasons to love them. To me, however, they are actual psychopaths incapable of self evaluation most of the time. I STILL LIKE THEM, but their choices and lack of growth are nausating at best.

The gameplay and the story are far less redeemable. I liked the RNG elements, they were interesting and mostly non-intrusive. I enjoyed the resource management and the map exploration. I didn't mind missing items because of the RNG. I DREADED the 2D side-scrolling exploration because it was a "move to the right" snooze fest most of the time. There were some sections that were smart and creative but there were very few of those. The puzzles can't be called puzzles by any means. At all. So this leaves the gameplay side of the game in a very unbalanced position I'd say.

And the story. God darn it, the story. The only reason I didn't fully hate the story is because the characters are too damn likable. I guess it's not the story what I hate so much but the characters' motivations, which I find to be a cliche of a cliche. And that ending... what a waste.

However this is a remarkable game. It is truly outstanding that the game doesn't collapse by the weight of an awful narrative and poor gameplay decisions. It's just built on a very sturdy art direction. I just wish, when developing the game, they'd spent half of the time refinating the story instead of the lore.

You may not believe me but it took me more than 25 hours to beat. I explored everything there was in the map. I still liked my time with the game but I'm unsure about going back and playing the rest of the Opus series.

This game's focus is primarily its story, which is a very good and rewarding one. With that said, though, the gameplay can be a bit repetitive, yes, but the small struggles and micromanagement the player faces across the journey build up to a more intimate and maybe even more grounded relationship between the characters. The story can get a little too monotonous or dragged out at times, too, especially considering the characters' ultimate motivations, which are kinda static and similar to the others' ones. This, however, also serves a reason, and that reason, neatly executed as it is, almost totally overshadows these nitpicks.

That reason is the fact that Opus' story is, above all else, about the characters finding their purpose amidst a place as vast as a galaxy. The tale being told here is not one of a large scale and stakes, like the ones usually found in epic sci-fi operas. Rather, it's about a handful of people. About how they deal with loss, acceptance, and growing up. And it's about, in the end, how all of that feeds into and is guided by their inner-voice, their starsong. Because of this, some relationships take quite a while to develop, and while, for sure, that can harm the overall experience, it's also just a by-factor of how hesitant these characters are of diving deeper into this world so crowded with multiple "starsongs" noise (other people's lives), indifference and uncertainty. Being so, Jun's early efforts regarding his "clan's honor" and Eda's unwavering earnestness to find this "Banshee" thing are just ways for them to find certainty despite all of that.

With all of that, the small steps toward acceptance and the eventual conclusion shine even brighter, because, like with the gameplay stuff I mentioned, the friction adds intimacy and weight to the plot. Nearing the game's end, I started noticing more and more the real importance of lumen. This bright omnipresent thing is not just a sci-fi worlds' ore or something, but also a metaphor to the light one must follow, not by using their eyes or body, but by listening to their inner-voice, so that they can find, or at least try to, their purpose. This fits well with the overarching religious/spiritual thematic, but transcends that, the same way that people's will can transcend its time and space, the context it's set in, if it has to in order to be fulfilled. Through a religious afterlife lens, that comes in the form of a paradise. Through a more grounded one, that is visible in the lingering impact your have on others' lives and memories during and after you die. Or maybe you don't need to transcend shit, and are satisfied just by knowing you tried, even if for a tiny fraction of your life, to listen to your starsong.

Space and time weren't able to separate Jun and even Remi from Eda. There were the memories. There were the emotions, dissolved across the lumen. There were the flowers, in an everlasting full bloom. It wasn't too late for Eda to truly understand what it meant to be herself, nor did Jun wait for 60+ years in vain. Because, for even a tiny moment, there was the field of flowers. In finding each other again, they found themselves.

Amazing game! Brilliant space opera. It's definitely a Makoto Shinkai film plus Dune, like that one reviewer said. It's the perfect way to describe this visual novel(?). Sigono games are always really endearing. I'm excited to see what they're going to create in the future, their games are only getting better.

Anyway, about the game. I like the interesting game over mechanic where when you die you get taken back to the real world of Old Jun remembering his past, dismissing it as him just misremembering the story or else he wouldn't be there today. I thought it was really clever, and a unique way to do a game over. Assassin's Creed did something similar but yet different with the Animus and you "desynchronizing" if you made a mistake in your memories.

Speaking of game overs, I loved all the ways you could get one. I love making bad decisions in games just to see what happens. You can't put a United Mining military station there and think I WON'T go there.

I found all the characters of the game interesting and fully-fleshed out. The flashbacks were amazing. They really gave us context behind the motivations and personalities of our main cast. It was like a well-crafted movie but in video game form so you're the one making the choices. Jun being a crybaby was hilarious and it was obvious Eda was kind to him the entire game just because she liked him. Remi hating on Jun was something I never got tired of, it was hilarious and such a funny relationship (until it climaxed to putting Jun's life in danger, then it wasn't funny anymore. That tonal shift was great). Eda was the only one who seemed like she didn't mature as she remained stubborn in wanting to find her master until the very end, never listening to her that she needed to be her own person. But I realized that characters don't have to have perfect character arcs, that's boring. It's nice once in a while to see a character do something unexpected and not change, to remain stubborn. It's what makes the character them.

Speaking of the ending, wow. That was such a great ending. Sometimes the painful ending is more powerful than the happy one. I know for sure the ending, which was basically revealed at the beginning of the game, made a lot of people very sad. Like an "all that for nothing" type of moment. You're telling me we spent the whole game watching these two fall in love and they never got to be together? That's rough. And there's a second lumen war? And Remi never becomes happy? Nothing changed since the start. It's depressing to see the permanence of the characters and their situations, but sometimes that is real life, and things don't go your way. Especially in a world where life is tough for everybody after the war.

The ending speaks something bittersweet about the idea of patience being important in life to make things go your way. If Eda had listened to Jun and waited for Phoenix to circle the galaxy and come back, they would be able to find it 66 years later and she would be old with Jun. But the point was she had no idea if she would ever get that sort of closure, and so the story sends the lesson that you shouldn't wait for your dreams. She found her master early but ended up stranded and died alone, but she did get her dream accomplished. So it's an open-ended debate whether going out and taking what you want is the right way to live life (but you will have to make some sacrifices), or to play the long game and have patience and things will eventually come your way. There is the interpersonal aspect too of waiting for people to catch up to you, or going ahead with your dreams and losing those people, but it's fine because you'll always be emotionally connected (if you are fine with that eternal physical distance), in this game told as a metaphor with the cosmic blue resource with conscious properties.

Anyway, speaking of Jun and Eda's romance, it can be boring as the whole game they are frustratingly, perpetually stuck in a will-they-won't-they where it's obviously clear to us, and to all the other characters in the story, that they love each other but they're just too awkward to act on it and only get flustered at the thought of the other leaving. But at the same time it's fresh and it lowkey reflects real life romance as well. You don't want to be too melodramatic or show emotion or act too clingy for fear of scaring the other person away, even when you both know you love each other. That being said, the ending still fell into the trap of being too melodramatic though. It really could have been toned down a bit, and it would have been an improvement.

I loved all the bits and pieces of lore, that of which I didn't even collect all of but only a majority, scattered across the solar system for you to find. The game really respects those that want to explore its world. I thought the lore was really fleshed out and well done. The story of the Lumen War and United Mining's imperial conquest vs big factions and rebel workers. The Myrian mythology of worshipping the sun and planets as gods. All of it was very interesting to me and I didn't get tired of reading every piece of lore.

I loved the random encounters while travelling in between asteroids. They reflected the state of their world, how it's so hard to trust anybody. It's always a gamble to help people or attack them first. It creates a culture of distrust. The game was really effective in making you feel that.

Anyway, artstyle-wise, this game is just beautiful to look at. Like a Makoto Shinkai film, as mentioned earlier. All the art was fantastic, and the 3D sections looked amazing too. The sound design is, as it was marketed and as it should be, gorgeous as well. The soundtrack was profound and memorable. The sound effects were high-quality.

The voice acting of the Full Bloom edition is a bit disappointing because not every line is voiced over, leading to a disconnect of experience, but the lines that were voiced were really good. But, well, they just weren't in English. I couldn't understand them. But at least I could feel their emotion. My one wish is to get the full game voice acted in English (please).

Anyway, gameplay-wise this game doesn't have much going on but for me it isn't a flaw because I totally understand what this game is trying to do. It's meant to be an interactive experience, it's not trying to blow your mind mechanically or anything pretentious like that. The puzzles are clearly not meant to be anything difficult, I don't get the people who complain about that. It's not trying to be anything it's not. It's just what it is. And for what it is, I really enjoyed it. Enough so to make it one of my favourite games ever. It was a wild, emotional ride from start to finish and I was really engaged in the story and the lives of the characters. This is a game I would recommend to anybody period.

The game hooked me perfectly from the start with incredible writing. Who doesn't get excited by an underdog story about a pathetic young man's personal growth? Unfortunately, 2/3 through the game I realized that, nope, Jun NEVER gets better. He never becomes anything more than a mopey, spineless damsel in distress (not to mention the worst cave diver I've ever seen). I'm with Remi here - what on lumen does Eda see in this donut?

I could forgive the boring gameplay elements, but a bad character is a no-no.

I'm not rating this lower than a 3 since there are some interesting moments, but looking back I couldn't really recommend this unless you REALLY like sap in your stories.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is a lovely game, I’m always a fan of well crafted space operas and this really succeeds on three fronts. It manages a compelling sci-fi setting I was interested in learning more about, it has a unique style with beautiful music that lends itself well to its ethereal space faring atmosphere, and it also has a story that, while not very lengthy, felt genuinely touching by its end

OPUS is a franchise that has two prior standalone entries (The Day We Found Earth and Rocket of Whispers), and while they were well made for what they were, I didn’t think they were particularly noteworthy due to their limitations as smaller mobile games. Echo of Starsong in comparison is much more ambitious, set in the same universe of its predecessors but dramatically fleshing it out with an extensive amount of lore and descriptive text for every location, mural, artifact, and minor object that’s collected throughout. The result is a solar system that felt really well-realized, as you explore its numerous floating cities, abandoned stations, and mystical asteroid caves each with their own piece of worldbuilding to peer through. This is also greatly complicated by its wonderful aesthetics, with numerous detailed CG scenes and pleasing character art that really bring the setting to life

The story starts in medias res and follows a weary elder named Jun who’s searching for his lost love Eda, and his memories of their time together in his youth. Once a disgraced noble who traveled to the Thousand Peaks solar system in search of Lumen discoveries to claim under his name, he came to meet Eda and her pilot Remi and joined them as a member of their ship, gradually revealing the events that result in her disappearance in the present. For the time you spend with them I really enjoyed the characters, and the emotional core of the story is further enhanced by strong voice performances (of which is a new addition with Full Bloom Edition). I did have a gripe with how heavy it was on using flashbacks to flesh out the cast rather than developing them in the moment, but its general presentation and heartfelt tone made for effective storytelling

Now while this is a game focused on its narrative much like a visual novel, it does have gameplay elements to it. Its main focus is on resource management, as you explore a galaxy map of Thousand Peaks and search locations for supplies or fuel to upgrade your ship and venture further out into the system. In addition, you’ll encounter random events or obstacles that can have a positive or negative impact based on dice rolls and dialogue options. I actually really enjoyed this aspect of the game, as it was just relaxing to explore and visit whatever seemed interesting across the map. Finding new upgrades for the ship throughout was pretty fun too

There’s portions of the game where Jun leaves the ship and explores the caves on foot, and this is presented as a side-scroller with occasional puzzles to clear. The problem though is that it’s a bit repetitive, every cave more or less looks the same and each puzzle just consists of opening a door with a simple mini-game or activate other doors through connecting Lumen pipelines. Not a highlight, but the positives of the game more than made up for it and exploring each cave didn’t really last long enough to be grating

You play as Jun, a young cave runner out to find asteroids full of lumen, a valuable resource in this post-war space-bound world. He must team up with a witch named Eda, who can record starsongs that unlock these mysterious caves. But there's a bounty on both of their heads, so it's certainly not smooth sailing and they fly from station to station picking up coordinates and information.

There are moments where you switch to Eda and Remi, mainly for gameplay purposes, but each of them also have their own stories to tell. However, the bulk of the game is set up as Jun looking back 66 years on these events. So what happened back then? Where are Eda and Remi? Where is Jun going now in his old age?

Visuals

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is a mix of anime-style visual novel and 2.5D adventure. I definitely enjoy both of those things, but this is not my favorite rendition of either. The character portraits are actually really nice, but the CGs looked underwhelming in comparison. The character sprites for the side-scrolling portions also reminded me the original Sims, which was interesting.

I loved the look of outer space though. Watching them fly around was a nice visual treat, that almost made up for the other bland environments. The buildings and other structures do look out of place, since they're low poly and not very detailed. But it was also an interesting contrast to the painted look of the stars and skies around them.

Sound Effects + Music

As a game with "song" in the title, I was expecting some exceptional sound design here. And it is pretty good, not stellar, but definitely enjoyable. There's a wide variety of background tracks which change with the location, situation, and tension levels. But there's also a lot of quiet time, which makes sense in the vacuum of space.

There is voice acting. Default is Japanese, but you can also switch to Chinese, or nothing. No voice acting adds in those typical typing, clicking, booping noises depending on the speaking character. Eda does sing at times to record starsongs for Jun to use in his explorations.

Gameplay + Controls

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is kind of a visual novel in the sense that the focus is on the story and the majority of your time will be spent reading, but it's also kind of a point-and-click adventure, since the main gameplay loop is you simply moving Jun around and clicking on things. There are some light puzzles, which involve matching up the starsongs you collect to the doors they unlock, but they're easy and felt like a simple way to add more interactivity. And there are even some arcade-like sections where you must guide the ship through friends of debris.

I played with keyboard and...well, just keyboard since mouse inputs aren't used. You really just need the arrow keys to move Jun around the screen or to scroll through menus, and the spacebar or Enter to select. The most interaction is actually with the navigation menu, as you need to read messages to obtain coordinates, scan unknown signals, and manage your meager supplies as you travel across the universe. These parts aren't that interesting, as you'll always have exactly what you need to move on, as long as you don't fly all over the map wasting fuel.

Replayability

OPUS: Echo of Starsong definitely has enough content for multiple playthroughs, especially if you skipped or missed some locations and events. I wouldn't play it again, since I'll admit that I didn't always follow the complexities of the story and world, and therefore wasn't always that invested. But if you loved the story, there would be more to discover.

Overall

I definitely enjoyed my time with OPUS: Echo of Starsong. It wasn't at all what I was expecting, but it was a pleasant surprise. Even though I wasn't 100% invested in the story, it still had me coming back for more when I'd take a break from playing.

I could spend my time here talking about the many misgivings I have with the storytelling, but it really does not matter, cause no matter what criticism I had about it’s “redundancy” or how “amateur” it is, I would still always find myself at the sidelines cheering them on. Hoping and praying that these two characters who needed each other more than anyone else would be able to communicate their feelings to one another. A desire to see these two find a speck of happiness, a moment of catharsis for all the frustration I felt in watching them awkwardly try to navigate their blossoming emotions in spite of their trauma and responsibilities.

You could call this ever present desire of mine my weakness, and it’s this weakness that Echo of Starsong exploits to hurt me in ways fiction never has before.

I’ve spent multiple hours just constantly replaying the final moments over and over in my head, looking for a silver lining, a recognition that my catharsis wasn’t stolen for nothing, but there’s no light at the end of this tunnel, just a field of regrets.

A surprisingly well developed universe brimming with intresting lore set in an incredibly grounded setting featuring political strife, interplanetary wars, corporativism and a techno-magical ether/lifeforce known as Lumen. I would totally watch an original series set in the world of Opus. It's fantastical.

It's also bogged down by one of the most aggressively mediocre stories I've ever seen in a videogame. Borderline one dimensional characters who are basically walking anime stereotypes with zero personal growth aside from the final hour and a trope-filled narrative with minimal development.

If you've seen the first scene where the cast is introduced: congratulations, you've already seen it all. The honorable male protagonist with a savior complex and a tendency to apologize for everything he does, the female idealistic pariah with a heart of gold (who's obviously also the MC's platonic love interest) and her sidekick slash adopted protegé - a kid with a troubled past who literally spends the entire playthrough cussing and belittling the protagonist on every dialogue interaction they have. It's as grating as dragging your face through a mile of broken glass. Their motives stay the same throughout the entire game - and you'll be reminded of them quite a few times. Basically all the time.

Hilariously enough, the only character with any semblance of a well written story was the bandit leader known as Bones, who initially shows up as an antagonist and after being unexpectedly saved by the protagonist, gradually comes to term with his own life choices while serving time in prison.

As if the story wasn't bad enough, the gameplay revolves around an absolutely terrible system of RNG encounters, dice rolls and an abysmal resource management mechanic. Your reward for guessing the right outcomes is getting enough money to buy fuel and resources to continue your journey. Your penalty for being unlucky is having to do even more dice rolls... so you can continue doing the aforementioned dice rolls. Exhilarating.

Exploration gameplay gets the job done, you basically walk from point A to point B, but for a game that prides itself so much about its relationship with music, the "puzzles" (if one could even call those sequences as such) are extremely uninteresting and repetitive.

It's a 10h game that would've been infinitely better had it been just an average 3h visual novel. There's some good story there and touching moments ruined by everything else in between.

I only stuck through its entirety because of the raving reviews - after I realized it wasn't getting any better than that, I was already too far so might as well power through the rest - sunken time fallacy and all that. Maybe it's good enough for people who are used to generic, cheesy emotional anime narratives, but for everyone else, there's better games to invest your precious time into.

Although this game was kind of enjoyable nevertheless, the story takes almost no risks and the characters barely change from start to end with the most sterile romance possible. I still can't take the setting of a super religious space-faring civilization with asteroids full of magical science goo in ruins only discoverable by "witches" singing seriously lol. Not to mention the Chinese clans overly concerned about their nebulous honor. There aren't even terrestial planets anymore only gas giants, does all of humanity really live on those asteroids and space stations now? Where do they grow all their food, or is the entire population in the low thousands? Did the gods genuinely exist and all die or what was with all those hallucinations? Are Jun and Eda reincarnations of Helius and Terra?

Also what's the point of changing Ribaku (Japanese dub) to Jun in the English text? Clashed hard every time Eda said it. And onee-chan --> Eddie, really? Don't think our trio is Ed, Edd, n Eddy

Lastly I'm not docking any points for this but FUCK the speedrun and never-fail-even-once achievements when all cutscenes are unskippable and you have to alt-F4 every single time you lose a dice roll or mess up a puzzle before it autosaves, what a clusterfuck of tedium

I went into this game almost completely blind, but I did see that it was labeled as a visual novel at some stores - and I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be a space adventure-RPG, with even some simulation elements. Yes, most cutscenes are told with still images, but even so, this is much, much more than a visual novel.

The graphics were fine, I personally loved both 2D and 3D parts, they were nothing fancy but still nice. As for the gameplay, the cave exploration and space travel segments were my favorites, and I absolutely hated the RNG dice rolls that you have to do quite often, especially if you want to collect everything and visit every location. Music and voice acting were OK in my opinion. And lastly, maybe the most important part in a game like this: the story. Well, even though I think they rushed the ending a bit, it was still wonderful, set in a world with a very deep and detailed lore, filled with fun characters (although, I must admit, maybe it was a bit too sad for my old, sensitive soul :D ).

If you're looking for something short and bittersweet, give it a try.

I really wish I’d seen the comparisons to Makoto Shinkai’s films before playing this. Like his work, this looks and sounds nice but the writing ultimately leaves me cold and wondering how anyone connects with it. If you like melodramatic anime about star-crossed (and very chaste) love, destined to be together but tragically separated, starring a terminally unconfident sadboy, you might love this. I appreciated some of its world-building and intriguing but inscrutable cosmological myth, but none of the emotional beats. The story is otherwise overlong and awkwardly paced, and the gameplay is an on-rails visual novel with basically meaningless choices beyond very light flavor and tedious resource management consequences.

Another one for the Game Pass chevos. Not something I'd normally go for but I was told this wasn't really a visual novel and had a fair bit of RPG in it. That was ...inaccurate. It certainly quacks like a visual novel. A lot of walking about sideways keeping an eye out for things to interact with. There are puzzles but they amount to little more to going here and there while people chat in the background.

What I liked about it was traveling about space. It was a bit like a board game where you had limited fuel, ammo and exploration kits and had to decide if it was worth going on a diversion or not. On each trip you could end up in one or two events that would be resolved by a dice throw vs stats. I'd have quite of happily pottered about in that for the whole game. It's a shame it wasn't used more as what is there is quite shallow, directing you on what ends up being a clear path and there not being any way to fail.

I might sound like I'm grumbling, I was promised more rpg less novel, but if you go into it as a visual novel then expect an extremely good one. I had a wonderful time in this world and I'm going to check out the other games they've made.

Cara, esse jogo provou para mim que a história consegue sim salvar uma gameplay ruim. A jogabilidade é bem limitada e não conta com muitos elementos, mesmo dentro de um universo bem detalhado.
Porém a história me cativou e muito a continuar, vendo os dois principais em suas devidas missões que convergem depois de um tempo e torcendo para que naquele universo apocaliptico eles consigam achar um tempo e um momento de paz. O final me pegou demais de surpresa e o plot da Eda me deixou sem reação. Esse jogo me fez sentir coisas bicho, não muito boas para ser sincero. O amor é impressionante bicho, como pode.