Review | Celestial Hearts

Review | Celestial Hearts

Hello everyone and welcome to a new review! This time we will be looking at a game called Celestial Hearts, published and developed by Joshua Keith. Celestial Hearts is a jRPG featuring the love story of a heartbroken young elf and an angel seeking her life’s purpose. So if you want to know more about this turn-based love story, please read down below.

We played Celestial Hearts for 4 hours on PC.

What we liked!

  • The Story: One of the most important things for me is usually the story and the conversation in one of these games. And I must say I loved every bit of it. The main characters tease each other a lot, and it’s so cute! (spoilers) It starts with you finding someone in a forest close to your village. He is a ninja and will join your team after saving your ass when you get abducted and put in a cell. When you are trying to get out of there, you find an angel. You carry her out and run away, back to your house. You lay the angel, with beautiful wings, on a bed, and a few days later, she wakes up. She doesn’t remember anything, not even her own name. Later you find out more and more about her story and that of every one of your team. Are you ready for a cute romance game with awesome writing?
  • Music: The music is so lovely! The first thing I can remember is me jamming to the music in the first city you get to on your travels. It was jazzy, and I loved it. But the music changes a lot in this game, and when you get to, for example, a desert, you’ll hear music that reminded me of Prince of Persia. I don’t know why. I don’t even remember playing that game since I was so young, but still, it reminds me of that kind of vibe. I think they did an excellent job with the music, not to forget the hype music when starting a battle. It makes you ready to RUMBLE.
  • Style: This game shows you how pretty a pixel game can be and that it doesn’t all have to be 4k high-end stuff to be enjoyable. It has beautiful 2d pixel art but when your character speaks, you get to see them up close and those are just like anime
  • Fighting/Battles: The fighting is indeed turn-based as mentioned above. I don’t play a lot of these games, in fact, this is the second or third turn-based game I’ve ever played. But the good news is that this game has a casual mode for people like me. So you can get used to the combat while still enjoying the beautiful story. And if you are really not into the combat there is an auto-battle mode, where it automatically uses skills and normal attacks to kill every opponent. I have to warn you tho, it’s not called an auto-win for a reason, you can still lose. Now for the combat itself. You have an HP bar telling you how much damage you can take, an MP bar telling you how many spells you can cast, and a special bar telling you how many special attacks you can do. One of your team can refill someone’s mana with her special attack. And two of your team can heal others, one even has an AOE (Area of effect) heal! I really had to get used to this all, there are so many options and also debuffs to use when fighting the bosses, but it’s so worth it in the end. I enjoyed it so much when I got the hang of it better.

Somewhere between

  • The auto-save: I am used to all my games auto-saving, so I turned it on as soon as I got into the game. However, 1,5 hours into playing, I took a break, and when restarting, I miss clicked on a new game. Well, it saved as soon as you do that, so there is no turning back; you have just restarted, if you wanted to or not. Maybe a “are you sure?” Or “Do you want to put the new game in safe slot 2?” would have been nice. If you put on auto-save, it saves after everything: every battle, every new map, and after every story sequence. So at some point, you get a story sequence that goes straight into a boss fight. What if I am not strong enough for that boss yet? I didn’t have this problem, but I was playing on casual. What if you are playing on hard, and you can’t seem to beat this boss? You would need to restart all the way. So if you are going to play this game on hard mode, I would recommend saving manually.

What we disliked

  • I have nothing to add to this section.

CONCLUSION

85%

I adored this game’s cute conversations between the main characters a lot. The Auto-battle mode and casual mode are very nice for new players of this genre, and the game has a beautiful style to it. Simple but beautiful with lovely music on every map. I would recommend manually saving if you are going for the harder modes, though.
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