From Jason Schreier's article about the game 6 years ago
Cosmic Star Heroine is the product of Zeboyd Games, a development team made up of Robert Boyd and Bill Stiernberg. Their previous games include Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves The World, and the final two Penny Arcade RPGs, but this might be the best yet, mostly because of the killer combat system.
Much like Chrono Trigger, combat in Cosmic Star Heroine begins when you run into an enemy avatar out in the field. Your party will move into position, and then youll enter a turn-based battle in which youll have to pick commands for each character, one round at a time. Each character can attack, defend, cast spells, etc. Standard JRPG fare.
But Cosmic Star Heroine has some neat twists. For starters, there are no magic points or skill points. Instead, you can use each of your characters skills once before its locked behind a gate. To use that skill againunless its a reusable skillyoull have to defend. So lets say your main character, Alyssa, starts off with the Laser and Drown skills, as well as the weaker, but reusable Bash skill. On turn one she might use Laser, then on turn two she could use Drown. But now, on turn three, she can only use Bash or defend. If she defends, all of her skills will be recharged on turn four.
Adding an extra wrinkle to this system is the hyper bar, a gauge that fills up on every turn. On the turn that its filled, your character will go into hyper mode and do extra damage, after which the hyper bar will reset again.
So lets say Alyssas hyper bar takes three turns to fill, and shes fighting an enemy thats weak to water skills. If she uses Laser on turn one and then Drown (a water skill, obviously) on turn two, shell get to turn three and enter hyper mode, but she wont be able to use Drown to optimize the amount of damage she does against that enemy, because itll be locked. In order to take out enemies, youll have to plan ahead.
As you get more party members and combat gets more complicated, fighting battles start to feel like looking over a big chessboard, deciding when to use each action to do the most damage before an enemy can take you out. Do you want to waste a hyper turn healing or gamble that you can win before your party members lose all of their health? Do you want to use Alyssas strength buff on Chahn to do fire damage or Dave to take out those robots with electricity? On the tougher difficulty modesIm playing on the hard Heroine difficultythis can get really elaborate, challenging, and fun.
So yeah, I recommend Cosmic Star Heroine. The finicky little bugs can get annoyingfor some reason on PS4, the game is ultra-sensitive when starting conversations and will continually restart dialogue after youve Xed out of the boxbut Im quite enjoying the game so far.
It's pretty decent, and fairly short. Probably like 15-20 hours, side content included. Pretty fast paced. Story and characters are serviceable, but there's a neat variety of aliens and stuff.