Starfy 4 takes all the good features of other platform games and mixes them together to come up with something quite special. From the moment i turned this game on i was hooked till the end. Little did i know that this would end up being one of my fav ds games. Hence the ds-scene official seal of approvel review.
Ok so the game itself is an oldschool style platformer, graphically it's beautiful, the 2d sprites are nicely animated over the top of some very effective 3d backgrounds. The backgrounds really come to life in some of the stages with objects moving, rotating and scaling
Starfy 4 has heaps of playability, Your'll start off with minimal abilities but the more you progress through the game the more moves become availble to you. Abilites work in a similar way as they would do in a castlevania game, say you need to use that double jump to get to a platform thats way out of reach but you cant get the double jump until later in the game. You get the idea.
Level design is done well. In most cases your'll find yourself having to solve simple puzzles to get through the stage. The puzzles will get slightly harder as you progress but they're never hard to the point where it gets frustrating, which is a good thing.
Some parts of the game see you playing as the Female character (Stapy) she's got some unique abillities that stafy cant use. Having 2 characters adds a bit of mix to the game and keeps it fresh. In some of the levels your'll even have to switch between characters to work your way through the platform style puzzles.
Music has the usual happy days feel to it like the previous starfi games. The J-pop group ℃-ute recorded the promo theme tune to Stafy 4, you can hear it in the video below
As for the length of the game it wont take long to see the end credits, but theres still plenty to do after that. Within each level is a door that cant be accessed until you've gone through the game once. Inside these doors lies the secret area to each stage. It's also worth noting that these secret parts are a lot harder than the normal areas of the game. This adds a lot of replay value and if you want to achieve a 100% complete save your gonna need to play through it about 3 times
And as for the extras nintendo decided to add a starfy cosplay game lol. You can buy outfits with the coins you collect, and you can check what these costumes look like on a 3d rendered Starfy. Mind you, you can only see the costumes from the menu. You cant actually walk around in the game with them.
Theres also a bonus stage at the end of each world thats controlled with the stylus. It's basically a minigame where you have to guide starfy through a maze of spikes collecting as many coins as possible on the way.
Overall Densetsu no Starfi 4 is solid platform game thats well worth the purchase. It's just a shame Nintendo have'nt brought this series over to the western audience. That said though the japanese version is very import friendly. If you like oldschool style platform games then Densetsu no Starfy 4 is certainly worth checking out.
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