A point-and-click game of discovery, Hoshi Saga revolves around finding stars. In each stage, you have to find a star and the fun is figuring out just what you need to do to uncover or create the star. The puzzles are many and varied, and range from the mind-numbingly easy to the hair-pullingly hard.
The Hoshi Saga series has thirteen installments so far, all of which can be found here
. The series started as a trilogy of games all containing 100 stages in total, before more were added and the naming themes changed accordingly. Minnano entries to the series are all Hoshi Saga stages designed and submitted by the community.
This game series contains the following tropes:
- Art Shift: Stage 74 of Hoshi Saga 3 has a hand-drawn scene and stars compared to the normally perfect shapes of other levels.
- Bullet Hell: A difficult iteration as stage 10000 [sic] in Dokuringo, further compounded by your huge hitbox. After losing the first time, the game offers you a shield to make it easier. Of course, that locks you out of the 'good' ending.
- Cutting the Knot: Stage 21 of Minnano 3 has a present-switching game with a wonky music player that's always rigged to ensure the star is out of your reach. What to do? Break the music player to prematurely halt the game when the star's in your grasp.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The first three games. The next number of games are fully-colored and are much more detailed.
- Easy Level Trick: Several stages have an inconspicuous solution to an otherwise difficult-looking puzzle.
- Stage 40 in Ringoame's esoteric solution does not involve the circles in it to reveal the star at all.
- The number of stars ranked as the difficulty can give it away, as in the stage 48, which initially appears to be a difficult Klotski, but is in fact, just a click-and-drag to the solution.
- Stage 70 in Ringoen can be difficult to align properly five times in a row, until the player realizes the background keeps track of previous attempts, so he can use those attempts to continue progress consistently.
- Even the final boss of stage 10000 has three strategies that make it a lot easier:
- Staying at the bottom middle of the screen during the first attack allows you to evade all but one of the bullets.
- If you move your mouse cursor out of the game border and move it back in from another side, your ship INSTANTLY teleports to the cursor. This allows you to dodge the "spinning laser" and "rings" attacks easily.
- Finally, right-clicking anywhere on the screen pauses the game, and left clicking anywhere else will teleport your ship to your cursor. This is VITAL for the boss' Last Ditch Move.
- Fanservice: In each of the first three installments, there's one stage that requires you to do something almost ecchi (pulling down underwear [but not that far down], blowing up women's skirts to reveal star-printed underwear, trying to get a woman to uncover her breasts so that they immediately get covered by stars...). The hints of fanservice disappear entirely after the third installment... until Dokuringo, where there are no less than an entire column (five stages!) that feature nude or stripped women in full color, one requiring you to unzip a girl's Meido outfit, and the winning screen you get if you clear the final stage the hard way is a drawing of a naked woman whose nipples and crotch are just barely covered by other objects.
- Genre Shift: Several final levels: Ringo's final level gives off RPG tones, and Dokuringo's final level is a flat out Shoot 'Em Up.
- Groin Attack: What you need to do in one of 3's stages.
- Guide Dang It!: Stage 9982 in Dokuringo has a solution unrelated to the original puzzle, stage 77. It also has to be found in a field of 35 blocks with four positions each.
- Kaizo Trap: On Stage 10000, the boss's particles from after its explosion damages the player's ship.
- Klotski: In the 48th stage, a deceptively difficult Klotski puzzle appears. It just requires a click-and-drag to be solved.
- Last Ditch Move: Stage 10000's boss uses a very nasty one when its health is depleted.
- Minigame Game
- Mood Dissonance: Dokuringo only allows one stage when it's first started, which is a revamped Ringo stage 7 with a skull in place of a star. It tells you that the rest of the puzzles (unlocked after solving that one) are not simple and are not as light-hearted as the previous games' puzzles.
- Moon Logic Puzzle: Some of the stages qualify as this, giving you next to no indication of what to do in them. Especially prevalent in Dokuringo, where you often have to completely ignore the obvious puzzle to search for a completely non-obvious one.
- Oddly Named Sequel: All the installments after the third one, perhaps to signify that they're in color instead of black-and-white and are considerably easier than the first three installments (or harder, for the eighth one).
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Stage 10000 in Dokuringo is pretty much the same as Stage 100 in Ringohime... except you can only take ONE hit before losing.
- Outside-the-Box Tactic: EVERYTHING in Dokuringo requires this.
- Recurring Boss Template: The stage 10000 boss in Dokuringo is the exact same boss in Ringohime, except faster, and with a Last Ditch Move. And you only take ONE HIT to fail it instead of having infinite lives.
- Red Herring: Plenty in Dokuringo; for example, the clock puzzle (stage 21 in Ringo) turns out to be irrelevant to the corresponding stage 9991—not even mashing the arrow to make it fall will grant you the star. A blend of stage 60 from Ringoen and 96 from Ringohime have no relation to finding the star in stage 9997. Instead, the "Stage:" letters and "Return" button provide the clue.
- Remixed Level:
- Dokuringo is almost entirely made up of stages strongly resembling that of past installments but with very different (and more difficult) solutions.
- The stages in Hoshi Saga 13 are the same as those found in the original Hoshi Saga trilogy, only the game is now controlled using arrow keys rather than the mouse.
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: You can go from a 1-star puzzle that just requires you to mouse your cursor over star pieces to a 5-star puzzle that requires you to have almost superhuman reflexes.
- Shell Game: One of the stages in Ringoen. Gets a Call-Back in Dokuringo where it's amped up in difficulty (instead of selecting the correct cup just once, you have to do it 5 times in a row).
- Shielded Core Boss: Stage 10000's star, whose core is protected by four walls as well as the spinning spikes of the star itself.
- Shout-Out: The very first stage in the first game recalls the Mario series.
- Stage 10000's star boss in Ringohime as well as Stage 10000's in Dokuringo are obvious references to Big Core from Gradius, down to the design of the boss's hitbox.
- Some Dexterity Required:
- Stage 30 in Hoshi Saga asks the player to type 'I will find a star' 10 times in 40 seconds to find the star. That might not come easy to some people.
- Stage 9979 requires some rapid-fire mouse-clicking to form the star faster than it can dissipate.
- Songs in the Key of Lock: One stage in the second installment requires you to play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on water-filled wine glasses.
- Star-Shaped Coupon
- Theme Naming:
- Ringo = Apple
- Ringoame = Apple Candy
- Ringoen = Apple Garden
- Ringohime = Apple Princess
- Dokuringo = Poison Apple
- Waiting Puzzle:
- In the first Hoshi Saga game on stage 35, the in-game switch has to be kept on for a real-time minute before turning it off to reveal the star.
- One stage in the third installment requires you to keep your cursor still (or keep it away from the game screen) for the star to form.
