Video Game / OPUS: Echo of Starsong

A Space Opera for the Soul^note Pictured: Eda, one of the main characters

Should we find each other in the next life, let us live on a planet of our own. I will plant flowers among the valleys and sing for you into old age and death.

—God Prime Terra in Melody of Starsong, Act 2

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is an Adventure Game with elements of a Space Opera developed by SIGONO INC. and is the third entry in the OPUS series as well as the series most successful game to date.

The game opens with an old man named Jun Lee, a noble of the East Ocean system, reminiscing of his past while visiting some old ruins. Most of the game takes place during then: a time 66 years ago when he was a young man who had been exiled from his clan after having slighted the Emperor and was now traveling across the planetary system of Thousand Peaks alongside his mentor, Kay Volan, for undiscovered Lumen Caves to restore his name.

While travelling he encounters a witch named Edalune and discovers she had been fed false intel about a cave somewhere in the system. Not wanting to sit idly by while she walks into a trap, he saves her and her cranky crewmate Remi, before deciding to join her crew as their goals align.

Like the rest of the series, Echo of Starsong is known for its emotional narrative, beautiful music and strong worldbuilding, all qualities that has helped it become an enduring Cult Classic alongside its sister titles.

The game also received an Updated Re Release for the Nintendo Switch titled the Full Bloom Edition with full Japanese and Chinese voice acting added, along with an update to PC adding the new content following not long after. A new entry in the OPUS series has also been announced, OPUS: Prism Peak.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong provides examples of:

• 100% Completion: The "Memories" menu displays every item you've received across your playthroughs and allows you to see if you missed any. Due to the RNG nature of some events, you're almost guaranteed not to get 100% on your first run.
• After the End: Downplayed. It was a war, not the apocalypse, but nevertheless, most of the setting is told through the ravaged aftermath of conflict.
• Ambiguous Ending: It's possible to interpret the Evolving Title Screen as an implication that once Jun passes, the characters will be able to reunite at the gates of Binarii, for players who wish to view the ending through a happier lens as well as tie all the mythology together (if you don't feel that the Binarii imagery was already used for the finale). However, there's also nothing that strongly suggests this either, and as with the rest of the game, it's never firmly established how true the mythology is.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When you upgrade your ship's fuel/armor/exploration capacity, the game will also provide you with free resources to cover the increased capacity.
  • If you make a mistake and end up with zero ship armor (aka what would be a Game Over in most games, as it means you're dead), the game will simply restart from before your decision without you having to reload.
  • Eventually, due to storyline reasons, the Red Chamber crew will be in the Lumen Association's good graces, meaning that if you run out of fuel (at least within their territory), being rescued is no longer a matter of RNG. In particular, this coincides with the point in the game that you're expected to explore more freely, making it less stressful to wander off-course.
  • If you're approaching endgame but neglected on your ship upgrades for whatever reason: at the Ironwind Border Patrol, the game may give you enough supplies to increase your fuel capacity rather than force you to backtrack on the map looking for said supplies.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Lumen, one of the central resources that lots of factions are after and is only found in old sacred asteroid ruins. It can take the form of a gas, liquid or solid and is primarily used for fuel but also seems to have other uses. It can also cause hallucinations and according to Eda seems to have a consciousness or will.
• Asteroid Miners: A common practice, though rather than mining minerals, it's lumen they're after. That, or scavenging parts from the wreckage of war.
• Asteroid Thicket: A few locations have this, resulting in Remi/the player having to navigate through debris or incoming asteroids to avoid damage.
• Be Yourself: Kay and Red tell Jun and Eda this respectively—for Jun, that his true personality is what makes him a worthy clan master, and for Eda, that this is what it means to be a true witch. Much of the game comes from their struggle in accepting this. In the end, Eda is able to find herself but dies in the process, while Jun is, as himself, able to lead his clan to prosperity; though tragically, this doesn't prevent him from living a bittersweet and regret-filled life.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Blue Blood Lee clan, torn apart by internal power struggles between its many sons, which is only fueled by how the clan as a whole is in decline. Kay sees Jun as the White Sheep and its only hope for a better future.
• Birds of a Feather: A big reason to why Jun and Eda are so attracted to each other is that they share a lot in common. Both are outcasts from their respective societies, both have traumas relating to their mentors and both are suffering from serious self esteem issues.
• Bittersweet Ending: Leans more towards the bitter end, but Jun manages to find the remains of the Red Chamber within his lifetime and finds that even in death, Eda managed to keep her promise of letting him see the fields of flowers of her homeworld.
• Call-Back: Late in the game, the Red Chamber crew receives an SOS signal but is somewhat divided on whether or not to respond to it—Jun says yes, Remi says no. Eda jokes to Jun that it could be pirates in disguise, referring to the trap at the very start of the game.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The various lore tablets found throughout the game heavily imply that something of truly cataclysmic proportions happened some time in Thousand Peaks distant' past, destroying the system's habitable worlds and leaving it barren past a certain point.
• Central Theme: According to the developer in "Behind the scenes", the theme of the game is "Finding yourself", a theme seen most clearly with Eda as she struggles with who she wants to be. To a degree, it's also conveyed in the low self-esteem prevalent in many of the characters, with Kay telling Jun to simply Be Yourself—while Jun believes that that's not good enough—and Red having told Eda, similarly, to be true to herself. On Eda's part, she acknowledges that neither she nor Remi is happy with who they are.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Red Chamber's cargo bay doubles as an escape pod. It first comes up when Eda tells Jun to use it before they head for Phoenix, knowing that if he accompanies them then he may never return to his clan. He says no. It's used later when Eda forcefully ejects Jun and Remi to save their lives.
  • Lumen itself, as while the game deliberately leaves its exact nature ambiguous to the player, we do receive the occasional explanation of what it does such as connecting emotions across time, granting Eda and Jun the ability to feel each other's presence in the final chapter despite being separated by decades.
• Child Soldiers: It's made clear, especially in Red's admonishments towards Eda, that the children of the Witching Tower were used for warfare.
• Comet of Doom: Banshee, the comet hidden in Thousand Peaks outer rim that orbits a black hole and that Red was supposed to investigate when she vanished as well as the one that destroyed the black hole monitoring station. Additionally, it has an eerie starsong tied to it that drove one man to near madness and that even Eda was unnerved by. And worse, the thing is not a true shrine but a giant trap dedicated to the god of the abyss, the black hole Excidium, meant to ensnare would be grave plunderers.
• Crapsack World: The system of Thousand Peaks is far from what one call idyllic. Still reeling from the after effects of the Lumen War. People are forced to live in space stations or asteroids as the only planets in the system are gas giants that orbit the incredibly temperamental star Ignis. Meanwhile, poverty is rampant while the United Mining Corporation rules with an ever increasing iron fist as they continuously exploit whatever resources are available in the system. And all that is if you are a normal human. For witches things are even worse as they are increasingly being treated less and less human by those around them.
• Creation Myth: Explore enough and you'll pick up the pieces of Myrian mythology, detailing the rise of Helius and eventual creation of humanity, along with lore explaining the Myria Taiyang branch from which Jun hails and the beginnings of East Ocean.
• Culture Clash: This comes up occasionally (also depending on player choices), with Jun being from the East Ocean and its differing values from Thousands Peaks.
• Cutting the Knot: When faced with a cave obscured by a debris field, instead of weaving through it like the Red Chamber crew did, the United Mining convoy simply starts blasting the whole thing to kingdom come.
• Divine Conflict: According to Myrian mythology, there was one between Ignis and Helius in the past, as Helius fought against Ignis for the good of the other gods, and Ignis felt that the Helius was undermining his authority. Eventually, this split the lesser gods into two divisions, between those who supported Ignis and those who supported Helius.
• Downer Beginning: Jun's first cave run ends with Kay getting shot and him having to blow up his beloved ship. Things get a little better from there, but not for long.
• Dub Name Change: Aside from a few characters such as Eda and Remi, many names are different between the Chinese and Japanese versions as well as the English translation, most prominently Jun (Ribaku in Japanese, Li Mo in Chinese) with his clan name also differing between versions.
• Due to the Dead:
  • After Kay dies, the next course of action for the Red Chamber crew is to arrange for his body to be sent back to the East Ocean. Similarly, Jun even offers words of mourning for the assassin who was after his life and killed Kay.
  • Some of the odd jobs Jun can take include work related to the dead—retrieving corpses from asteroid debris, marking the names of those lost in the war, etc.—and he's always humbled when carrying them out.
  • Conversely, it's clear how bad the prejudice has gotten against witches when United Mining suggests that they'll remove their names from the war memorial, even though the witches helped win the war for them.
• Dysfunction Junction: Each of the main cast has a Dark and Troubled Past of some kind that fuels their motives today, whether it be Eda's abandonment issues, Jun and Remi's self-loathing, or Kay's embitterment towards the Lee clan.
• Escape Pod: Red Chamber has a virtually forgotten one in the cargo bay that Eda tricks Jun, with Remi, into going in.
• Escape Sequence: Jun/the player will end up in one after encountering the assassin; allowing him to reach Jun will result in Jun's death (narrative backtracking notwithstanding).
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Downplayed, as Jun is still alive and the nature of the Framing Device means that most of the cast would've inevitably died from old age anyway, but Kay dies, Red was Dead All Along, Eda almost certainly dies young on Phoenix, Rushell and Bones go MIA during the timeskip, and Remi passes away peacefully shortly before the present.
• Evolving Title Screen:
  • The initial title screen is—in elderly Jun's time—Jun's ship arriving at an asteroid. After starting the game, it switches to the location in said ruins where Jun sits, narrating the story.
  • After completing the game, the title screen will, instead of an elderly Jun, show a combination of characters (different on each startup) at the aforementioned spot, who will disappear into light if selected or if you continue from your autosave.
• Family of Choice: Eda, Remi, and Jun—the former two being adoptive sisters, while the latter explicitly comes to see them as his family, equal to his clan in terms of importance.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • There is significant bad blood between the residents of Thousand Peaks and the witches from their involvement in the Lumen War. Members of the faction were conscripted to accompany the United Mining Corporation during their campaigns. Their learned ability to locate and manipulate the element that powered the universe’s technology made them invaluable tools. The witches were scapegoated as the aggressive faction following the war by United Mining’s propaganda, giving those displaced by the war a target for their ire and are in general treated with disdain and hostility.
  • A much lesser example, and one considered by Kay as justified, is the Peakers' contempt towards those from East Ocean given that East Ocean promised they wouldn't surrender to United Mining but were the first to do so.
• Fertility God: This was God Prime Terra's role, as her singing channeled lumen and extended the Sanctums' life, as well as caused flowers to bloom.
• Fishbowl Helmet: The various spacesuits shown all make use of the classic fishbowl look in order to make characters faces as visible as possible to the player.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Invoked. Since the story is Jun narrating his life, he can't die in the "past". Any actions that the player takes that result in his death are presented as Jun misremembering how things went and thus forcing the player to try again, rather than granting a game over.
  • Jun's regrets as an old man make it clear that something happens to separate him and Eda. The main plot is learning how this came to be.
  • It's already known that Jun goes on to be a respected clan master, so it's not a matter of if he redeems himself but how.
• God of Light: God Prime Ignis, who serves as the sun and source of lumen energy.
• Great Offscreen War: The Lumen War, a giant war between numerous factions in order to gain control of the resource known as Lumeside. After several years, the United Mining Corporation managed to eventually claim a decisive victory. Then in-between the chapter 5 and the epilogue there was the Second Lumen War, though details of it are never revealed.
• Holding Hands: Subverted. At one point, Jun asks Eda to hold out her hand, only to take her wrist. With that said, he's actually doing an East Ocean-specific intimate gesture with her (albeit one that isn't inherently romantic). She's clearly disappointed. It later becomes an implicit case of Be Careful What You Wish For, as he does take her hand... when they're fleeing for their lives.
• In Medias Res: The game opens with an old Jun reminiscing of his past before jumping 66 years back into the past before then jumping back to the present during the final chapter.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Only Eda, Remi, and Jun have message inboxes, suggesting Kay doesn't stay with the crew. And considering his fierce loyalty towards Jun, he clearly won't leave of his own volition...
  • Averted in the finale when you try to return to Ironwind after leaving Banshee. Your fuel gets depleted as usual... but no matter what, you're not making it back there.
• Justified Tutorial:
  • The tutorial for the side-scrolling gameplay segments is presented as Kay explaining how cave running works in Thousand Peaks to Jun, a Naïve Newcomer.
  • The exploration mechanic is introduced via Red Chamber being damaged after escaping from Bones's base, and thus Jun has to scavenge for parts.
  • Purchasing supplies is introduced via Rushell—both the shopkeeper NPC of the location and whom the Red Chamber crew was just talking to—insisting that the crew make sure to stock up on fuel before they leave.
• La Résistance: The Ring Liberation Front was one against the United Mining, with the unfortunate reality that most of them were forced into becoming pirates or mercenaries after the war. Many locations depict the aftermath of their fight against United Mining.
• Latex Space Suit: Almost all of the spacesuits shown within the game are all fairly skin tight affairs.
• Luck-Based Mission: In some parts of the game there is an element of luck on whether or not you will succeed in a certain task. These changes can be boosted more in your favor with certain upgrades and items, but due to the games autosave feature it also means that you won't get a second chance if things don't go your way.
• Magic Music: The starsongs used by Lumen Witches such as Eda are used to locate sources of Lumen and can also be recorded by runners to be used to operate various Lumenide powered devices.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's never confirmed if All Myths Are True. The setting mentions researchers who offer scientific explanations (e.g. Excidium being conceived to keep people away from the black hole), but the nature of Eda's throat injury and dreams and the visions Jun experiences imply the mythology is real. With that said, nothing in the story runs on the strict assumption that that's the case.
• MegaCorp: The United Mining Corporation. After they won the Lumen War they basically have a monopoly over Thousand Peaks and even acts as a sort of corporate government over the whole solar system.
• Merchant City: Silk Oasis is infamous for being this.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer establishes that Jun and Eda are torn apart, but suggests it was because of a fight, with Eda's declaration that she wishes she'd never met him—a line with virtually the opposite connotations in actual context. Similarly, Jun's spoken line in the trailer is, in the game, actually to Kay. Presumably, this is to avoid spoiling the real reason Jun and Eda are separated.
• No Antagonist: The game has no real antagonistic force for the characters. Even the United Mining Corporation is more of an oppressive presence than something actively antagonistic. The real threat is really the characters' own personal demons.
• Non-Standard Game Over: There's one way to get Jun "killed" that isn't related to gameplay: at the start, choose not to save Eda. Given that Jun's impulsive decision to try and help her kicks off their entire relationship and fuels Jun's guilt over getting Kay involved, not doing so is the one story choice that cannot be canon no matter what, hence why elderly Jun has to backtrack on it happening.
• Noodle Incident: Jun notably keeps the details of his time in Taoyuan sparse.
  Some memories are best not spoken.
• Nostalgic Narrator: The story takes place through Jun looking back on his past, with many game descriptions reflecting this. For instance, one location notes in the interface that this is the cave he remembers the most clearly, being where Kay dies.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • When Jun and Eda set off the Lumen Ziggurat, mistakenly thinking they're only opening a gate.
  • A decidedly dark version when Jun and Eda read the final mural in Banshee, realizing that this isn't a tomb for Terra but a deadly trap for would-be grave robbers. Jun's narration notes that he can still remember the chilling writing, even years later.
• Our Witches Are Different: The witches of this setting primarily act as human radars, being able to track sources of Lumen though song. They are trained from a young age at the Witching Tower and study a religion based around the stars and planets of the system.
• Pieces of God: In Myrian mythology, Helius's soul was ultimately scattered into fragments with a small number of people believing that Taiyang is one such fragment that drifted throughout East Ocean, resulting in the eventual creation of East Ocean nobility.
• Police Brutality: While only police by a technicality, the men of United Mining loves to employ Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique's and the like to those caught even when they are only allowed to do so after they have been read what they are arrested for.
• Precursors: Before humanity in the Peaks, there was the ancient civilization Myria, belonging to the deities. Nearly every cave is the remnants of their empire and lumen-wielding technology.
• Reincarnation Romance: Helius and Terra, as Star-Crossed Lovers, were hoping for this if Melody of Starsong is to be believed. If you pay close attention to descriptions, it's hinted Jun and Eda could be their reincarnations. Maybe.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • The Myrian Inscription Decipherments will allow you to translate the Lumen visions and sprite dialogue if you're willing, but it'll take you virtually the entire game to collect them all, meaning you can't do so until subsequent playthroughs. That's for a good reason: the Lumen sprites are a reflection of the characters' future thoughts, meaning they give away part of the ending.
  • A minor case, but the CG of Kay swearing his Undying Loyalty to Jun shows him and Jun grasping each other's wrist. As you don't learn about this gesture until late in the game, you won't realize that it's reaffirming Kay and Jun's vow that their lives are interwoven.
• Rise to the Challenge: Banshee is in fact a giant trap meant to lure grave robbers and once the trap is sprung it will cause the entire interior to flood with Lumenide forcing those inside to hurry upwards to try and get away. And unfortunately, Jun and Eda set it off.
• Running Gag: A somewhat dramatic example, but Jun blows up no fewer than three caves during the game, each for a different reason. This isn't lost on him.
• Ship Tease: As the game progresses, it's increasingly obvious that Jun and Eda have developed more than platonic feelings for one another with Eda in particular worried that Jun is gonna leave her behind and Jun at one point stating that meeting Eda was one of the best things to ever happen to him.
  • The most explicit scene comes after Jun has been saved from a cave collapse and is resting in the greenhouse of the Red Chamber. After a brief conversation, Jun and Eda begin moving closer together and... Remi activates the sprinkler system, soaking both of them before anything can happen.
• Show Within a Show: Melody of Starsong is an opera that the Red Chamber crew has the opportunity to watch (via separate acts) over the course of the game, featuring the story of Helius and Terra. Eda is a huge fan, Remi is indifferent, and Jun mostly remembers his time spent with Eda rather than the play itself if you have him watch it with her.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • The Red Chamber crew isn't with United Mining, meaning that if you as a player try approaching any of their locations, you're almost certainly going to run into trouble with varying degrees of avoidability.
  • If you run out of fuel mid-flight, are within the territory of the Lumen Association, and are at the point where the Red Chamber is in the good graces of said organization, they'll respond accordingly and even give you some fuel on top of rescuing you.
  • Jun will move more slowly on the map if he's carrying or pulling someone along, injured, or watching his step, or when he's a old man using a cane to walk.
  • As noted under Foregone Conclusion, Jun and co. can't meet an untimely demise, since the present day already establishes that couldn't happen. Therefore, there are no actual game overs; anything that leads to a party wipeout via player choices will have Jun backtrack on his narration, so to speak.
• Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty: The technology and vessels of the United Mining Corporation have a noticeably boxy and dirty aesthetic to them, compare this with the Myrian technology that despite being in ruins, looks clean and shiny while incorporation plenty of circular motifs.
• Solar Flare Disaster:
  • Expect this to happen every time the ship passes by Ignis, where no matter what, you will lose armor plates.
  • Inverted in East Ocean, where being born during one is considered a good omen. Case in point: Jun was born during a rare solar flare storm, and while it disrupted satellites, it also caused many barren lumen caves to produce lumen again and thus brought prosperity to East Ocean that year.
• Space Is Noisy: This trope ends up actively invoked in the Lumen Ziggurat where Eda instructs Jun to release as much Lumen as is available so that she can use it as a medium for her song in the vacuum of space.
• Stealth in Space: Part of what makes Remi such a skilled pilot is her talent in keeping Red Chamber undetected by other ships. With that said, it's not always convenient, as more than once it means completely cutting off communication with Jun to remain off the radar and abandoning him to his fate.
• Straight for the Commander: A variation. Bones provokes Jun into confirming that he's Kay's master, at which point he immediately orders his men to shoot Jun, knowing this will end the stalemate as Kay has to focus on protecting Jun.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: More than one event has the Red Chamber crew sneak around in United Mining stations and be mistaken as enlisted help, which they roll with to avoid getting into trouble for trespassing.
• That's No Moon: In the Lumen Ziggurat, Jun and Eda try to open what they believe to be a gate only for them to realize that what they just activated was actually the old ruins' core. And they are standing right in front of it.
• Third Wheel: Played with. Remi sees herself as this to Eda and Jun, which is part of why she hates the latter—she's afraid that Eda will run off with him. (On their parts, it's clear that they would never dream of abandoning Remi and see her as no less important.) Then, on the flip side, platonically Jun considers himself to be the outsider, intruding on the comfortable dynamic Eda and Remi have formed over years.
• Timed Mission: A few cave runs will involve one, typically when Jun has to achieve his goals before United Mining arrives.
• Time Skip:
  • Over a year passes between Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.
  • Chapter 5 ends with a skip of 66 years, returning to old Jun's time.
• Top God: Ignis is described as the god of gods, being the origin of the others. One consistent thread across all versions of the mythology is Ignis's fury over his authority being undermined, explaining the solar flares Ignis emits.
• Unspecified Apocalypse: Digging through the lore reveals that some kind of massive disaster happened far in Thousand Peaks past. What that was is never revealed, but it caused the system to go from ten planets to just the four gas giants that remain.
• Unwinnable by Design: Although the game is generous enough that you actively have to work for it, it is fully possible to screw yourself over by going somewhere and not paying attention to the remaining fuel aboard the Red Chamber, leaving you stuck with no way to progress.
• Utsuge: Echo of Starsong is a game focusing on a cast of flawed characters all struggling with emotional trauma with plenty of tears and heartbreak along the way.
• Villainous Rescue: When Jun is buried under rubble and all seems lost, it's United Mining that saves him, aka the very group that the Red Chamber crew was trying to avoid out of fear of being arrested or killed. Downplayed, in that the one responsible for the rescue operation was Bones, who isn't an antagonist by this point and has bailed Jun out before—still, it's not as though Bones could call all the shots unconditionally.
• War Is Hell: The game pulls no punches in demonstrating how much the Lumen War has ruined Thousand Peaks, possibly permanently, and how the people hope war will never break out again. Tragically, their wish is denied, as the timeskip reveals a second Lumen War occurred not long after, spanning years like the first.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Bones Brigade is made up of former members of the Ring Liberation Front, who fought against United Mining and continue to do so. They were forced into piracy after the war, with nowhere else to go, but they're still regarded as war heroes in the eyes of many.

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