Hoshi wo Miru Hito
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 When your game is far worse than even the standard Kusoge games, you screwed up big time.
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Hoshi wo Miru Hito (星をみるひと a.k.a. Stargazer) is a RPG game developed in 1987 for the Famicom by Another (developers behind The Black Bass) and published by Hot-B. In the game you control four kids with ESP powers who must stop a computer which went insane and now threatens the world.
A Switch port of the game was eventually released by City Connection in July 30, 2020. (and once again, exclusively in Japan)
Why It Sucks
- Very slow gameplay. It takes seconds to move from one tile to another.
- Ugly graphics, even by 1987 standards. It is often difficult to make out what the textures are supposed to represent, and each screen just uses the same handful of tiles over and over again.
- Although the game is supposed to have a dystopian cyberpunk theme, you wouldn't notice just by playing the game because of how primitive the graphics are.
- Towns and dungeons are invisible on the map.
- Whenever you leave a town or dungeon, you're teleported back to the beginning of the game for no reason.
- Items cannot be transferred between characters.
- During battles the last digit of your character's hit points is not shown. For example if it says that your character has 10 hit points that means they have anywhere from 100 to 109 hit points remaining.
- Treasure chests are also invisible.
- Some tiles can be jumped over after obtaining a specific ability, but which ones you can is totally unclear.
- Speaking of tiles, some of them can poison you if you step on them, but the game will not warn you about this, meaning that you can die in matter of seconds for no apparent reason.
- You start the game at Level 0, meaning you can barely do any damage at the beginning, and you can't even run away from battles.
- Unbalanced difficulty to the point that enemies at the beginning of the game go from overpowered to dying in a single hit after leveling up only a couple of times, only for the enemies in the next area to be overpowered all over again.
- The game has no save feature and uses passwords, but whenever you restart a game your level is reset to 0.
- The password system is a complete disaster, since it uses a strange mix of the katakana alphabet and Latin characters.
- Key items disappear after a single use, so if you need the item more than once you will have to buy another, which always cost a ridiculous amount of money, this and the level up problem is because the game saves the money in pack of 256, and the levels in packs of 4, for example if you save while being on level 5 the password that you will be given will start you at level 4, the same with the money (but with 256) and the items.
- When you buy new equipment for one of your characters, the currently equipped item is automatically discarded, and there is no way to know if the new item will be better than the previous one.
- There's no option to cancel during battle, meaning if you accidentally select the wrong option in the menu, there's no way to go back.
- Ear-bleeding soundtrack.
- Ridiculous plot twist in the ending (although it may be a redeeming factor for some).
- The final boss was not programmed into the game. If you make the decision to fight, you immediately are skipped to a bad ending screen saying that you lost the battle.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- Minami, Shiba, Aine and Misa are very decent main characters in the game, plus they have really good character designs too. Their battle sprites also change depending on their experience level, which is a pretty unique mechanic.
Reception and Legacy
Upon release, in the "Cross Review" section of Weekly Famitsu, four reviewers gave it a scores of 4, 5, 6, 4 for a total of 19 out of 40. Readers of Family Computer Magazine voted to score the game 16.08 out of 30 points.
This game is very well known in Japan for how bad it is. It's even known by the Japanese as "Densetsu no Kusoge" (伝説のクソゲー), which translates to "Legendary Shitty Game", meaning the game is even worse than other Kusoge games.
Fans have made a patch for the original game that balances the game and improves the graphics, as well as a remake of the game for the PC known as Stargazer that improves the story, adds some clever puzzles, and makes the gameplay more akin to the SaGa series.
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