Starflight II: Final Rating

Apparently, humans wear less clothing in the future, even when exploring alien planets.

Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula

United States

Binary Systems (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga and Macintosh

Date Started: 4 March 2013
Date Ended: 18 March 2013
Total Hours: 22
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 53
Ranking at Time of Posting: 85/92 (92%)

Ranking at Game #455: 440/455 (97%)

Starflight II feels very much like an expansion to Starflight. You could read that sentence as a wildly positive statement or a slightly disappointed one, and indeed I feel both as I write this final posting. On the one hand, the developers didn't screw up anything that made the first game so much fun. On the other, they didn't really continue the spirit of innovation that Starflight so thoroughly exemplified.

Perhaps unfairly, I'd hoped that in the three years between games, the developers would have used the technological advances to provide a bigger galaxy, more tactics in combat, a greater variety of encounters, some side-quests on the many planets, and just overall more depth to the gameplay. I especially hoped they'd introduce more traditional CRPG elements, and would make the crew seem like characters and not just part of the ship. Instead, the game's few innovations--the trading system, a slightly different combat mechanism, and swapping crewmembers with the Dweenle--added only slightly to the basic Starflight template and fixed none of the problems that prevented the first game from being a great CRPG as well as a great game.

I hate to dwell on the negatives. I realize my postings on this game have been almost insufferably gloomy, and I honestly don't know why. It's a fun game. It kept me locked to my computer until the wee hours on several nights. Few other games of the era, or any era, allow such open exploration of such a large game world. And the story is one of the best we've seen, outperforming everything else in 1989 (so far) except perhaps The Magic Candle. And yet I'd still hoped for a little more.

On the GIMLET, I don't intend to look at my final rating for Starflight until I'm finished, but if everything goes as I expect, the final scores shouldn't be much different. The first game had a slightly better story, the second a slightly better economy and equipment selection. Everything else is very much the same.

1. Game World. The game world and story remains the best part of the Starflight series. You have an entire galaxy to explore, and a good reason to explore it. As you do, you uncover tantalizing bits of history and lore that slowly come together in a galactic puzzle. It's one of the few games of the era that you could imagine being developed into a compelling book or film. I love the idea of a somewhat ineffectual and absurd enemy suddenly becoming a threat, as if North Korea suddenly unveiled a fleet of stealth bombers. The neat thing is that the game doesn't hammer you over the head with the plot, as a modern game might with multiple cinematic cut scenes, and if you're not paying attention, you could still "win" the game without fully understanding what's happening. The final twists, while not quite as jaw-dropping as Starflight, are still some of the best we've seen. I have to save perfect scores for later games that really flesh out the game world, but this one deserves a relatively high score of 8.

Exploring new planets never really got old, even if I wished there was more stuff on them.

2. Character Creation and Development. Not really improved since Starflight, which is too bad. The game starts with a good idea: that performance in things like communication, analyzing sensor readings, and finding continuum fluxes should be based on the skill level of the assigned crewmember. But it screws this up by making training so cheap and the consequences of less-than-perfect scores so severe, that you'd be crazy not to sell off some equipment and get your science officer, navigator, and communicator up to 250 in their respective skills ASAP. It also makes secondary skills essentially worthless for each character, with the captain the most worthless of all, needing no skills at all to do his job. As with the first game, you cease thinking of the crew as individual characters from the moment they occupy their slots. There are some role-playing consequences of a couple of races: humans go loopy in the nebula, and Elowan have terrible survival rates. But neither is enough to really "matter" the way that having Thrynn or Elowan members in the first game affected encounters. I'd go so far as to say that the game's approach to characters is so poor that it causes it to skirt the line of a "CRPG." Score: 2.

Training crewmembers is the game's entire approach to character development, and even then it only matters for one skill per character--and no skills at all for the captain.

3. NPC Interaction. This is another area that hasn't changed much from Starflight, but in this category that's actually a positive. With its "postures" and question categories, Starflight and Starflight II remain the closest thing to "dialogue options" that we start to see in the mid-1990s. You have to test out different postures with different races, find out what works, watch their responses carefully, and ask the right follow-up questions to get all the clues and lore you need to finish the game. It's possible to miss entire threads of discussion, as evidenced by my failure to communicate with the G'nunk at all and several threads I read about in a walkthrough regarding the Tandelou and Humna Humna. I much appreciated the new "replay" feature and used it extensively.

Talking to NPC aliens is vital to filling in the history of the galaxy.

The only "problem" with all of this is that the postures become a Machiavellian exercise of figuring out what's likely to allow you to squeeze the most out of the alien races and not a way of "role-playing." And some variance in what postures worked best in certain situations would have been helpful, rather than aliens that always respond best to one posture or another.

I also feel like I'm being a little generous in extending the concept of an "NPC" to entire races rather than individual characters. There are no memorable individuals among the people you meet in the game, including no NPCs at all among your companions back at starport. It would have been nice to occasionally encounter an alien captain who bucked the trend. But as a whole, the races were memorable if a bit silly. The multiple-personality species, the hostile G'nunk, and the bizarrely-religious Tandelou felt truly alien.

The ability to trade crewmembers with other races was interesting though not really well-implemented. All I got from trading with the Dweenle was a doctor who never stopped whining about how no one liked him. I'm sorry I missed what happened from trading with the G'nunk or even talking with them; apparently, I would have learned more about Spemin and Umanu weapons, gotten the clue as to the mining drone, and received a warning on the gas slug. Score: 7.

You're not the first mate, jackass. You're the doctor.

4. Encounters and Foes. This category blends with "NPCs" in this game, so I've said most of what I can say about it. Both the NPC races and the non-NPC foes (the Umanu, the hostile Leghk, and the Uhl) are equally memorable, well-described, and well-integrated into the game's lore. Each encounter in space is a slightly nerve-wracking experience, as you try to juggle scanning and hailing while watching for signs of hostility and trying to determine if you should raise shields and arm weapons.

Planet-side, things aren't quite as much fun. You encounter groups of aliens wandering around planets in vehicles and on foot, but you can't have any contact with them. There are about a dozen races who exist only on planets, and while their images are neat to look at when trading, it would have been nice to have a deeper level of interaction. Score: 7.

Killing Spemin with my ATV's laser wasn't nearly as fun as shooting them down in space.

5. Combat. Still the weakest part of the game. It's all action-based, with no depth to the tactics. As PetrusOctavianus pointed out, it's extremely binary: either you're hopelessly outmatched and you die, or you're able to wear away the enemy by dancing around the periphery of the battlefield. It was also binary in another way for me: I either died or escaped combat unscathed. This meant that throughout the game, my engineer had essentially nothing to do.

The game removed a little of the frustration from Starflight by having you automatically shoot at the closest enemy rather than having to turn and point at him, but I still felt the controls were clumsy and unresponsive. Finally, we have the issue that combat is basically unnecessary throughout the game--you don't even get any decent loot from it--until the final battle, where you face a dozen ships.

For such a cerebral, logistic game, I don't know why the developers didn't take a more statistics-based approach to combat. It would have been a lot more fun if you'd seen combat only from the bridge of the ship, with the various ship's officers shouting reports and the captain having to make tactical decisions. Very disappointing. Score: 2.

One of many massive space battles in which all I did was fly around and hit SPACE.

6. Equipment. There's no personal equipment in the game, like a regular CRPG, but there's lots of equipment for the ship, and buying upgrades is fun enough that I think the game deserves a reasonably high score. It's also fun to make notes, chase leads, and slowly collect artifacts from various corners of the galaxy, seeing slow but palpable boosts to effectiveness and convenience along the way. The psychic scanner and planet teleporter turned out to be extremely good rewards for a long series of trades, and yet they weren't so powerful that they broke the game. I also liked that the various items weren't strictly necessary. I ended the game without finding a "mineral drone" (I never even heard about it), the trade routes map from the Humna Humna (should have given them more Shyneum, I guess), or the shield nullifier from the G'nunk. Score: 6.

My end-game ship.

7. Economy. Definitely the one area improved from Starflight. The trading system was original and interesting, and required careful note-taking. There are enough things to buy with money (if nothing else, you have to keep stocked on fuel) that I didn't feel too rich, even at the end. I also like that there were several ways to make money: mining and trading ore, trading specialty goods, capturing and selling life forms, and logging colonizable planets.

That said, I think the game sabotaged its trading and mining system a bit by making it so lucrative to identify planets for colonization. I made about 70% of my money that way even though I spent the least amount of time on that activity. I wish there had been more of a point to all of the careful note-taking I did on trade goods; there should have been more game time in which I loaded up with cargo on one planet to haul it to another. For the same reason, it never made sense to waste a lot of time bartering even though the game introduced a complex system for doing so. Score: 7.

8. Quests. The main quest is compelling and multi-staged, and yet flexible enough that you can collect intelligence from a variety of sources. There's even a bit of a choice at the end: whether to let the Uhl live and relocate, or kill him (it doesn't seem to affect anything, though). I really wish the game had built in some side-quests, though. The huge and open game world would have been perfect for a kind-of radiant quest system in which you solved local problems, destroyed space pirates, helped injured vessels, and so forth. I suppose you can see the identification and selling of certain prized trade goods as kind of a "side-quest," but I think the developers could have done a lot more with the world and mechanics they constructed. Score: 4.

Yet another piece of the main quest.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I found the graphics (with the occasional animation) pretty enough. The sound was piercing and annoying, and I left it off for most of the game. Aside from combat, I thought the interface was the worst part of the game. There are few enough commands that they could have been mapped to individual keys rather than requiring the player to scroll through a cumbersome menu. Commands are unresponsive in crucial times, like in combat (although there might be some emulator issues here), and there's no excuse for changing--completely flipping, in some cases--the "execute," "pause," and "move on to another option" functions of the ENTER and SPACE keys. It is unclear at numerous places when someone has more to say and you needed to hit SPACE to continue, or when he's done talking and SPACE moves you to a different command. Worst of all is the "playback" feature in which you can review your previous conversations with different species. The otherwise-useful feature offers no way to escape from it once it's selected, meaning if you choose it accidentally (or have already found the information you're seeking), you have to finish scrolling through the entirety of your conversation--but you can't hit SPACE to do that too quickly, or you might end up accidentally selecting it again. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. The game features exceptional world nonlinearity even as the quest itself is pretty linear. It felt like it lasted just the right amount of time, and at pretty much the right difficulty level. There were times I felt challenged, but rarely did I feel frustrated. I wouldn't call it enormously replayable, but it would be fun to see what happens with the G'nunk as well as some of the artifacts I never found. Score: 7.

I was right: the final score of 53 turns out to match Starflight exactly. It jives with my assessment that in totality, Starflight II is equally as good a game as Starflight, just slightly less impressive because it was developed three years later. I had hoped it would be more like the Ultima series, which between IV (1985) and V (1988) kept its focus on a great game world, plot, and quest, but introduced significantly more advanced and enjoyable elements to things like combat, dungeon exploration, and inventory.

Chris Lombardi's review in the December 1989 issue of Computer Gaming World (p. 18) echoes mine. He praises the open game world, the interactions with the alien species, the plot, and the general sense of exploration while criticizing the simplistic combat and often-frustrating interface. (There was a lot of discussion of the saving system--supporting only one save file, deleting it upon entire party death--and a tough copy-protection system, neither of which I experienced in my version.) But he concludes that "the world of Starflight 2 is one of the most colorful worlds ever crammed into a computer."

The magazine also granted the game the title of "Role-Playing Game of the Year" in September 1990, with the other nominees being Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Princess, Dragon Wars, Keys of Maramon, and Ultima VI. Their concept of related "years" is a bit different than mine, and I haven't played all of these games, but to me Starflight II fails in enough classic RPG categories--while still being a fun game--that I'd be hard-pressed to rank it above some of the other games I've already played in 1989, including The Magic Candle, The Dark Heart of Uukrul, and even Chaos Strikes Back, although it technically has a higher score than all of them.

I should mention that CGW turned on them a bit in their November 1996 superlative issue, listing it among the 15 "Least Rewarding Endings of All Time," but their excuse--"If your crew was destroyed, you lost your saved game files, as well"--is a little unfair. That's not really about the ending of the game.

Starflight II was the second and last of two games developed by Binary Systems, a company formed, according to MobyGames, by "five guys who met in college." Greg Johnson is credited as the lead developer. He would later go on to develop Star Control and Star Control II, both of which seem to have questionable CRPG credentials but are on my list anyway for 1990 and 1992. They are often given as spiritual descendants of Starflight, so I look forward to checking them out. Johnson also designed the popular ToeJam & Earl series for consoles, which a lot of people seem to love but sounds like absolute torture to me; thankfully, they're not CRPGs.

I'm also looking forward to Protostar: War on the Frontier (1993), originally developed as Starflight III by Tsunami Media but changed when their contract with Electronic Arts fell through. I'm a little leery since none of the developers are the same, but it supposedly features very similar gameplay with more advanced graphics, sound, and combat. There's also a page online promising a fan-made Starflight III: Mysteries of the Universe, but it's been up since 1997 and not updated since November 2011, so I'm not holding my breath.

      
Starflight II was one of my "anchors" for 1989: a game I was pretty sure I would enjoy, placed strategically among games that I either didn't think I'd enjoy or didn't know either way.  My next doesn't come up until Dragon Wars, and there are at least five games I know next-to-nothing about in between, starting with Knights of Legend.