Nova Hearts
Developer: Lightbulb Crew
Publisher: Shoreline Games
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Reviewed), PC
Release Date: Available Now
Price: $24.99 USD – Available Here
Overview
There’s always something interesting about trying out a new indie game. While there are plenty of indie developers that happen to be trend chasers, there are just as many that want to set out and try something different and sometimes that game they’ve created turns out to be amazing or at least happens to hit a particular niche that hasn’t been explored before. Other times, it simply falls flat or is downright bad and when it comes to Lightbulb Crew’s Nova Hearts it is unfortunately the latter. With a colorful presentation and enticing aesthetic this visual novel/turn-based RPG seemed like it had potential, but where did it go wrong?
Story
After a number of bad experiences happened during her time away at college and living with her father in the big city, Luce has returned home to her small town of Vermillion to live with her mother again and try to recover. With an understanding mother, Luce may have had a chance to try and come to terms with what happened but before she’s even unpacked her old friend Will and CJ, who she only knew vaguely in elementary school but is treated like a “bestie” find that the best way to meet the summer is to go on an adventure in the biggest party the city has and it just so happens to be hosted by the boy Luce had her first kiss with too.
Despite being thrown into the social deep-end right out of the gate, that is far from the only dire event Luce will face that night at the party as CJ and Luce soon find themselves transforming with magical girl like powers, or magical sentai more-like, and having to battle against fluffy furballs that have begun attacking people at random. Soon the pair meet up with Will who also has gained this new mysterious power and the three form a team of super hero magical girls called Luck, Chaos, and Wish. They’ll have their work cut out for them though as not only have these little random monsters started appearing but larger more intense creatures have also begun to roam around, seemingly capable of commanding these minions and the town of Vermillion itself is seemingly filled with mysteries that unfold all at once in the final chapter.
It feels like the writers at Lightbulb Crew were trying to aim for something special here, or at the very least inclusive, when it came to Nova Hearts’ storyline and characters but unfortunately it all sort of falls short of the mark. The storyline, which we won’t go into too much detail here, is as formulaic as they come with some little twists right near the end that help expand upon earlier elements but they come far too late to actually feel impactful. A few characters get a bit of development here and there but nothing worthwhile, if anything a few even regress. It also doesn’t help that a lot of the characters in the game are paper thin at best which is not a good look for a dating game meant to be “inclusive” to nearly every sexuality and gender identity.
Throughout the visual novel portions of Nova Hearts players will make choices with Luce that almost always simply boil down to answering questions from her friends, enemies, or frenemies, that will raise or lower their friendship and romance meter but these decisions are entirely out of left field at times and often don’t even give players a chance to actually, you know, change things. On countless occasions Luce was given the choice to ogle or openly flirt with a newly introduced or random character like a horndog while others saw her needing to pick from an option of choices that were just flat out bad. What if we don’t want to date any of the current three choices that are presented? Not an option at this point. Even then when players do manage to find certain elements the plot tends to devolve into making no sense whatsoever with what characters are actually talking about, and even later knowledge doesn’t help clear up these inconsistencies.
As mentioned before, the dating aspect is superficial at best and it seems more like Luce, CJ, and Will are more than eager to jump anyone’s bones if given the chance or altogether despite it being clear that at least at one point some characters had feelings for only one person only for it to get tossed right out the window potentially. Even directly trying to choose options to beat away romantic choices with a stick saw characters still liking Luce regardless as shown through the Astro.link app that players can view their relationship status on. This can lead to some frustration when trying to target a romantic option, especially given the game’s abhorrent save system and lack of menu options.
Nova Hearts features only three save files that generally only save the beginning of a scene rather than mid-conversation and to actually “reload” players either need to finish a scene entirely or quit out of the game as there is no way to return to the menu otherwise, making fixing a poor dialogue choice an annoying task, especially since one, at least according to the very glitched achievements we will mention later, saw Luce locked in with a character shortly after meeting her.
Gameplay
As mentioned before, Nova Hearts is part visual novel and part turn based RPG. Players will play through the visual novel segments until they eventually find themselves thrown into a set amount of battles that, when completed, will allow them to continue the storyline. Unfortunately all of these gameplay elements lack quality of life features that one would expect from both genres they are trying to combine here. The visual novel dialogue sequences have no option to pull up a dialogue log, skip previously read text (making replays a slog), or even reload if not in Luce’s bedroom as mentioned before, while the game’s turn-based combat is some of the slowest and simplest that we’ve seen in a while.
Nova Hearts‘ combat system is straight up boring in its design. It features a “timeline” style where the unchanging three party members (occasionally players will have less) all have moves that require certain “preparation” time before an attack, buff, heal, or debuff can be sent out. The same can be said in terms of enemies. Players can choose to delay their attacks to line up their party members’ attacks together to perform “combos” that can be quite powerful when used correctly but given that only four of the eight possible combos can be equipped at any time, it’s a limited system. What is also limited is the fact that there is no real character growth in terms of strength here. Sure, players will earn a a type of XP that can be spent to increase damage, healing, or even delay rate of certain attacks but a fighter’s health or defense will never increase. In fact, players will go right into the final boss with only a hundred health still for two of their party members and when multiple foes can dish out eighty damage a hit with no chance to revive, good luck.
All of these types of combos and attacks, whether done by the player or the enemy, are done in the slowest way possible and there is no way to increase the speed in any way. Using AoE attacks can lighten the load a bit but there are some real cheap encounters late-game and gimmick style bosses that drag the entire experience down and make combat feel like a chore, even compared to the near non-stop hornfest that are the main characters talking to one another. Unfortunately, should players lose in a fight the best they’ll be offered is simply some minor XP that can be used to try to improve a skill, though this is minimal help at best especially against a certain pair of late-game bosses.
It is worth noting that while playing on the Xbox Series X the title ran perfectly fine and loaded quickly as well, which was good to try and avoid some of the dialogue issues with characters from time to time, but it is also worth noting that not did the “phone” screen players use in-between scenes to talk with their allies froze on multiple occasions and would not let us leave the options menu, but the entire achievement system also appears to be incredibly buggy. Achievements for meeting certain characters came an entire chapter after they were meant to, multiple possible spoilers were revealed by a random achievement unlocking in the same conversation that had nothing to do with it, and even those that seem like they should have unlocked remain unobtainable.
Audio & Visuals
One thing Nova Hearts has going for it is style and we only wish there was more of it to see. The character portraits during conversations are nice and expressive while the character designs themselves are vibrant and varied but when it comes to combat, the actual enemies that players will be facing off against are unfortunately almost entirely slight re-skins of one another with the only change-ups happening between chapters. Bosses have unique designs at the very least and the background artwork is quite a treat. It is also nice to note that there are some animated transformation scenes but sadly these are kept rather tame and limited, especially since seeing some of the enemy bosses transform would have been neat as well given that they “say” they’ll be changing forms only to never actually do so.
There is no general voice work through Nova Hearts, there are some minor grunts and chirps of characters speaking slightly when responding either positively or negatively in visual novel segments and the usual grunts and groans of combat and nothing else. The soundtrack consists of fairly standard music that gets more tense during fitting segments such as boss battles and when players are at low health in a fight and in danger of losing but these tracks don’t stand out in any noticeable way.
Overall
It really does feel like there were good hearts and intentions behind the indie game Nova Hearts with the story it is trying to tell and the characters that it features, it just all happens to come together in the wrong ways. Between visual novel segments that lack all of the standard visual novel features and combat that is so dreadful players will wish they could skip it entirely combined with buggy achievements makes this relatively short visual novel one that had a lot of potential behind it but simply never reaches that “spark” that might have helped set the passion ablaze.
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