Oozora Subaru Plays Suikoden STAR LEAP Up to a Burned Village and a Journey’s Start

HOLOLIVE — Oozora Subaru played the opening chapters of Konami’s new mobile RPG Suikoden STAR LEAP, which came out on Aug. 7, in a roughly two-hour stream on Tuesday. She said it was a sponsored play, a follow-up to an earlier stream in which three Hololive members tried the game, and that she had wanted to try the series for a while. She had not played it before, and said she was nervous about carrying the stream alone.

After watching the trailer and a rundown of the series, which has run since 1995 and now spans 12 titles, she was pleased to learn that the game’s cast of more than 108 recruitable characters joins the player through the story rather than through the gacha, or random draw, and that the characters are voiced. She named the hero Subaru, and the game opened with a hunt in which the hero’s father and a traveling swordsman, Georg, coached her through a first fight. She called the graphics and the music excellent and kept pausing to explore the village, which she said was far bigger than she had expected.

“I think I like this game.” — Oozora Subaru, after the first village scenes

The mood turned when a band of attackers set the village on fire and demanded the crest the hero carries. The father offered himself in her place, and the crest then flashed and turned the villagers into animals, leaving only the hero human. Subaru reacted with disbelief and a good deal of laughter as the innkeeper Marie, her childhood friend Shirin and the father, now a goat, all spoke in their new forms. The group decided to look for the family’s adviser, who was away in Gregminster, and a servant who had saved the village asked to join the trip.

Subaru paused midway to go through the game’s other features, then reached the village’s sacred tree, where the party prayed for a safe journey. She spent the final stretch on the game’s character draws, a free tutorial pull and several ten-pull rounds that turned up an unusually large number of turtle characters, which became a running joke with viewers.

In her closing remarks, Subaru said the game was very fun. She praised the way pixel art kept its charm while giving the world more depth, called the female characters especially cute, and said she liked the near-full voice acting. She added that the village life made the adventure feel real, and signed off joking that the village had burned down.