Demo Impression: STARDUST: Wish of Witch - Combine Attacks to Conquer Your Foes In This Bewitching SRPG

Written by Jared T. Hooper on 02 Feb 2026

I frequent r/IndieGaming to check out the up-and-coming projects indie devs are cooking up, and while some look nice or cool, not much, if anything, has me ripping open my wallet so that I can give the developer the last dollar bills to my name. That is until I happened across a trailer for STARDUST: Wish of Witch, an SRPG with such amazing artwork and animations that I could hardly believe it had come from a studio making their debut project. As a lover of SRPGs and wonderful pixel art, it was love at first sight, and when the demo came out not long after, I downloaded it at light speed.

Story

The story begins with a camera pan onto a young magician napping blissfully beside a lake. And then the protagonist bursts onto the scene, declares she's the protagonist and will do protagonist things, and this is how STARDUST breaks the record for “Fastest time for a protagonist to cross the Threshold in the Hero's Journey.”

These are our main characters, Yu and Star, Star being a young girl who's dubbed herself the heroic hero who will go on heroic adventures to do heroic things, and Yu being a lackadaisical boy who only puts up with Star because if he didn't, she'd probably fall into a well trying to rescue a cat from a tree. They're the red oni, blue oni duo required in every story with two main characters, and because I've seen their countless counterparts, they weren't tripping my dopamine receptors famished for new things. Their most interesting quality is that their names coincidentally combine to make the name of the Pokémon Staryu.

Star in particular didn't leave a warm first impression. That “I'm the protagonist!” declaration wasn't just me taking the piss out of her character—being a hero and doing heroic things on a heroic adventure really is her sole motivation and character trait. Her zest and goofiness with how far she'll play into this alleged fated role were, I'd put money on, supposed to endear me to her straight away, but too many questions were swirling around my head to fall for her charm right away.

While it's good Star has a goal driving her actions, her goal is extremely nebulous. It'd be one thing if she wanted to be a doctor or a farmer or a guild receptionist. It's another for her to want to be the hero. That's a definitive position, a legendary role. It demands questions of who the hero is, what they do, who were past heroes. I'm not asking for an exposition dump from Staryu rehearsing the battle between the Demon Lord and the Great Hero five score ago that the Great Hero won, but with his dying breath, the Demon Lord swore to return in exactly one century, so now every prevailing authority is on a desperate search for potential candidates. All that's needed is a brief exchange between the two:

Yu: For the last time, what makes you think you're the next hero?

Star: Who better but yours truly to put the Demon Lord back in his place?!

With just those two lines, a foundation's laid that can be built upon, each beam and frame an answer to a mystery keeping the audience engaged: Why's Star so confident in her fighting abilities? What's the Demon Lord's deal? If Star might be the next hero, who was/were the previous hero(es)? Pieberry's journey in WitchSpring R starting off as a run to the next village over to pick up some pie wasn't a thrilling start, but it still took the time to bake in questions and sprinkle in ingredients that would ferment later on. Everything out of Star's mouth is some variation on “I'm the hero!” and every response out of Yu's mouth is some variation on “Please be quiet for five minutes...” STARDUST's story as it is relays too little information and fails to add any. It doesn't lay down a foundation so much as scratch the outline of one in the dirt before dancing around it for the next two hours.

Needless to say, the story's hook was too dull to snatch me, but then it switched out lures and hooked me when things accelerated from 1 to 100 when the countryside came under siege by a city's worth of anthropomorphic hyenas. A local leader of an adventurers' guild declares a state of emergency under which anyone with a sword and a pulse has to get out there and euthanize the hyena-men, which Staryu find themselves surrounded by. It's a surprisingly effective bump in the pacing, the level of the threat communicated succinctly by the guild leader's frantic alarm and Staryu's panic when they put down a pack only for reinforcements to roll up right after. And then to top it off, the guild leader realizes there's something majorly up about the formation of the hyena-men and marches off like he's getting ready to awaken a secret mecha to raze their ranks. The excitement, thrill, and suspense of this arc more than make up for the character shortcomings from Staryu.

Due to this sudden hyena-men invasion, the story doesn't receive the opportunity to fully settle before the demo ends, but from what little shook out, the long-term setup seems to be that Staryu will complete jobs as registered members of the adventurers' guild, like literally every generic isekai or fantasy anime that exists. I don't need more than two hands to count the number of isekai or fantasy anime that I would consider as anything better than “It was good, I guess,” and if STARDUST is looking to become the video game version of That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Lvl. 1 Tamer With God's Pet Dragon As My Familiar, I'm apprehensively curious how things'll pan out. On the one hand, the character writing leaves a lot to be desired, but on the other, it seems to have plot down strong, which is already one leg up on what most isekai/fantasy anime have.

Somehow, I've accidentally found myself on a Korean game kick as of late, because STARDUST is the fourth Korean-made game in a row I've played. For pretty much everything I watch or play, I default to English voice actors, but if that's unavailable, I fall back on Japanese voice acting. STARDUST is the first time I've listened to Korean voicework, though because I don't speak a lick of Korean, I'm not a good judge of the performances. All I can say is that the styles, tones, and everything is about on par with what you'd get out of your typical Japanese performance.

What I am a good judge on is English writing, and having recently played WitchSpring 3 and WitchSpring R, I can use their respective scripts as opposite poles of a spectrum measuring the quality of a translated English script, and the script of STARDUST sits somewhere in the middle, closer toward R's pole. Broadly, it's a good script, with natural-sounding sentences and responses. However, as the story progressed, I found one mistake, like quotation marks being used on the same side of the phrase they were trying to encapsulate, then another mistake, with twice as many quotation marks than what was needed, and then at some point, some sentences were technically grammatically correct but would sound unnatural coming out of a native speaker's mouth. There're plenty more mistakes I could list off, but it's the same issue the WitchSpring games have, most notably 3, where they were translated from Korea by Koreans, presumably with no native English speakers being asked to give the scripts a once-over. And since video game scripts tend to load up on mistakes the deeper they go into the game, regardless of the translator's native language, I can only imagine the full game's script will have as many mistakes as there are ants in an anthill.

Dialogue progression was terribly inconsistent. Rather frequently, the game would ignore my input to skip to the next line of dialogue once I had finished reading the current line. These non-skippable lines are tethered to character animations, which is nothing new, but where other games reserve these unskippable lines to a precious few story moments, STARDUST is punctuated with them everywhere due to the common drawn-out character animations. My problem isn't these drawn-out character animations, it's the communication. The textbox lacks the little arrow that informs the player that a full line of text is displayed. The arrow visible in my screenshots is actually my cursor, and it reads NEXT when hovered over the textbox regardless if I can skip to the next line or not. Had my cursor read NEXT only when I could skip to the next line, I likely wouldn't have had this confusion when the game would sporadically ignore my skip input. Tack on the handful of instances when I shouldn't have been allowed to skip but managed to anyway, jerking the characters into different positions and poses, and it's a case for the dialogue interaction needing a parse-through for quality.

Combat

JRPGs are where I overpower myself so that I can obliterate whole demonic armies with a single swing of my sword, and SRPGs are where I test my intellectual mettle by routing the baddies like a covert team of special operatives. STARDUST seems to be doing something of a blend between the two.

The demo lasts two hours, filled by seven battles, and each party member gains a good hand of skills, with offensive options like dealing big damage to baddies, charging at distant baddies, or attacking all baddies surrounding the attacker, or supportive options like dodging or buffing an ally, so there's always something fresh to try out. While the how, when, and where these skills are used is what constitutes the S in this SRPG, the potential to overpower oneself comes in the form of combo skills, which can be stacked with other skills, resulting in a burst of extra damage by Yu or Star charging at a baddie before scooting around to their booty. As long as a skill's off cooldown and you've got sufficient mana, there doesn't appear to be a cap on a combo stack, so a bunch of little damage numbers could group up into one big damage number, like performing the right combination of skills in Ys to atomize a baddie. However, for the potential this mechanic has, it's limited by how limited the combo skills are. Only select skills are combo skills, yet I could fill out a war manual with the many strategies possible if every skill could be linked together. Like I could have Star charge into a pack of baddies before doing a spin attack. Or Yu can incinerate a baddie, teleport deeper into enemy ranks, blast a squadron, then yoink out to safety. It could feel like the SRPG version of a sick League of Legends play. It makes me wonder why these many potential strategies were curtailed from the game before they could ever be utilized.

The list of strategies may not be bloated like I'd want, but the difficulty sure is. Ever fight a boss that isn't hard but that takes a while because it has a ton of HP? That's the hyena-men. For most of the demo, all you have are Staryu, and they're always up against eight or more hyena-men, each of whom needs three or four hits to defeat, and with multi-hit attacks being situational and having long cooldowns, it became somewhat tedious taking them down. On reflection, I think what kept battles from getting boring was planning positions so Staryu weren't bumped around like schoolyard bully victims. Still remaining on this reflection, it probably wouldn't have mattered because Star's pretty tanky. A few times when she was surrounded by hyena-men, she sponged their hits and walked away still raring to go. Save for the demo boss, who one-shot two of my party members with a single attack, I never felt like I was up against any substantial threat.

Attack damage was kind of weird. Skills would state exactly how much damage they would deal, and then never deal that exact figure. I assume the stated damage is the power of said attack, with the final figure being the damage output, after it's been run through an equation. Damage output being higher or lower than power is pretty standard. Battles are no fun if Flamethrower only ever deals 95 damage. What matters is the communication. If a skill said it had 57 power and not that it would lower a hyena-man's HP by 57 points, I wouldn't have raised a brow at the contradictory figures. This might be something lost in translation, where the exact terminology and jargon for video games doesn't translate so cleanly from Korean to English.

Another likely miscommunication between the two languages comes from one attack description that says it damages baddies, plural, within a certain range, but it's actually a single-target attack. For clarity, it should just read that it damages a baddie.

Also weird was how many clicks I had to perform to do everything. In other SRPGs, if I wanted to bop a baddie on the noggin, all I had to do was click on them, confirm the attack, and my guy would automatically walk over and bop 'em. STARDUST doesn't allow that. What I had to do was select the option to walk, select which tile to walk to, then select which direction to face, after which I would have to select my skills, pick out the one for the noggin bop, choose whose noggin I'm bopping, confirm I'm bopping their noggin, and only then would the baddies's noggin be bopped. It wasn't more than a few turns into the second battle before I was rushing through clicks so I could get to the combat proper. Some of the fat could be trimmed by doing what Stella Glow does, which is changing your character's direction after the battle step, during what would be a “denouement period,” when the rush of the battle is past, and not during the build-up to the battle step. As things are, it felt like I had to fill out a bunch of bureaucratic paperwork that had to go through three different governmental agencies before I was granted permission to run to the grocer for milk.

It got even worse with combos. The first time I placed one, the attack confirmation icon didn't show, so I wasn't sure if it was a bug or if there was some crucial step I had missed. I went to look at the tutorial for combos to see if there was some detail I had missed or misunderstood, but I played the demo before the update that would allow tutorials to be reread, so I had to abandon my combo for that turn. Later, I tried again and discovered that adding on that combo also added to the sequence of clicks that needed to be done. While this made sense for combos that needed specification on whose booty Star was scooting to, it was unnecessary bloat for a combo that only added extra damage. It was another sheaf of paperwork I needed to fill out when I wanted to bring my mother with to the grocer.

Maps were a bore. They felt like procedural generations of the same grassy field, with the only influence on movement being slightly steep changes in elevation. There were no groves to use for cover or lakes to sneak around for flanks. If each map was the same flat plains, I doubt battles would have played out too differently, if at all. What's more, the enemy selection had little influence on how I maneuvered my party. In Fire Emblem, if there's a platoon of Wyvern Riders, I'd send my archers that direction, or if there was an enemy mage, I'd send in another mage to tank their attacks and trail them with a horseman to swoop in for the killing blow. Hyena-men come in three varieties: hyena-man, slightly stronger hyena-man, and hyena-man-with-bow. While I might've'd Yu blast a hyena-man-with-bow from a safe distance, I fought each type of hyena-man the same as the last. The purpose of enemy variety is eliminated if they don't force a change in strategy.

A last-minute complaint I'm wedging in is how leveling up is done. Not the system itself, but the display. In just about every RPG I've ever played, a level-up is displayed as an EXP bar that fills up, sprays particles, and celebrates with flashy text and a merry chime. STARDUST skips all that fanfare and just shows your current level and experience bar like it's this semester's report card. It had me thinking after the first battle that Staryu started off at level 2, not level 1, and it wasn't until the second battle's report card that I realized they were leveling up. I can't begin to fathom why STARDUST, which has such a quirky and excitable protagonist, is such a wet noodle when it comes to level-ups. That mini-celebration is half the fun of a level-up. I can get not wanting to whiplash the mood, since the level-up screen, if memory serves, only comes up during the quieter or dramatic moments in the story, serving as a brief reprieve in the chapter. Even so, level-ups can be subdued by showing the level-up without the glitz and glamour as opposed to celebrating it with.

Art

The thing that stole both my attention and my heart. The artwork in this game, simply put, is incredible. It's not detailed like Blasphemous or stylized like Hyper Light Drifter, but its colorful palette, flashy attack animations, and detailed sprites reminds me of the JRPGs the Game Boy Advance got. Character sprites themselves are a marvel. Their dimensions are large, averaging about 30x50 px, which allows for a lot of detail in their clothing, hair, general shading, and expressions, and the sprites are nothing if not expressive, especially and specifically Star, who's basically an eight-year-old that can't sit still and is always gesticulating like she's trying for the leading role in her elementary school's play. Even if the writing for Star turns her into a one-note character, I'd be a horrible liar to say she has no charm, because it's absolutely infectious. My favorite scene from the demo is when another adventurer joins their party, and this third member is so taken by Star that the pair of them waltz out of the guild building like a pair of goofy goobers.

What astounds me is not just how great the character animations are, but how many there are, and what astounds me even further is how many characters there are. There's a few scenes that take place on a bridge, and in any other game, the NPCs would be generic-looking sprites mocked up so that it doesn't look like Staryu are in the Bakemonogatari anime. In STARDUST, they're so vibrant and unique, they look like they should be their own named characters with a role in the story, and it half makes me wonder if a few won't at some point in the full game become party members.

With so many characters and so many animations spread across them, it's almost a letdown how few enemies the game has, but I can let it off the hook because, having done animation myself, I can attest to how difficult, time-consuming, and oftentimes tedious it is doing something as simple as a walk cycle. That characters have unique animations for specific scenes that'll probably never be used again, like a woman sliding her hands across the back of a couch, is a sign of bona fide madlad-ery I tip my hat to.

Since it feels like the art department petered out on enemy variety, I like to imagine the demo's arc was written to account for the sparse enemy variety. I have no proof of this, and it's almost certainly not what happened, but if it were, it'd be a clever way of hiding development limitations.

Though on that topic, I can't help but worry that with all the detail stocked into the game's frontside, time or budget constraints won't allow the same toward the backside, meaning new and unique animations will cease to be, or even that characters will forego animations altogether.

But more than anything else in all of this game's art, what absolutely won me over are the hand-drawn cut-ins for ultimate attacks. They're these animations whose choppy frames but intimate distance look ripped straight from an action series like My Hero Academia or Kill La Kill, which make straightforward punches into intense spectacles. The GBA-quality pixel art on its own was great, but seeing those ultimate animations, and in an indie game, no less, blew my mind.

Conclusion

STARDUST: Wish of Witch seems like the lovechild of a bunch of artists who are masters of their crafts but are still figuring out the intricacies of game design. Between the GBA sprites and the ultimates' sakuga, the artwork itself is all the promotional material the game needs. However, attracting an audience and pleasing it are two different accomplishments. While I did enjoy battles, I didn't enjoy them anywhere near what I have from Fire Emblem, and though the writing has some good highs, its lows were holes that needed filling in. That said, everything in the package most certainly has potential. It just needs some fine-tuning, elbow grease, and some spit polish, and once it's received all that, I think STARDUST could very well, when it releases later this year, shine bright as a star.