Deckbuilding titles have been there and back again in recent years, and I’ve played just so, so many of them. From Fights in Tight Spaces to Phantom Rose 2: Sapphire, it’s clear that the roguelike approach of letting you build your arsenal of whatever on the fly is here to stay. With Slay the Spire 2 on the horizon, you need something truly different to help pull focus and get people’s attention. Wander Stars, a bold new experiment from Paper Castle Games, pulled the wool over my eyes with an innovative design and on-point anime styling that kept me from realizing I was in a deckbuilder until it was too late. By the time I realized, I was already several hours in and eyeballs deep in well trodden tropes, ridiculous word salads and some incredibly enjoyable setups and deliveries.

Ok, not the wittiest exchange, but effective, nonetheless.

Ringo is our protagonist, an orphan being raised by her grandmother deep in the mountainous countryside, where she spends her day practicing martial arts and being rude, because that’s what you’re expecting. An errand into town to buy cilantro takes a wild turn, though, when a wolf-man from the stars crashlands on a sweet jetbike and starts a chain of events that pulls Ringo deep into a conspiracy about fate, wealth and power, not to mention her long-lost brother. Thankfully, Ringo is a deep practitioner of Kiai, allowing her to channel the elements and her deep powers through the art of adjectives and superlatives. Be ready for when the enemy brings a Heavy Repetitive Flame Knee to the face, because Ringo has her work cut out for her!

Wander Stars has no shame and no apologies for being as 90s anime as you can imagine. Much like my recent enjoyment with Cobra, Wander Stars apes directly from classic Dragon Ball, with a good number of sound effects you might have found in Macross or Akira to help set the mood (Wolfe’s crash landing is almost a direct copy of the iconic bike skid). It’s not just the standard sprites and animation, either: the choice use of filters to add some CRT grain at the right moments really puts you back in the timeframe, and various facial expressions, transitional moments and even dialogue quips feel like they were aired during those uncertain days of localization back in the 90s. While you’ll never reach the “jelly donuts” level of silly dialogue, everything has a good amount of camp and intent behind it to keep the melodrama going.

Thunderpunching in the desert is probably a euphamism for something.

As an aside, I also loved that Paper Castle Games wanted to throw a bit of cultural flair into Wander Stars, a great nod to the fact that these types of animes made huge impacts well outside of Japan. While Ringo and Budo might be some pretty fruity Japanese names, the fact that you heal up with both takoyaki and empanadas and traverse some distinctly not-Japan landscapes showcases how important things like Dragonball, Saint Seiya and Fist of the North Star were to a lot of younger developers in other countries. The trio of Kay, Andie and Rafa have made something that pops as both an homage to the influence of Wander Stars and something that stands alone as its own world, and that’s phenomenal.

The progression of Wander Stars is done by moving over a branching map that gives you a variety of encounters that can happen between you and the goal for each episode/level. Most of the events can be skipped over if you’re in a hurry: while things like treasure finding and conversational events with NPCs can be helpful and boost your combat in a big way, it’s only the fighting that’s mandatory. The end of each map is a branch that will grant you some kind of boon (increased SP, HP, etc), so you can experiment on the best way for you to move differently through the same areas. You might want to stop at as many places as you can, though, so that you can be prepared for the fights.

Once you hit a battle moment, Ringo (and Wolfe) will engage in word-to-word combat, giving you a limited amount of energy per round as to what you want to say. Not to mention some words are weighted more than others: “fire” only takes up one slot, whereas “flame” takes up double. Carefully tack things together in the right way, and you’ll see how a Super Slow Strike hits differently from a Big Water Knee. Finding an enemy’s weakness will give you bonus SP, which can be used at critical moments to add another word or so to the combination. Each word has cooldown periods, so you need to plan out your attacks sometimes several turns in advance so you’re not just left spamming “block” and hoping for the best.

The man who’s immune to being kicked also grants you immunity to lightning. Story checks out.

While every word has an explanation ready to go for what it does (adds points versus multiplies points, sprinkles in elemental damage, etc.) it’s still a learning curve with every episode of Wander Stars. Enemies tend to have different weaknesses, resistances and immunities. It was wild to find out someone was immune to being kicked, and I had to wrap my head around that one for a moment. The foes you encounter will often have different word lists than you, so some lessons need to be learned by being hit instead of just studying. Combat is turn-based, and the system will sometimes have you doing multiple attacks in a single round (or hitting then defending) while the enemy only gets a single chance for what they’ll do to you. Even though your HP is generally higher and the foes locked into more recognizable patterns, the fights still require your dedication.

Personally, the combat aspect of Wander Stars is the central point of interest, which is good since that’s most of what you’ll be doing. Outside of the animation and the absurdity of the attack names you build, I love that there’s a different level of success by simply wearing down an enemy instead of knocking them out. Getting an opponent in the red and then throwing the peace sign (indicating the battle is over) grants you more Honor points (used between episodes) and often grants you a Pep-Up, which is a passive boon the enemy bestows upon you. You’ll end up gathering a slew of Pep-Ups to decide between over the course of an episode, and, like the words, you can only have so many active at once. This gives you a real sense of customization to help craft a character build that makes the most amount of sense.

The duality of anime love interests.

Unlike other deckbuilders, Wander Stars also has players reset between episodes, discarding all the obtained words, items and Pep-Ups they discovered along the way. This all funnels back into the Honor system, and you can buy extra words to flesh out your linguistic arsenal before jumping into the next stage. If you want to focus on creating a specific elemental build, this is your chance! If you don’t feel like moving forward until you are crazy overpowered (as Goku would want), Honor also lets you buy stat buffs and boosts, increasing health, defense and all that jazz. So you can run the episodes again and again, jumping to the fights on higher difficulty levels to get more Honor faster and just beef yourself to the nines in order to make mincemeat out of every pithy boss that “defends” the end of the episode.

While the experience is excellent overall, I do have some points that took me out of the loop and made things a bit less exciting than they could have been. For one, the moments of dialogue between fights, which are exceptionally expositional (of course they are), do tend to take a while and, while they can be skipped, probably should not be as they explain a lot of reasons why Ringo’s quest goes in the direction it does. It’s a downshift in the momentum, whereas a lot of animes of this genre tend to incorporate the plot dump into the fights, so you can have the best of both worlds. In that same vein, there is no voicework in Wander Stars, which means everything is read and you just have to grin and bear it as you click through screen after screen. 

A classically Japanese idea: utterly dominating nature while pretending to reviere it. Well played.

On a more technical level, the game does have bugs, and it takes a special level of bugginess for me to mention it in a review. Wander Stars seems to have moments where it forgets itself and just arbitrarily changes things, like deciding that half my screen would disappear while the fight continued, or not allowing me to select any attacks as my opponent took every advantage of my disabled state. Once I had a Pep-Up bug where I could suddenly equip every single Pep-Up I had without caring about point limits, which was cool until the game crashed and obviously took that with it. Players coming in hot on this title need to be ready for the experience to have some jank and some glitches, and basically be okay with potentially losing progress until everything gets patched out.

Having said all that, I really enjoyed the loop of Wander Stars. The cooldown period for the words made it so I couldn’t just cheese my way to the top, and the constant learning curve allowed me to really appreciate the craftsmanship that went into making a pipe that wasn’t a pipe, if that makes sense. After being exhausted by everything being a deckbuilder for a while, it was nice to be tricked into enjoying the concept again with some visually and aurally impressive trappings. Making a game that’s fun enough that you don’t bother looking at the bones to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes is a blessing when you’ve been reviewing titles as long as I have.

Ringo doing the “I should have prepared better for this fight” dance.

Classic anime fans and roguelike survivors who want something different are going to discover Wander Stars as a fantastic expedition. The story goes in amazing directions, the engagement of crafting the best “deck” never gets old, and, when it’s running well, it’s a smooth and enjoyable expedition. It’s got heart, it’s got muscle, and it’s got plenty of madness to keep this battle going well after the sunsets. Will Ringo find her brother? Where will the mysterious map lead our heroes? Can a Pineapple Frappe be useful in the heat of battle? Tune in for the next exciting episode of Wander Stars!

Wander Stars is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Wander Stars was provided by the publisher.