You’ll Want To Tune In For Wander Stars, An RPG That Feels Like An ‘80s Anime

By Wallace Truesdale | September 19, 2025 | 12:00pm

Video Games Reviews Wanderstars

You’ll Want To Tune In For Wander Stars, An RPG That Feels Like An ‘80s Anime

Homage can be a scary word to conjure. The world is already full of art and entertainment that can’t be separated from their influences and inspirations, but calling a work an homage carries some extra weight. It implies that a new piece is not just referencing an older work, but doing so with words boldened and sentences underlined. It’s carrying its references almost like a bow of respect to the original work. While such unabashed referencing can be good for paying respects to older art, it carries a few fundamental dangers. A balancing act starts where a creator’s unique vision begins to compete for space with a consumer’s nostalgia. Or, the new product can retroactively become less exciting should someone look up its influences after the fact and decide the latter was better. Moreover, too much respect for past works can run the risk of repeating their mistakes in a misguided sense of loyalty or blind love.

With all that being said, developer Paper Castle’s RPG Wanderstars is not simply a good homage to older anime — it’s a great one that understands exactly what was good and worth resurfacing from the period of anime it’s quoting, while also confidently realizing a unique story full of heart and comedy that’s bolstered by its word-based combat system.

In this adventure, players follow Ringo, a good-natured but sometimes naive 14-year-old who’s always ready to fight, and Wolfe, a tough exterior/soft interior beastman with a knack for stealing wallets and keeping it too real, as they travel the cosmos to find pieces of the Wanderstar map. Ringo is looking for the map in hopes of it leading to her missing older brother, while Wolfe has separate reasons that unravel over the game’s 10-episode structure. Backdropped by a head-bumping soundtrack, their adventures have them facing off against many foes—including but not limited to crustaceans that make Larry the Lobster look small, crows with knives, cacti that spend too much time on their phone, teenage witches, space pirates, and zombies—which they and their allies will fight with Kiai, the word-based martial arts.

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While the look of Wanderstars is clearly inspired by anime from the ‘80s and ‘90s, like Sailor Moon, Yu Yu Hakusho, and especially Dragon Ball, and ropes in a few tropes like the classic Akira slide and muscular elders, its combat is where the RPG begins to borrow more than just aesthetics. When fighting, players form attacks by combining words—categorized by ACT (action), ELE (element), and MOD (modifiers)—within a limited number of slots to create powerful moves. For example, to create a strong kick with flame properties, you’d pick KICK from the ACT words, FIRE or FLAME from the ELE words, and BIG and/or EXTRA from the MOD words, culminating in an attack that’s read and delivered as BIG FLAME KICK. You could even do an attack like EXTRA BIG SWIFT FLAME KICK since modifiers can be stacked, unlike action and elemental words. While it’s a mechanic that could feel silly elsewhere, it’s right at home in a game inspired by anime where characters yell out their attacks as if their lives depend on it, because often it does. Plus, what’s wrong with being silly?

Wanderstars screenshot where Ringo faces off against zombies

While the diversity of words and enemies alone makes this combat system praise-worthy, the extra PUNCH is a feature where, if you get an enemy’s health within a certain range, they surrender without requiring a full KO. While you can knock out every enemy you come across (you never kill anyone in this game), almost every fight can be ended via this alternative Peace Out method. This element can completely rewire the thought process behind a fight, as you’re no longer trying to reach the highest damage output you can create with a set of words, but instead playing with different combos until you find one that does a specific range of damage. There’s also an incentive to do so, as ending fights without KO’ing foes turns them into friends—because this wouldn’t be an anime-inspired RPG without your enemy immediately becoming your ally—that give you stat effects called Pep Ups. These boosts stick with you for the entire duration of an episode and can be incredibly helpful for smoother runs.

But even outside the practical benefits of aiming for a specific health range, it also creates a mechanical emulation of one of martial arts’ most important lessons: restraint. If you’ve ever spent time learning a martial art, or even just listened to someone who is, you’ll know that it’s equally important to know not just how to punch, but when to stop punching. I feel like this can get lost in translation sometimes with action TV shows, anime, or otherwise, since the high-stakes nature of these dramatic stories often leads to kill-or-be-killed scenarios. And Wanderstars doesn’t avoid this completely, as bosses are the only group in which you can’t end a fight via this Peace Out method, but it’s clear the game wants you to think about your damage with a softer intention. Truly, the only hiccups encountered with this combat system were a few bugs that briefly interrupted the game’s flow. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a quick exit to the Main Menu, but they were annoying snags nonetheless.

However, while the combat system carries Wanderstars far, its cast of characters and their stories are a major reason to see this game through to credits. Watching Ringo and Wolfe’s initially adversarial relationship blossom into a deep bond is heart-warming, not to mention full of genuinely hilarious moments. Wolfe brings a mature perspective, tinged with the wisdom of one who’s had to do less than savory things to make it to tomorrow, that contrasts well with Ringo’s unyielding excitement for seeing what the universe has to offer. They both help each other grow and break out of their respective shells, all while building a chemistry that’s rarely boring to watch. This is in addition to some party recruitments that I won’t spoil here, but only make the story more interesting as Wolfe, Ringo, and the player learn how deep the rabbit hole goes regarding who’s interested in the Wanderstar map and why. While some of its twists and turns are predictable, the overall execution makes the story a fun ride from start to finish.

I cannot overstate the role of humor in this story’s success, which is one of the most charming bits of both Wanderstars and the era of anime it pulls from. The show that came to mind more than any other while playing this game was the 1980s Dragon Ball, the story of Kid Goku that preceded the alien epic that the series is arguably more known as today. Despite being born well after its run, Dragon Ball was the first anime I ever watched to completion, and I’m so glad I saw it before Dragon Ball Z. Outside of its more grounded approach to fighting that doesn’t involve frequent hair transformations and ki blasts that blow up planets, I appreciate that comedy is an emphasis in Dragon Ball, not an afterthought. Faces are expressive and stretch wide with reactions, bodies collapse to the floor out of shock, gags run rampant, and appear even during the most serious circumstances. You can still find bits of this in today’s shounen landscape, with shows like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer having no shortage of zany characters, but even they feel like they’re pulling their comedic punches. Or, to put it another way, while the characters in these shows can be funny at times and often need to be in the face of the grave circumstances they face, Dragon Ball exists in a world that is funny at its core.

Wanderstar not only manages to capture this magic, but also eschews the grosser parts of the era it comes from. There are no lecherous old men who are treated as heroes. Women are not sidelined or there solely for the purpose of advancing a man’s story. Gay people are not magically missing or made out to be monsters when they do appear. Ultimately, this is a story carried by a strong-willed teenage girl and a suave, flirtatious gay man (technically a beastman, to be fair, but he mostly acts like a regular dude who happens to have claws). And it knows how to make that dynamic funny, both for who they are on paper and who you discover them to be over time.

Overall, Wanderstars makes using the word homage less scary because it knows what lessons to learn from the past. It recognizes what’s good about its inspirations and what to leave behind, while ensuring its unique personality shines throughout its entire runtime. At every step in the journey, I was excited to see what mess Ringo and Wolfe would find themselves in; I knew that, regardless of what was waiting for them, an adventure worthy of the works that inspired it was about to unfold.

Wanderstars was developed by Paper Castle and published by Fellow Traveler. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Wallace Truesdale is a journalist and critic who loves games and much of what they come into contact with. He’s written for Unwinnable, Stop Caring, PopMatters, and more. You can usually find him blogging at his site Exalclaw, hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch, or devouring some cookies.