Shining Song Starnova: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

More admirable for what it sets out to do than what it actually accomplishes, Starnova is a mean-spirited, misogynistic, often excruciatingly crass screed of a visual novel, whose slick presentation is overwhelmed by horrendous, overwritten prose and worse dialogue that reflects the reality of otaku & idol culture more than its author probably intended.

“The deeper truth is that idol fan culture, as well as the closely related anime and manga fan culture, is institutionally incapable of dealing with independence in young women. It seeks out and fetishizes weaknesses and vulnerabilities and calls it moé, it demands submissiveness, endless tearful displays of gratitude, a lack of confidence, and complete control over their sexual independence. […] This whole episode will become part of the all-encompassing AKB48 narrative, but the framework of that narrative will continue to go unquestioned as long as fans cling to misogynistic fantasies and as long as [AKB48 producer Yasushi] Akimoto thinks he can still make money off of them.” — Ian Martin, The Japan Times, on AKB48 member Minami Minegishi’s controversial demotion & video apology, 1 February 2013

DISCLOSURE: I backed this game on Kickstarter for a physical copy, and I also separately donated to the developer’s Patreon for a two-year period following the game’s original announcement. As a result of my financial contributions, I received my digital copy of the game in May, two months prior to the official public release, and this review is based on that early build, which may or may not be different from the final release.

This review will contain spoilers, as well as discussion of sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.

Shining Song Starnova is a game about idols. More specifically, it’s a game about the idol industry and how it is hardly filled with saints. The player stand-in protagonist character, who actually does have a name that I can’t be arsed to remember and is usually just referred to as “Mr. Producer” or “Producer-san”, depending on how the author is feeling, for much of the game, is a former employee of the idol industry who was fired over a curious incident, and after some time struggling to get by, he is now ready to re-enter the industry from the lowest rung. After networking with an old industry chum of his, he is given a production office and seven young ladies who serve as his candidates for his group, all of whom have their own quirks & personality traits. Some of them have prior experience in the industry, some of them just signed up to follow their dreams, but all of them have one thing in common: stand up to the sleazy idol industry and become the top idol group in Japan. Easy, right? Maybe not when one of them is a sex worker, one is fresh from the sticks (no, not Tōhoku, you fucking idiot, KANSAI), one is a social outcast who constantly wears goth lolita clothing and goes around imitating her favorite anime, one is a wealthy media conglomerate owner’s daughter with ~WACKY MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES YEE~, and the three other girls with actual industry experience were all either fired acrimoniously or thrown aside when their minor notoriety waned.

Welcome to capitalism, baby!

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: “MOU” MEANS ”GENERAL EXPRESSION OF EXASPERATION”

Looking at the real-life idol industry, it is apparent that a “fly-on-the-wall” story about the idol industry, and how it treats the young women who enter it with dreams of making it big in show business, would make for quite an engaging narrative in the right hands. And I don’t mean something like Love Live, of course; I mean something more along the lines of This Is Spinal Tap, i.e. the kind of narrative that pokes fun at & actively castigates the industry it’s portraying on numerous levels. But not only does Starnova fail to say very much of value about the industry it claims to be deconstructing, it further reinforces the framework of that industry by being an overwritten & vulgar expression of idol fan culture and all the toxic baggage that comes with it.

That said, though, there are things I do like quite a bit about Starnova, so let’s start by outlining those. It’s nothing if not high-concept; the visual presentation is, in a word, stunning, with some very impressively detailed pre-rendered background art and sometimes gorgeous event CGs. Ashton Wilson’s character designs are cute and strike a good balance between the best elements of Western & Japanese art styles. The soundtrack, produced with the involvement of Seycara and Elements Garden, is very well-produced, especially for a visual novel, a genre of game where incidental music is usually given little consideration. The wide array of Japanese voice actors, whom the savvy among you may recognize from other Japanese-produced visual novels (eg. Mariya is voiced by Chocola from Nekopara, Aki is Nagi from Maitetsu, Nemu is Charles from Da Capo III, among others), are another big selling point despite only certain major scenes being fully voiced, on account of it being expensive to hire voice actors like these, and they do a pretty good job with the material they are given.

Sadly, that’s where the pros end for me.

Anne Rice has more restraint with words than this.

There’s no other way to break this news, I’m afraid. Sam Yang, lead director and writer for this project and brainchild behind the developer Love in Space, is a bad writer. While there are certainly occasional glimpses of brilliance which shine through, on the whole, Starnova’s writing is a nightmare. The characterization is lukewarm at best and horrendous at worst; in particular, Natsuki is one of the most worthless main heroines I’ve ever seen in a visual novel (imagine Scrappy-Doo with a Kansai accent and you’re close to envisioning how annoying she is), and Kodama, the girls’ gravure photographer turned dance instructor, embodies every single overused trait of the flamboyant gay man stereotype that wasn’t funny in 1998 either. You’d better believe he makes a pass at the protagonist, too, a joke which falls kinda flat considering I’ve seen better written works where characters like this come right out and say “nah I ain’t into straights” as the punchline for scenes like that. Most of the rest of the humour in this game is equally worthless & tasteless, but we’ll get into that again in a bit.

As for the dialogue, I wouldn’t recommend playing a drinking game for every time somebody says “Mou!” or “Ara” or “Mah” or even the dreaded “It can’t be helped” and its variations thereof, because I don’t want anyone to die of alcohol poisoning. Pastiching badly written anime fansubs is not good writing, in much the same way smooth jazz is not jazz. It’s imaginable that the audience this game is directed at will eat it up on account of being “authentic”, but really, it’s only authentic in that it’s regurgitating the same kind of bad prose that English-speaking fans of Japanese media have put up with for decades in translations, especially non-official ones, and will now seemingly defend to the death against actual well-written official translations as a demonstration of their severe lack of understanding of the mechanics of translation.

Rape Joke Pertaining To Most Barely Legal Heroine #[TOO MANY] of [FUCKTONS]

Yang is on record touting this game’s exceptionally high word count as being not only greater than all of Love in Space’s previous works put together, but also, apparently, greater than J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. In a May 2018 promotional interview with publisher Sekai Project, he is quoted as saying:

“I really wanted Starnova to be Love in Space’s big entry into visual novels, so I knew we had to make something bigger than what even Japanese companies are making nowadays.”

Apparently, he believes that a story’s word count and not things like memorable prose, characterization & dialogue are what make for a good story; since he can’t write well, he has to counteract that by writing more. Tolkien built a gigantic fantasy world with a rich array of settings and characters across his famed trilogy. In contrast, all Starnova can muster with a larger word count is a whole bunch of often wildly redundant prose. A lot of this game’s text could really use some paring down in length; don’t be surprised if you see a lot of scenes which largely consist of characters reiterating stuff we already learned two scenes ago, except with different horrible shitty dialogue. Yang’s writing, in terms of length, dialogue, and the presentation of interpersonal narratives, is the kind of stuff veteran fanfic writers know better than to indulge in.

Most egregiously of all, Starnova sets itself up as a work deconstructing the idol industry, but it doesn’t really know what it wants to say. Starnova is attempting to condemn the idol industry as being unfairly exploitative of the girls who work in it and a venture run by money men who don’t care about what the public thinks, but it does this while also shamelessly exploiting the major character flaws of its main heroines repeatedly for dramatic, comedic, or erotic purposes. Julie, as a particularly egregious example, is repeatedly labeled as Starnova’s “top bitch” by other characters in the story. Keep in mind, the Japanese loanword ビッチ [romanized: bicchi] is closer in meaning to the English “whore” or “slut”, and as a related aside, I hope you like or understand wasei-eigo in general, because this game is chock full of it. In addition, Aki is either the setup or punchline, sometimes both, for numerous rape jokes despite, or perhaps precisely because of, her status as the youngest, most barely legal heroine. A story attempting to condemn things it practically delights in showing the viewer over and over is a story with a broken moral compass; much like in Guy Ritchie’s infamously awful remake of Swept Away, any attempts at moralizing ring utterly hollow when the story itself doesn’t know what its own moral code is.

When you’ve never actually seen Tropic Thunder, but only heard about the slurs and just wanted to reference it to be edgy.

Both the management and members of Quasar, the rival idol group whose role is clearly inspired by The Misfits in Jem and the Holograms, are ironically portrayed as literal Saturday morning cartoon villains with one sane individual among them. That sane individual, Kaori, is a character who exists to occasionally parrot ironically self-aware “Are we the baddies?” musings about her job and co-workers that Mitchell & Webb did first in that famous Nazi sketch, and did better. As a group, they’re obviously intended as an expy of AKB48, still the most popular idol group in real-life Japan after over a decade, and their manager, Kamijou, is a character with obvious allusions to AKB’s longtime producer & songwriter Yasushi Akimoto, who has, like his fictional counterpart, done no shortage of questionable things in the name of his business ventures. I hope the black-and-white morality is plain to see here: Starnova are the good and noble indie idols who start from “nothing” (except the player stand-in protagonist used to work in the industry himself and knows someone who got him set up with an office & seven applicants right out of the gate so it’s not actually “nothing”), while Quasar are the evil money-driven corporate entity who will happily stab anyone in the back, including their own— nay, especially their own — if it gets more Fukuzawa bills into their pockets. Of course, the game doesn’t bother condemning Starnova after they end up becoming successful enough to get signed to a major label themselves (something which, by the way, also happened to AKB48 in real life), because after all, bare faced hypocrisy sells records.

(with apologies to Chumbawamba)

Oddly enough, the climax of Sasami’s route involves an attempted hostile takeover of Quasar’s company, Golden Calf Productions. HAHA GET IT? BIBLICAL ALLUSIONS, SO DEEP BRO. Oda, the greying old man who orchestrates the takeover with the help of some traitors within the group, is a literal sexual predator who openly fondles the girls during an inspection and whom even Kamijou is quietly repulsed by, because subtlety is for losers. After the takeover is successfully thwarted and Kamijou reaffirms his power over the company, he proceeds to sack everyone involved in the event and begs his more loyal employees for forgiveness over his negligence in allowing the event to occur. With this event, the game is trying to say, “Hey, you know those two-dimensional, Saturday morning cartoon-level villainous idols & manager we’ve spent the whole game up until now portraying as irredeemable monsters? Maybe they’re not so bad after all. Maybe they have some moral standards.” It’s lazy, badly written, and wholly unconvincing, and pretty much only exists to give us a big, dumb Starnova x Quasar crossover song at the end to prove that they can actually be buddies, in spite of both groups having been at each other’s throats for literally the whole story.

“I didn’t want to be an idol anyway… I wanted to be a lumberjack!”

Speaking of character routes, I can’t help but notice that the plot of Nemu’s route is basically the plot of the second half of Rise’s route in Princess Evangile, except with the added caveat that the heroine is also a yandere, and with much worse writing to boot. Between that and the Fault poster we see hanging in the Producer’s office early on in the game, this game twofold violates the unspoken rule that you should never remind audiences of a good creative work in the middle of your own awful one. Both Mika’s and Julie’s routes use the motif of “bad fans make idol’s life hell over perceived failing” as a crutch for lazy, cheap dramatic writing (for what it’s worth, Mika’s is probably the least egregiously awful), but Julie’s route is especially notable for being a seemingly constant exercise in slut-shaming, even more so than her usual portrayal throughout the rest of the game. While I shouldn’t be surprised considering the kind of character Julie is written & portrayed as, I would also like to think that someone writing fiction like this should know better. But that may be a bit too generous. More on that later.

As a related aside, it’s worth pointing out that Mr. Producer prepares to have Julie fired early in the game after discovering she makes money from compensated dating. She changes his mind by taking him to a bar and getting him drunk enough to reconsider, and the reader is not made to sympathize with her actions very much, considering that’s more or less the point where the game starts calling her a stupid blonde whore with much greater frequency. But when considering that one of AKB48’s early singles, Seifuku ga Jama wo Suru (“My School Uniform Just Gets In the Way”) was a lyrically ribald take on that exact subject of compensated dating, I can’t decide whether that’s ironic or an accidental revelation of just how hilariously blinkered Sam Yang’s view of the idol industry is.

As for the other routes, well, they’re all bad in their own ways. Mariya is the main heroine with the most interesting backstory, enough so that the plot of her route screeches to a halt for a little while just so she can tell Mr. Producer all about it over a drink. Pity, then, that the execution of that backstory is as outrageously unsubtle and contrived as any of the other cloying attempts at “drama” this game does. In addition, Natsuki’s route seemingly goes out of its way to write off Kansai, or rather, Kansai except for Osaka— which, I would like to remind you, is the second-most populous region in Japan and home to some of the most culturally indispensible cities & monuments in the country — as a backwater hog island full of stereotypical Podunk hicks who talk funny, Aki’s route takes the sensitive issue of parents selling their children into the idol industry and treats it with all the subtlety of a punch to the solar plexus, and Sasami’s route, while certainly starting with a decent enough concept of having the most innocent girl of the troupe learn that life as an idol can be harsh, does so in the most trite & offensive way possible. Which is another way of saying, it’s pretty damn rapey.

Same.

And speaking of rape. I previously mentioned Aki and all those rape jokes which are made about her or by her, but Sasami’s route — which I’m going to specifically focus on here because it is the one framed as the most “true” ending, the one that you have to play through all six other heroines’ routes first before you can access it— uses rape as drama not just once, but TWICE. Sasami is raped by Quasar’s lesbian lead member Shiro during a film shoot where they’re working together, in a scene which is only explicitly shown in the 18+ version but which very definitely happens regardless of what version you’re playing. This event is framed as the culmination of how Shiro’s been gaslighting and manipulating her into questioning her moral convictions the whole time because, erm, I guess she really doesn’t want Sasami to be a top idol? But then Sasami ends up having a crisis of conscience afterwards and considers defecting to Quasar when it turns out Starnova’s going to be dissolved by their corporate overlords anyway because capitalism, so maybe Shiro only wants her to be a top idol she can control? I dunno. Anyway, the second instance of rape as drama in this route comes during the hostile takeover thing I mentioned earlier, where Oda tries to rape Sasami before an observing Shiro, finally realizing a few years too late just how much of a manipulative, Machiavellian monster she’s been towards everyone in her life, cracks him over the head with a steel pole as her big dumb act of self-redemption. I mean, talk about contrived. This story’s attempts at writing dramatic conflict are all over the place, trading narrative coherency for cheap shock value.

At any rate, the rape-as-drama bits fall completely flat on account of being both tasteless and astoundingly tone-deaf to current world events. Even with the 2 year-plus development time this game has had, you’d think Sam Yang would have seen the seismic shift in women being outspoken about sexual assault in the year prior to the time of this writing, and thought maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have so many rape jokes & usage of rape as drama in his story. Or maybe he’s the kind of person who would take the side of sexual harassment, something I’m willing to accept after reading through a story so patently dripping with misogyny as this. The game’s common route is bad, but it’s bad in a boring/funny kind of way where you can spend a while laughing at the bad writing. The individual character routes, on the other hand, end up accidentally being the most honest expression of what this game is really about, since they’re the kind of bad that evokes genuine anger. These parts are where the game is trying to be genuine & dramatic, openly wearing its feelings on its sleeve while advertising to the audience that it has something to say. And what it does have to say makes me want to scream “shut the fuck up” at it.

Makoto Itou has more respect for women than this game.

Looking back at everything that happens in this game and at the controversies which have engulfed AKB48 in previous years, not just the demotion of Minami Minegishi and her tearful video apology, but also the 2014 attacking and injuring of two other members of the group at a handshake event by a fan wielding a handsaw (an event directly paralleled at one point in this game, by the way), I can only conclude that Yang, in response to the real life AKB48 controversies, came to the same conclusion as the rest of idol fandom at large: that those incidents were just the result of bad actors, not things which are borne of systemic problems with the entire industry and society at large. And really, questioning the system itself is too unfathomable and uncomfortable, or perhaps even inconceivable, for someone like Yang, who is mired too deep in the fandom’s culture to see the forest for the trees and isn’t talented enough to tackle a complex subject like this.

People just like Yang are the ones who found Minegishi at fault for spending a night with a boy band member, pinning the blame squarely on her, and not the system which robs her and others like her of the right to a normal life in favour of sustaining the deluded sexist fantasies of socially inept young men. People just like Yang looked at the man who tried to kill a couple of AKB48 members with a handsaw and said, “oh, he’s not a real fan. He’s not one of us,” while simultaneously throwing thousands of copies of the group’s latest single into the trash after retrieving the election tickets inside (since the music doesn’t even matter anymore), or sending idols stuffed animals which have been… “tampered” with, or posting frothing, incoherently irate tweets about wanting to murder a comedian who performed a silly physical comedy routine on a variety TV program with a particularly popular AKB member, or threatening a company with a sarin gas attack because they didn’t like the idea of idols doing TV commercials for them, or any other assorted instances of very bad behaviour from idol fandom at large that I can happily list off. The fandom itself would sooner pin these incidents on the individuals responsible and sweep them under the rug than have a long, hard think about the state of its cultural reality which allows things like that to continue to happen. This is why Starnova has a villainous character made to represent badly-behaved fans who wears a hoodie, has dyed hair, and runs around calling people “cucks”, and why the climax of one route has the two side characters made to represent “good” fans screaming at this character so loud he runs off crying to mommy. Because pinning the faults of idol fandom culture on one individual strawman is more convenient than questioning your own liability in allowing those faults to continue existing.

And that’s to say nothing of the game’s structure as a traditional romantic drama/comedy visual novel, with seven individual character routes in which Mr. Producer falls in love with the girl he makes into the group’s center. It’s fairly clear what the message is here. Every one of the black suits in the idol industry is morally bankrupt and driven by money. But not Starnova’s own Mr. Producer, who writes the group’s songs himself and pours his heart and soul into managing them even while acknowledging he’s maybe 60 or 70 percent in it for the money. Every girl in every popular idol group is just a crazy bitch who wants to get to the top and will destroy friendships or even lesbian romantic relationships with other idols, as Shiro does, to get there. But not the girls of Starnova. A story which wants to make commentary on the idol industry just might be trying to have its cake and eat it too if the main message the characters’ experiences end up conveying is “everyone in the idol industry is shit except for us”, and especially if the end goal of the storyline is “your idols are good and will be your waifu.”

Also, it’s worth noting that while male idols do exist in Starnova’s world, the game doesn’t seem to take them as seriously as the girl groups, since instead of being comprised of girls, those are largely marketed to girls, and who gives a shit about what girls like, anyway? Never mind that Johnny’s has been in the business for much longer than AKB48 and its derivatives, but I digress. Male idols generally only come up as a springboard for the plot to get from one point to the next, including a flashback where a younger Natsuki attends an Osaka concert by a male idol group, which then sparks her own interest in becoming an idol. There’s also one laughably contrived moment where one heroine’s scandal over rumours of a relationship with a member of another male idol group is handily thwarted when he proves there was no relationship by — and I wish I were making this up — coming out as gay in front of the media at a press conference held to address the scandal. When I said this game was a sobering reflection of modern idol fandom culture, I was hardly joking.

Anybody got a knife to cut this incredibly thick lack of self-awareness with?

Starnova might be worth taking a look at for the ideas it presents and its infrequent moments of visual splendor, but its actual presentation of these ideas often leaves a great deal to be desired, and the glimpses of brilliance are ultimately overwhelmed in a sea of redundant and often embarrassingly bad writing. Alas, most of the people in the target audience won’t care, because it’s clearly made by them, for them, and about them. But for everyone else, it is precisely the fact that Starnova is made by them, for them, and about them that makes its poor quality all the more obvious. A concept like this probably deserved better. But considering the direction idol & otaku culture, nay, fandoms in general, have taken, that would clearly be asking for too much.

Contrary to what you may be thinking if you were directed to this review by somebody angry at me for holding a contrarian opinion, I’m not demanding Love in Space stop making VNs. I am, however, trying to hold them accountable for creating something like this. As someone who threw hundreds of dollars at the development of this game, hoping against hope it might turn out good because I at least thought the concept was good, I do not intend to let their actual final output go uncriticized.

Love in Space has violated the trust of their audience before; as you might be aware, they had to write a whole new additional ending and a non-canon side story with more porn than the main story for their previous game, Sunrider: Liberation Day, after outraged complaints from fans over the original release’s completely inconclusive cliffhanger ending. Sam Yang is a man who has rewritten the Japanese translations for his dialogue right before having the lines recorded since he apparently didn’t take kindly to the translators trying to make his work better (something he briefly touches on in the previously quoted Sekai Project interview), has said with a straight face that Starnova as a story is “based on the idea of the American Dream” in one of the most hysterically pretentious things I’ve ever heard from a waifu porn peddler, and has refused to listen to constructive critique from his own QA testers.

If his rampaging egotism is any indication, Love in Space is not above violating their audience’s trust again.