Omega 6 review: Nintendo artist’s creativity shines where game mechanics stumble

You can’t move for retro-inspired video games these days, but when one of those is the work of a legendary former Nintendo artist, it justifiably commands extra attention.

Omega 6: The Triangle Stars is the work of Takaya Imamura, the artist previously known for his work on the likes of Star Fox, F-Zero and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Many of Imamura’s creations have household name status, but Omega 6: The Triangle Stars is his first attempt at working on a video game from outside the hallowed halls of Nintendo.

While Imamura’s creativity undoubtedly shines through in this new Nintendo Switch and PC adventure game, however, the results are still a mixed bag.

The game is set in the distant future, where Earth has become overcrowded due to a combination of an average life expectancy of 400, and a wormhole leading to a huge influx of immigrants from Mars. Just as you begin to worry that the plot is about to don a red cap, we’re whisked off to Omega 6, a spacecraft containing two androids called Thunder and Kyla.

The pair have been tasked with travelling around space until they can eventually find a planet that can serve as a second Earth and ease the congestion on the first one. This quest takes a back seat, though, when a flyer advertising a quest to find a mysterious, valuable treasure hits the ship’s windscreen. The promise of potential riches is too much to resist, so they’re off to find that treasure.

The Triangle Stars referred to in the game’s title are the three planets you travel between. Initially you can only access the main planet, Impostar, which has a plaza leading to numerous other buildings. Eventually you gain access to the other two – fire planet Igni and frozen planet Froslara – with the main aim being to find the special key located on each.

Each planet has roughly nine or ten locations and the majority of the game is spent jumping between them in search of the various people, items, and battles needed to trigger the next part of the story. If that sounds a bit limited, that’s pretty much by design.

Omega 6: The Triangle Stars is inspired by the Japanese style of graphic adventure games, where players navigate, interact and talk almost entirely via text menus. Whereas in the West we had our fair share of text adventures and point-and-click games, this specific style of interface (which is essentially half adventure game, half visual novel) was mainly seen in Japan.

As a result, Omega 6: The Triangle Stars makes for an interesting release on our shores because it’s a nostalgic look back at a genre that very few people in the West actually have any nostalgia for.

“Omega 6: The Triangle Stars makes for an interesting release on our shores, because it’s a nostalgic look back at a genre that very few people in the West have any actual nostalgia for.”

The few examples that did make it here, such as the fantastic Snatcher, didn’t exactly set the charts on fire, and while in recent years players have had more expansive access to this type of genre – including Nintendo’s remakes and reboot of its Famicom Detective Club series – for the most part players outside of Japan will be judging Omega Six on what it offers today, not how it recreates yesterday, and through this lens the game’s limitations are clearer.

Much of the game is spent moving to a new location, using the Call Over command to see who’s in the area, talking to them and exhausting your dialogue choices until you have enough information to move to the next area. At times you’ll get stuck, but this is usually resolved by simply revisiting all the places you’ve visited before and making sure you’ve exhausted all the possible options available to you in each room.

Occasionally a fight will break out, and it’s here where Omega 6: The Triangle Stars’ unique combat system comes to the fore. Rather than a traditional RPG style turn-based battle system, the game instead features a partly luck-based mechanic in which you wear down an opponent’s health by correctly winning sequences of Rock-Paper-Scissors battles, by playing cards with those symbols on them.

While this sounds like pure guesswork on paper – and at times does descend to this – there are a few gimmicks placed in there to add at least some strategic thought to the process. Thunder and Kyla specialise in Paper and Rock respectively, and when you fight an enemy you’ll see which of their cards have their corresponding weaknesses.

For example, if you fight as Kyla, who specialises in Rock, when a fight starts you’ll see how many Scissors cards are in the enemy’s deck. There’s still a random element because you don’t know when those cards are going to be drawn, but as others are used up you can at least use odds-based logic to decide the best time to play each symbol.

You can also use a variety of abilities to help improve your chances in these battles, but in reality, even with all these features designed to add a tactical twist to the battles, it’s impossible to shake the notion that there’s still a heavy random element to proceedings. It feels like the game is aware of this too, because losing a battle almost always results in you getting to simply retry it right away with no repercussions.

The main issue I have with Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, however, is that the journey simply isn’t that engaging. It’s essentially a series of fetch quests where you have to find this item, and then give it to that person in order to receive another item, which is then used in another location, repeated ad nauseam until the credits roll.

There are attempts to break things up a bit but these feel half-baked. One of the three planets requires a pass to visit it, and while you can buy temporary passes, you realistically need a lifetime one to explore it fully. These lifetime passes are extremely expensive, so you’re given the option to take on a series of bounty hunter, bug extermination, and parcel delivery jobs to make enough money.

This feels like artificial padding to extend the game’s length, and once you realise the bounty hunting missions pay out substantially more, making the other two a waste of time, it starts to become clear that there could have been a lot more work spent on balancing things out here. At times it feels like it wants to be a straight visual novel but feels obliged to find ways to jam an adventure game in there.

“At times it feels like it wants to be a straight visual novel but feels obliged to find ways to jam an adventure game in there.”

Omega 6: The Triangle Stars is not without its charm, however, and this is largely down to Imamura’s creativity. You’ll encounter well over 100 weird and wonderful characters over the course of your adventure, from a suspiciously Fox McCloud-like armored beast, to a ‘modern’ Earthling with distracting tentacle eyes, to even Imamura himself at one point (who fights you for a copy of the Omega 6 manga).

While the dialogue occasionally leaves something to be desired—the quirky banter falls a little flat at times, perhaps due to localization issues, and we lost count of how many times someone said, “It’s just like in a video game.” For the most part, each new encounter is a fun display of Imamura’s creativity, and that is the main thing that still makes playing it worthwhile.

It’s just a shame that these characters inhabit a limited game, both in terms of duration – I wasn’t timing my playthrough but I must have clocked it in around four or five hours, though its $15 price point acknowledges this – and its general mechanics. Treat it as a brief, low-priced visual novel rather than an adventure game and you’ll have a better time with it, because in this way you allow Imamura’s contribution to take centre stage.