• Price: $24.99 USD (currently on sale for $22.49 until October 10th)
• Developer: Paper Castle Games
• Publisher: Fellow Traveller
• Release Date: September 19, 2025

A review code was kindly provided by Fellow Traveller on behalf of Paper Castle Games. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Content warning: rated T. Mild swearing & violence.

From the developer of Underhero, Wander Stars is a 90s Anime-inspired turn-based RPG with a unique word-based combat system. I was instantly drawn in by the art style, which is clearly inspired by the work of Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball). Continuing with the Anime theme, the story of Wander Stars is divided into episodes; fight across the galaxy using your words to get out of risky situations as main character Ringo searches for her brother.

As is often the case, our hero is living an ordinary life at the beginning of the story. Sent out to buy groceries by her grandma, fourteen year-old Ringo gets distracted by sparring opportunities – as well as the arrival of a wolf-man touching down on the beach on his flying jet bike.

Aptly named “Wolfe,” the man in question has a glowing piece of paper that points right at Ringo. Apparently pieces of the fabled Wanderstar map can be used to locate the other pieces, and Ringo has been unknowingly carrying one around with her. Wolfe steals her piece, and they begrudgingly come to an agreement to work together to find the other pieces after she discovers that her brother had one before he vanished.

Ringo and Wolfe inevitably get into trouble everywhere they go, and they’ll have to fight their way out of it. Each episode consists of several maps, which are referred to as the “acts” of the episode (i.e. Episode 5, Act 2-1). There are multiple spaces on each map, which include battles, events (conversations), item acquisition, and more.

I really like how we can travel to every space on a map before moving on, if we’d like. Normally I think games force you to choose a path without the ability to go back at all. (You can’t return to a map once you’ve left, though.) Once you’ve stepped on all the spaces that you want to, you can advance to the next act by choosing one of the exits, which offer you a power up that lasts for the rest of the episode.

Ringo battles her opponents on each map by combining words into either offensive or defensive moves with some cool and/or silly names. For each turn you get to choose an action word (i.e. “kick”), an elemental word (“dragon”), and multiple modifier words (“super”).

Each word takes up a number of slots; you start out with 4 slots to use each turn, for a maximum of 7 after upgrades. To prevent you from just spamming your most powerful combinations, words have cooldown periods. You don’t see Goku using back-to-back Spirit Bombs, after all! 🤣

There are more than 200 words to collect as you play through the game, and it’s so much fun to come up with the word combinations. I don’t think I’ve seen such an interesting battle system before that allows you to essentially customize your moves like this.

In another unique twist, the goal of each battle isn’t total annihilation of the enemy, but to whittle down their HP just enough to reach their “breaking point.” If an enemy has 20 HP and their breaking point is between 2 and 5 HP, you’ll want to use a combination of words that should get you there without getting them down to 1 HP/defeated.

Once you’ve reached the breaking point of each enemy, you can end the battle peacefully. I believe you earn more “Honor” this way, which can be used to improve Ringo’s stats and permanently unlock new words to equip in subsequent playthroughs.

You can choose to go past opponents’ breaking points and knock them out – some without the broken heart icon require it – but it’s to your benefit to end battles peacefully instead because most opponents will offer you useful “Pep Up” passives to equip.

There were a few aspects of the battles/maps that could have been a bit better for me. For one thing, it took me a while to figure out that I had to move the cursor up to my opponents in order to view their weaknesses. I also wish that the attack animations were more varied and flashy. As far as the maps are concerned, I didn’t like how many events/conversations on the map seemed to be more like tutorials.

But overall I really enjoyed my experience with the combat and events. The battles are fun, and certain episodes add interesting twists to the maps by also having you outrun someone, or making you inflict sleep on opponents to prevent them from sending you back to the beginning.

Once you’ve finished an episode by defeating its boss, you’re sent to the episode selection menu. You can view your stats for an episode, start the next one, or even replay one you’ve already finished. Wander Stars isn’t super “grind-y,” so it’s not necessary to replay episodes to power up enough to beat the game.

When you choose an episode to (re)play, you get to equip a limited amount of each type of word that you’ve learned so far. You can only use those words in that playthrough of an episode, although you can swap them out with words you acquire within the episode itself. Ringo is the only character who fights directly in battle, but the other characters make their presence known when you use words associated with them.

There are reasons to replay an episode for the sake of completion and also a challenge. To fully “complete” an episode you need to earn all 3 star medals by beating an episode in normal mode, clearing it in normal mode without being defeated, and completing an undefeated run in challenge mode. (Incidentally, the game also offers 3 difficulty levels for players to choose from before starting an episode. They affect the number of weaknesses Ringo has and the amount of honor earned in the episode.)

You can also try to view the scenes you haven’t seen before in a chapter by replaying it. While the skip function doesn’t skip scenes so much as fast forward through them, it allows you to speed through the scenes you’ve already seen.

“So tiny, so violent, dang.” ~Wolfe

I found a lot of scenes really entertaining. Ringo and Wolfe don’t get along much at first, and Ringo is a teenage girl who likes to fight, so naturally things get interesting pretty quickly. 😂 She reminds me of Edward Elric when she gets angry about people mentioning her size, and Usagi from Sailor Moon with the “Apple Head” comments she gets. All with a Dragon Ball aesthetic.

The “found family” elements of the story made me so happy; it remains one of my favorite tropes. Just some gay space dads with their newly acquired kids, searching for treasure and family. 🥰 I found the endings of Chapter 6 and Chapter 10 quite touching.

It took me about 16 hours to complete the game by playing through most of the episodes only one time (10 episodes total). The ending wasn’t completely satisfying for me, but it’s not bad, and leaves things open for a sequel. (Please?)

Wander Stars is a WANDERful wonderful love letter to 90s Anime. I noticed so many great references to the Anime I loved so much as a kid. The art style made me smile, and while I was sad there wasn’t any voice acting besides a few sounds, the soundtrack is fantastic. I think the combat system is so creative and exciting, and I loved the characters. Now I kind of want to gather all the Dragon Balls and wish for a sequel, because I’d love to see more of this universe. ⭐️