Omega 6: The Triangle Stars review: Rock, paper, scissors, fruit!

Omega 6: The Triangle Stars is based on a manga by Takaya Imamura. If you don’t recognize that name, you’ll recognize the art if you’ve played games like F-Zero, Star Fox, or The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. That’s because Imamura was an art director (among other things) at Nintendo for over 30 years, leaving a mark that won’t be fading any time soon. This man created Captain Falcon and Tingle, for chrissakes. Who else can say something like that? Nobody.

Nintendo is written all over this thing

Omega 6 is as weird as it gets. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, and a sci-fi story full of as many wacky character designs as there are screens to cram them in. If Star Fox was a universe the size of Star Wars, Omega 6 feels like a spinoff about all the weird, freako aliens that would show up as background characters in cantina scenes. Running into a new character is a delight, from their 16-bit, 90s Nintendo-coded pixel drawings to their unhinged designs comprising bulging eyes, goofy expressions, and blatant disregard for color-coordination. Shinobu Amayake’s music also sounds ripped right out of a Nintendo cartridge, which is appropriate since she composed for games like Wario’s Woods.

The combat kind of makes me want to jump out of a moving Arwing, though.

Let’s back up. The story here is… well, it gets strangely close to conspiracy theories your elder relatives might see on social media these days. Science has expanded human lifespans to hundreds of years, leading to a lack of young people that hurts the population and labor economy of Earth. Aliens of all shapes and sizes are let in freely to make the numbers look better, but it isn’t long before humans start to get worried about being overtaken. Before this cartoon Great Replacement stuff gets too weird though, Omega 6 introduces a pair of superhero androids, Thunder and Kyla, who are sent out into space on a mission to find a habitable planet. During the quest, a cluster of illegal space flyers (I laughed) show the pair a planet calling for treasure hunters, which sounds more fun than planet-shopping.

Rock, paper, scissors, shoot me

Playing Omega 6 is very traditional, not unlike any classic SCUMM-based adventure. Think Monkey Island or the original Sam and Max. You look, use, inspect, talk, move; anything you do is a menu choice. Much of the story is a series of tasks, running into one roadblock then guiding the androids to find the next flag to move the story forward, the right item, or a puzzle to solve. Or… unfortunately, combat. There’s so much combat. I might be traumatized a little, cursed to never again enjoy a round of rock, paper, scissors. I’m shuddering just thinking about it, folks.

That’s the mechanic. You and your enemies have a carousel of choices, and your goal is to outguess the opponent to deal damage. You can alter your options or reveal hidden choices with items (and heal, crucially), but ultimately it’s about guessing and trying to use probability to your advantage as you keep track of what your enemy has left before their carousel is depleted and reshuffled. It’s almost like Fate/Extra, a PSP RPG set in the Fate/Stay Night universe I really enjoyed back in the day, except with critical, joy-destroying flaws.

There are two major problems. One, combat is very slow. The animations and colors are fun, but it’s slow. Second, the damage balance is way out of whack for nearly every fight, and certainly ones that are important for you to get through the story. In many fights I would have to deal several hits, while the opponent only had to tag me two or three times to take me down. Even using items to boost damage, even using items to try and make sure I was getting hits with my character’s favored choice (for more damage), it’d be like bopping a boss with a stick in Dark Souls or something and watching their health bar barely trickle down. Then I’d inevitably guess wrong once and watch my HP drop by almost half.

Tree labor abuse

The other big mechanic is taking care of bonsai trees in the titular Omega 6 ship, which is where you get items aside from shops. I quickly learned that abusing this thing was the key to survival, and spent tons of time clicking through my inventory to pump these poor plants for fruits like I was running some kind of government-subsidized agricultural operation out of my bedroom. If these were eggs instead of fruits I’d probably be breaking several intergalactic animal abuse laws. But if I wasn’t prepared to pop healing fruits like an aging wrestler guzzling pain killers or fruits to give me the moves I wanted beyond what I had left to draw, I was guaranteed to see the game over screen over and over again. And the worst part? Losing a fight gives you the option to retry, but any items you used are still gone. I accidentally lost a close, overlong battle by butter-fingering a button and felt like that tragic, cookie-breaking guy in the goofy Squid Game show. Not cool, Omega 6. I thought we were gonna be friends.

If it wasn’t for the tortuous combat I probably would’ve loved Omega 6: The Triangle Stars. It’s weird, it’s funny as heck, and it has ample Nintendo charm despite not being a Nintendo game. It almost feels like the team at WarioWare, Inc. made a whole game instead of a sketchy microgame. But for as much as I enjoyed exploring the world, meeting the goofy characters, and solving puzzles while uncovering the story, the overbearing presence of the worst rock, paper, scissors gauntlet ever made clouded the whole thing. I figured combat would be a silly minigame I’d run into on occasion, but instead it was a massive, unavoidable part of the equation. If Omega 6 was a pure visual novel I would’ve loved it. It’s still neat, but now I just want to read the manga when it comes out in English later this year and never look back.

Omega 6: The Triangle Stars is available on February 28, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch and PC. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.