I'm a sucker for girl's media
I haven't yet talked about one of my favorite games of all time. The one I will spend months at a time playing, spend hours thinking about the characters and lore, and surprisingly not spending hundreds of dollars on... the MMORPG horse game Star Stable Online.
I am aware that SSO is targeted towards young girls. I also do not care. I love the world and the story and characters so much. It was a place that intrigued me as a kid, and I still have that yearning to know everything about it. I have spent so much time delving into the game, its lore, and all the games that came before it.
In the main story of SSO, your character has come to the island of Jorvik to spend the summer at a horse camp. You make friends and go on quests and compete and explore the island. Along the way you become intertwined with the Soul Riders, a group of four women who are fighting to protect Jorvik from evil.
While Star Stable Online was released worldwide in 2011, the world it takes place in was created long before in the early aughts (the release timeline is unclear). There were three groups of CD-ROM games released before 2010, each with four installments.
I'll start with the original Star Stable series: four games themed around the seasons, beginning with The Autumn Rider, then The Winter Rider, The Spring Rider, and The Summer Rider. In these games your main goal is training your horse and racing in competitions. The next four games, released under the title Star Academy, are Audition!, Showtime!, Breakthrough!, and Starstruck!. In these games you play as a student, learning to sing and perform. And in the last four games, Starshine Legacy, we follow Lisa in The Mystery of the Soul Riders, Linda in The Secret of Pine Hill Mansion, Anne in The Legend of Pandoria, and Alex in The Riddle of Dark Core. In Starshine Legacy, the four girls meet and work to stop an evil plot to destroy Jorvik.
These twelve games may sound unrelated to each other, but they are not. First and foremost, all of them take place on the island of Jorvik. They also share many characters, some of which you meet or play as throughout the games. I feel like Star Stable Online really ties all the elements of the past games together.
At the core of Star Stable Online are the relationships. Because it is an MMO, you are surrounded by other players who you can interact with. You can chat, join clubs, compete with each other, or participate in roleplay if that's your speed. Your relationship with your horses is important as well. You care for and bond with them over the course of the game, which benefits you with higher scores and rewards. In the game your completed quests build your reputation with characters or locations. As people and places come to like you more and more, you'll unlock more things to do in the game.
Star Stable Online has changed a lot over the fifteen years it's been around. The graphics have improved, locations have been unveiled and revamped, characters have been introduced, and questlines have been redesigned. While the community around SSO has not always been supportive of every change, my fondness for the game has never faltered. I have loved seeing the game grow into something new. I may miss certain aspects of the game that were there when I played as a teenager, but I can appreciate those experiences for what they were and create new memories with the game in its present state as an adult.
Currently, I have three accounts for the game. The first I created when I was around twelve, the second I created when I was 19, and my third and most recent I created last year. Each of them I have only spent money on to buy the Lifetime membership. I do not use the microtransactions, mainly on principle, but also because there aren't many items or horses that are released in-game that I want badly enough to spend real money on.
I'll likely talk more about Star Stable at a later date, but I think this is enough for today, haha. I love it so much and I'm glad to have an outlet to talk about it.