Sea of Stars

I stopped playing at about hour 15, as I felt by that point the game was simply spinning its wheels. The rote combat mechanics never meaningfully evolve, protaganists are so shallow as to be almost non-existent as characters, and the puzzle solving aspect (the most fun thing in the game) seems to vanish from the gameplay loop for whatever reason. Moreover, its tone is so breezy and lighthearted that I could never get invested in the story or setting.

After bouncing off several of them, I'm now resigned to the fact that these modern throwback (j)rpgs are, despite being throwbacks, geared towards a younger audience than people like myself who grew up enjoying classic jrpgs from the 90s/00s.

It looks and sounds great, but whenever you pay more attention to anything deeper, from writing to gameplay, there's just nothing there.

I might be spoiled by Baldur's Gate 3 a bit, but for an RPG this game is extremely railroaded. I've played about 10 hours, and there was zero opportunity for exploration, RP choices, build choices, progression branches.

You can't choose where to go, because there's nowhere to go outside the main progression line. You can't choose what to do, because there are no side quests or anything worth exploring in any of the locations. You can't choose how your characters play, because on the only choice you have is what stat will gain a superficial boost on leveling up. There are no abilities, no equipment to choose from.

Even combat is railroaded to one correct strategy. You need to hit enemies with the element they are vulnerable to and break their attacks by hitting them with a combination of elements. This is the only thing the game wants you to do in combat, there are no alternative strategies or other decisions to consider.

This would be forgivable if the game railroaded you through an amazing story with characters worth sinking your time in. This is not the case. The story and the characters are the same shallow pastiche of JRPGs as everything else about the game. I quickly started skipping through dialog because of how superficial and poorly written it was, something I almost never do in RPGs.

The artists and the composer deserve the highest praise in this game, it's really a joy to look at and listen to. A shame that this cool aesthetic has no structural support whatsoever.

Sea of Stars is the latest JRPG hotness scoring some major scores from pretty much all of the reviewers, landing it as one of the all-time greats in the genre. Even before the scores came out, I was pretty excited to play it as it looked just so good with its SNES/PS1 throwback look and that style is just among my favorite things. So is Sea of Stars worth playing? Yes, that's certain.

However I don't think people should come into this one expecting one of the best games in the genre, the game mostly hit the nostalgia factors well but it really lacks in imagination and innovation. I've been playing JRPGs since I was a young kid (Final Fantasy in 1990 was my first) and there's very little that Sea of Stars does that pushes the boundaries of what you'd expect. There's a big Chrono Trigger influence here with trio of characters and combos between each other, it doesn't quite hit the highs of that game but it feels like some good comfort food nevertheless. The game does have a lot of polish and provides a good linear experience, but if you are looking for some major depth and lots of decision making, perhaps this isn't quite the game to deliver that.

The equipment is always straight forward and you are replacing your old piece with your new piece cause it has more attack or defense power, and there's just 1 weapon and 1 armor slot. A few relics to boost some other stats or effects, but there's so little of them throughout the game that you will rarely be customizing your team in any adventurous ways. The battle system is interesting at first but this a 30 hours RPG here and it does get pretty repetitive, about 90% of the time you'll be using the same strategy once you've figured out a few things. Speaking of the length, the game is about 10-15 hours too long as the 2nd half is just a repeat over and over of the same concepts. The dungeons are all on the same template with climbings, jumps, hooks, switches and gathering objects in numerous rooms to eventually unlock the boss room... definitely not the games strongest suit as it feels they ran out of inspiration and just repeated the formula.

It's not all bad of course, the art style is gorgeous, the soundtrack music is in pure classic JRPG style (which I really liked, I will be checking out the full soundtracks) and overall it's pretty fun to play. Comfort food is really the best way to describe things here, if you like those classic RPGs from the 90s you will feel right at home here. The story while not mindblowing is pretty good and there's a great cast of characters to meet and the game does incorporate humor well in it, without any of it feeling forced. I did enjoy myself while playing it all the way to the credits, it's just I couldn't help myself thinking of some reviewers putting this on the level of a Persona 5 and that's a big nope from me. But you should play it if you want a classic JRPG experience. It's on Game Pass and PS+ so it should be very accessible to everyone one, there's a lot of love put into this but I don't think the devs really pushed for enough depth (at least based on my personal preferences). I haven't played their previous game The Messenger so I don't know how it compares, but I will be playing that eventually to see where they came from.

A good game. As for as Retro JRPGs, I do think Cross Code and Chained Echoes nailed the innovation factor a lot more, these 2 games were able to build upon classic templates and add a lot of new interesting mechanics to them. Sea of Stars is just more of the same stuff we know, but applied very well into a tight (but perhaps overlong) adventure.