Sea of Stars was my most anticipated game of this year, winning that spot over big releases such as Pikmin 4 and Armored Core 6. Sabotage Studio’s previous game, The Messenger, was a game that took me by surprise with its fun gameplay, engrossing world, fun writing, and amazing soundtrack. It was a game that surprised me with new twists and turns, and I got so much more out of that game than I had initially expected. Perhaps there’s something to be said about how much my positive experience with the game was due to how I wasn’t expecting anything in particular when I booted it up for the first time. Going into Sea of Stars, I had high hopes and expectations due to my experience with The Messenger, but unfortunately these expectations were not met, and I spent much of my playthrough desperately chasing the highs that I felt playing their previous game.

Admittedly, if asked, I would probably say that I don’t typically enjoy JRPGs as a genre, but the more I’ve come to understand the games that I like the more I realize that I don’t actually have any inherent issues with JRPGs. I’ve played and enjoyed many different JRPGs for many different reasons. Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door had wonderfully creative chapters and the badge system in those games opened options for interesting build options that I could really sink my teeth into. Earthbound and Mother 3 have comparatively lackluster combat but the worlds and stories they explore were thoroughly engaging. I even recently played through Lisa, with its creative setting and combat design that forces the player to adapt to extreme circumstances. In just about every JRPG I’ve enjoyed I can point out at least one aspect of it that it excels at, whether its combat, exploration, story, or even something completely different. Sea of Stars fails for me because all aspects of the game range from mediocre to just plain bad (with maybe one exception I’ll get to later). It tries too hard to be good at everything and as a result it wallows in mediocrity.

Puzzles:
While puzzles are certainly a more minor aspect to JRPGs than perhaps combat or story, puzzle solving represents a somewhat significant portion of the gameplay of Sea of Stars, and yet it feels like no effort was put into making any of the puzzles interesting to solve. There’s not a lot of detail I can go into about these puzzles because the majority of the puzzles the game presents are just non-puzzles. The core issue with most of the “puzzles” in this game is that they never have incorrect solutions. When the game presents you with a problem to solve you never have to use your brain to solve it, you just do whatever seems most obvious, interact with whatever objects are closest, and so on until the problem has solved itself. The first thing you try in any room will usually lead you to the solution since there’s never a second thing to try that would be incorrect. No reasoning is ever required to find the correct solution from a series of options since those options just don’t exist in the first place. I find a locked door, there’s a lever a little ways to the left, and another one a little ways to the right, with no enemies or obstacles in my way. I walk into a room, interact with the first object I see, then the next object that opens up as a result of the first interaction, and so on. I hesitate to even call most of these puzzles, they function more as mindless filler between story beats and combat.

I struggle to even remember the specific types of puzzles the game offers, because they are grossly underutilized and never increase in complexity as the game progresses. The time-of-day puzzle at the start of the game where you have to reason out that you need to activate the longer series of lights first? That's the amount of complexity you’ll be experiencing for the rest of the game, oftentimes with no changes whatsoever. Too many of the time-of-day light puzzles are functionally identical. Just light up the longer line before the shorter time, repeated over and over and over again. Traditional push-block puzzles are in this game, but none of them take more than two seconds of thought to solve. There's light beam puzzles in this game that show up maybe 5 times and never come with any twists or interesting mechanics, just rotate mirrors until the light hits the receiver.

Perhaps the saddest part is that the developers actually demonstrate competency in puzzle design in specific limited sections of the game. There are various puzzle shrines scattered throughout the world, about 10 of them, and while I wouldn’t consider any of the puzzles inside of them to be particularly challenging (with at least one that I can remember being completely braindead), most of them contain interesting ideas. There’s one where a 3 by 3 pushblock grid determines the placement of floating platforms that grant access to specific parts of the puzzle. While the puzzle itself isn’t particularly challenging, there’s an interesting idea that’s executed well, and the same can be said for most of these shrines. It’s a shame that full access to most of these shrines is locked until the main game is nearly complete, and functions as optional side content. It’s too little too late; the types of puzzles seen in these shrines should have been introduced early to mid game, and expanded on as the game progressed. As it stands right now, the fact that the only satisfactory puzzle content in the game is optional only serves as a painful reminder of what could’ve been.

Exploration:
Exploration was easily the thing this game succeeded the most at and was what I alluded to earlier in this review, however many of the strengths that the exploration has to offer are often not utilized well enough, or come with unforeseen negative caveats.

Let’s take the traversal mechanics for instance. The player can interact with ledges and walls to jump across gaps, scale up walls, or dive into bodies of water. There’s a lot of expressiveness in how the character can interact with the environment, and levels are designed with impressive verticality. An area you find pretty early on, the Port Town of Brisk, is filled with tons of goodies to find strewn across rooftops and hidden in the ocean. You have to climb up on said rooftops, balance across ropes, and take secret routes into homes in order to properly pick this place clean. It was one of the most memorable and fun parts of the game for me, but unfortunately this type of exploration is the exception rather than the rule. For the majority of the game, the verticality and traversal mechanics aren’t used to create similarly fun, open-ended jungle gyms.

In any given JRPG, there’s space and downtime between the main components making up the gameplay loop. A hallway connecting a puzzle room to a room with an enemy encounter, or one connecting a central atrium to the boss’s lair. It’s not something you think about when playing any other JRPG but it’s certainly something the game designers have to consider. Valuable downtime helps with pacing, areas need to be visually interesting enough to not be boring to simply walk through, or adding a hallway here or there simply makes the area you’re exploring feel more realistic. The reason that I’m pointing this out is that Sea of Stars seems to put a great deal more effort than its peers to make these sections feel more interesting. Sure, there are normal hallways to walk down, but there are also walls to climb across, you need to jump from one ledge to another before carefully balancing your way towards the next platform. This sounds cool when I’m writing it out, and it is cool the first couple of times, but it quickly gets annoying. What was once a non-issue in other games is now a feature that slows down the time between combat encounters and story beats for the sake of a novelty that wears off quickly. The first time my character balanced across a plank of wood to reach the other side of a roof I thought it was interesting, but the fifth time it happened I couldn’t help but be annoyed at how slow my character was moving as a result of the plank of wood. It’s like these levels were designed by someone who thought that the best parts of the Uncharted series were the linear climbing sequences.

Level design doesn’t just fail on a micro level within liminal sections, however. In many dungeons the layout of rooms fails on a macro level. Almost every major dungeon in the game follows the same formula of having a central area with a campfire and savepoint. This central area branches off into two or three sections that often need to be completed in a certain order to properly progress. Once all sections have been completed, the game allows you to progress further, and you get to experience your next boss/story moment/new area. This style of dungeon gets tiring to see over and over, but even if we ignore the lack of creativity on display here, this style of dungeon highlights another flaw with the game. In most JRPGs (and most games in general), there is some form of full heal, oftentimes this is a hotel that the player can stay in for a gold price. In Sea of Stars, the inns have no price attached, and there is no cost or disincentive associated with resting at a campfire. This means that when exploring a dungeon, after any enemy encounter where HP or MP is expended, it is optimal to backtrack and rest at the campfire before proceeding onwards. While this is something I might avoid since I’d find it annoying to do, the branching path level design means doing so is hardly an inconvenience. If anything, entering basic combat without full MP to bulldoze enemies is often more inconvenient than backtracking a few steps and filling back up for free. Resource management is completely broken due to this, and I spent the entire game hardly using any consumables. While this issue isn’t solely caused by this style of level design, it certainly plays a significant part in it.

Combat:
Turn-based combat is something that is hard to get right. Too many JRPGs are designed too simplistically; strategy in bad JRPGs often devolves into just spamming high-power special moves while occasionally taking a turn to heal. In order for turn-based combat to be interesting, there needs to be some level of strategic depth, either inside or outside of combat, but preferably both. Paper Mario, while simplistic and action command reliant while in combat, has many interesting decisions to be made outside of combat, decisions that can help the player steamroll through basic fights. Choosing which of the three stats to level up holds a surprising amount of weight since choosing one means forgoing the others, and the badge system from those games means there’s a lot of experimentation that can be done with different builds. An RPG like Omori injects strategic depth in-combat via the concept of rock-paper-scissors style type weaknesses also serving as status effects that can be inflicted on both allies and enemies. While the player might gravitate towards certain macro strategies, the player still has options and choices to be made on the fly to adapt to the unique circumstances of any given fight. My issue with Sea of Stars is that it fails to provide any meaningful strategy.

I’ll begin by briefly discussing strategy outside of combat. Due to the implementation of action commands and the lock system I believe that the developers never really intended for strategy outside of combat to be the focus, so it's less that they tried and failed to make macro strategy interesting and more that they didn’t really try. The only strategic options the player is offered outside of combat are bonus stats during a level up and ring slots. Ring slots are a tried and true system that I don’t have much to comment on, however the variety of rings leaves much to be desired. Too many rings are simple stat sticks, and there just aren’t enough of them for there to be any interesting decision making. Some rings are even straight upgrades compared to other rings. The game provides a unique type of ring slot that provides a bonus to the entire party regardless of who’s wearing it, but there are so few of these in the game that you aren’t making any decisions about what rings to have so much as you are making a decision on a ring or two to omit.

As for the bonus stats that the player can choose from when leveling up, these types of systems don’t really work for me when they come with some mechanic that disincentivizes actively focusing on a specific stat, which Sea of Stars does. I’m not 100% sure how the system exactly works, but I do know that when selecting a stat to boost, the next time you level up that stat won’t be available, so you can only really upgrade that stat every other level up. There also seems to be some sort of hard cap on how many times you can boost any individual stat judging by how the number of stats I could choose to boost from lowered from 4 to 3 by the time I was in the late game. It's annoying that the game pretends to give the player options to focus their characters on certain stats but then yanks those options away, rendering them meaningless..

Shifting the discussion to strategy within combat, let’s start with the lock system. Anytime an enemy decides to use a special move it is telegraphed to the player as a series of locks that, if not broken in time, will lead the enemy to use the special move. This system is actually pretty interesting in the early game. While many field encounter locks are trivial to break, bosses can throw some complex patterns at you. These complex patterns often require use of special moves, combo moves, live mana, and any combination of those. Figuring out what you need to do and learning that it's optimal to keep some amount of combo points/live mana available at any given point is a pretty fun early game moment. Unfortunately, much like many other aspects of this game, this concept isn’t evolved or made more complex over the course of the game, and hurts the game more than it helps.

The fatal flaw with the lock system is that once the player is past the point where they understand the best methods to break locks, the lock system wrenches away interesting decision making from the player. This flaw is practically in the name: combat devolves into a simple lock and key system. The player no longer has to make a decision on what move would be best for any given situation, they are instead assigned the simple task of finding the keys for the locks that the game provides. Perhaps it would’ve worked better if breaking locks had some sort of trade-off, some opportunity cost that the player needs to take into consideration whenever they make the decision to break locks, but in its current state there’s just no reason not to try to break every lock every time. Even if you’re incapable of fully breaking the lock, it's the easiest way to build up combo points and it reduces the power of the special attack being cast. While at first it appears that the lock system is a system that increases strategy in combat, the lock system ultimately represents the game asking the player for a specific series of moves, taking away interesting decision making from the player, which by extension takes away interesting strategic choices.

Another problem with the combat is just how homogenous the individual characters are from a gameplay standpoint. At the start of the game it sort of feels like the characters feel distinct, Zale and Valere are our main character DPS dealers while Garl functions more like a tanky support. In the early game there’s a little overlap (Zale and Valere are pretty interchangeable DPS-wise, both Zale can heal just as well as Garl), but at this point roles feel relatively separate. Unfortunately, this does not remain the case, combat roles overlap so heavily that characters are almost indistinguishable other than the types of damage they are capable of dealing. All of them have AoE options, all of them deal relatively similar damage under normal circumstances, all of them take relatively similar damage, and almost every character has some form of healing. There’s a lack of meaningfully unique mechanics tied to one character, one of the only examples being Serai’s ability to delay enemy attacks. Every character is a jack of all trades, which is a bizarre choice considering that class distinction is a key aspect of many JRPGs that just isn’t present here. It ultimately makes me question the developer's intent behind this decision (assuming this was intent and not just incompetence). The only explanation I can come up with is that the developers realized that every variety of team compositions needs to function as a result of sections where team compositions are limited and due to the nature of the lock system often requiring specific combinations of characters to break certain patterns. Regardless of whatever developer intentions there may have been, this style of character design takes away a lot of potentially interesting decision making from the combat system.

There’s a similar lack of variety in the individual skills available to characters. Each character only has access to three special moves and an ultimate, a pitifully small number of options when considering that those three special moves are the only ones you’ll be using for the entire 30-hour runtime of the game. Unlocking new options is always very rewarding in other RPGs, you level up past a certain threshold and get a cool new move to mess with in combat. In Sea of Stars, gaining new abilities comes at a snail’s pace, and most of the time the new ability you gain is a combo move that you can only realistically use during boss fights. Not that you’ll ever throw the combo move out for fun during a boss fight, since the lock system incentivizes banking combo points for niche cases where one is required to break a lock. It’s also worth mentioning that while there are a significant number of combo moves, there’s a lot of functional overlap where the only difference is the type of damage being dealt by the move. The same can also be said about both normal skills and ultimate abilities. This lack of variety in skills is simply another example of a baffling design choice that I can only reconcile in my head as a misguided method of limiting the number of “keys” available to the player since having too many would make breaking locks trivial.

The result of the lock system and lack of variety in combat options means that every combat encounter boringly plays out the same way. Every fight in the game devolves into the first phase of Ganon from Ocarina of Time, just spam your ping pong moonerang at every enemy and boss until they die, occasionally healing when you take too much damage and occasionally breaking locks whenever they pop up. The combat system just boils down to rote RPG number shouting where occasionally the game will display a series of moves it wants you to do, which you then do. The action command minigames get boring very quickly as they often feel like they take too long and often lack variety, and ultimate animations similarly get repetitive and boring. Fights start feeling slow by the fifth hour of the game, and combat doesn’t get any less boring even by the 20th or 30th hour.

Story:
There are various aspects of the story that bothered me, ranging from core issues to personal nitpicks. It’s honestly hard to know where to even begin, but I suppose I’ll start by saying that while I’ve tried to keep the rest of the review relatively spoiler-free, in this section I’ll be going over specific story sections of the game that didn’t work for me, up to and including the true ending.

The problems I had with the introduction of the story might be the best place to start with. The sequence is structured very strangely, starting with Zale and Valere exploring and scaling a mountain, fighting off some enemies. While seemingly simple, I found myself enjoying the fact that Sea of Stars had wasted no time getting me into the core gameplay. Unfortunately for me, this quick introduction turned out to be misleading, as our protagonists quickly go into flashback mode to start the actual introduction, which is just about as boring as they get. The most bizarre aspect of the intro that rubbed me the wrong way is the fact that the flashback recounts literally every major event in the characters' lives up to the point we just played where they’re scaling the mountain. The normal purpose of a flashback is to inform/remind the audience of some key event that took place in the past that holds some relevance to the current situation, and while this is partially true for the flashback at the start of the game, the fact that it fills in the entirety of the backstory of the main characters just makes me wonder why it was a flashback in the first place. The way I see it, the flashback in the intro would be narratively equivalent to simply starting the game off with the characters as kids and going through the story chronologically. It leads me to wonder why the game even bothered to structure it as a flashback since the only thing that the flashback sequence did was annoy me by taking me away from the gameplay in favor of a boring introduction. It feels like the developers were aware that their introduction was drawn-out and boring, but rather than put effort into crafting a more effective introductory sequence they just decided to splice in a gameplay segment at the very beginning to placate players. It’s funny then, that this decision had the exact opposite effect on me.

There’s also the weirdness surrounding Zale and Valere’s relationship with Garl. The introductory sequence includes a section where the three of them, as kids, wander off into a dangerous area, and as a result, Garl loses an eye. Immediately after this moment, Zale and Valere are separated from Garl to start their training as Solstice Warriors, and they don’t interact with each other for years. The game even makes a point of mentioning that Garl isn’t present for the send-off ceremony for Zale and Valere. To me, this all felt like a setup for a story about reforging bonds with childhood friends that you haven’t spoken to in years. Cut back to the present day, and Garl jumps out of the bush that our protagonists are camping next to, and they’re all buddy-buddy like nothing ever happened. The most baffling part of this moment isn’t even the fact that Garl just so happens to be in the bush that Zale and Valere were camping next to. The game is a fantastical RPG with a lighthearted tone and fun characters, obviously some moments are going to willingly sacrifice realism for the sake of a fun gag or a wholesome moment, the game would be worse off without these sorts of moments. The problem with this one in particular is that it feels like it throws away a lot of genuinely intriguing and seemingly intentional setup. It’s natural to assume that the relationship between two people that haven’t seen each other since kids isn’t going to be the same, and the game even goes out of its way to imply this. Garl getting injured as a result of their shenanigans holds no narrative weight here, and it almost feels like the game forgot that it happened. The real reason that the game showed this moment to us doesn’t occur until much later in the story, and even then it damages this introductory moment much more than it supports that later moment. You could argue that perhaps my expectations and predictions as to where the story was going to go is the reason why this moment didn’t work for me, but in my opinion, that’s exactly the problem with the story in Sea of Stars; a good story rewards the audience for paying attention and thinking about the situations it presents, but Sea of Stars often punished me for putting thought into its story.

Annoying introductory sequence aside, one aspect of the story where this rang true in particular was the game’s incessant use of blatant foreshadowing, all too often contextualized as prophecies. One funny example of this is when the Elder Mist gives Valere her prophecy: “When the time comes, you will be the one to create paths on water”. Not only did this one feel comically videogame-y compared to Zale’s prophecy about “confronting the darkness within him”, but Valere also seems very confused about the meaning of this prophecy. “He said I might be able to ‘create paths on water.’ What does that even mean?” she asks. Not only does the prophecy lack any subtlety or intrigue, but the game feels the need to have its characters pretend like the meaning of it is cryptic and indiscernible. I don’t even really know what to say about this moment, it feels so blatantly stupid that part of me is suspicious that it was some self-aware joke that didn’t land, but judging by the tone of that scene in particular I doubt that was the case. Spoiler alert, later in the game two islands need to be connected with a bridge that Valere makes out of water. Valere conveniently awakens this power at this moment so that the plot can progress, and then the ability to make bridges out of water is never acknowledged again. The only reason the game felt it necessary to prophesize this moment was to explain why Valere is randomly able to awaken this ability at such a convenient time. Prophesying your future plot conveniences doesn’t make them any less convenient. It’s a bandage fix for lazy storytelling that just failed to land for me.

As comical as I found Valere’s prophecy, ultimately it was thinking about Zale’s prophecy that did the most damage to the story for me. In the same conversation where the two protagonists are discussing the cryptic nature of Valere’s prophecy, Zale mentions that he believes that the “night inside of him” refers to the thought of losing a loved one. He comes to this conclusion due to how he felt when Garl got mind-controlled by the Dweller on the island they were staying on. He mentions how he felt the power but couldn’t actualize it, and at this point it became all too clear to me where the plot was headed. Garl was now marked for death by the game, and it was just a matter of waiting for when it would happen. When the moment finally came I couldn’t experience it as the huge emotional moment that the game wanted it to be, at best I could only appreciate what the game was trying to do, but the foreshadowing to this moment ultimately meant that this key moment in the story failed to have any impact on me. It’s what I was talking about when I said that Sea of Stars punished me for putting thought into its story. Maybe there’s an alternate reality where I skimmed over this foreshadowing and found myself surprised that the game was willing to kill off one of its main characters, but unfortunately I’ll never get to experience that.

The real tragedy is the fact that such moments of foreshadowing even affected my opinion of my story as much as they did. Foreshadowing is conventionally considered a good thing in most stories, but in Sea of Stars it works to its detriment since the only thing that the story of Sea of Stars has to offer are its twists. I recently watched Uncut Gems, a movie which succeeds on many different fronts but one point I’d like to make in particular is just how invested I was with the protagonist despite the fact that I had correctly predicted their fate. In that movie, the further along the plot progresses and the tension rises, the more and more obvious it becomes that there’s really only one way it can properly end, and yet when the climax of the film finally reaches its breaking point it still feels wonderfully impactful and cathartic. The fact that I knew what would happen to the protagonist at the end of the movie didn’t change my enjoyment of the film whatsoever. All of this being my convoluted way of saying that the journey matters more than the destination, and that ultimately the fact that I saw many of the twists in Sea of Stars coming shouldn’t have affected my experience as much as it did. It speaks to how little substance the story has outside of the shock value found in specific moments designed to wow the audience. Viewed through this lens, my complaints about story moments being predictable are relatively petty, but then we’re left with the question of why the journey taken through certain key moments is so ineffective.

I think it comes down to the simple fact that it feels like the story was written solely for the sake of specific key moments at the cost of all else, the writers would put the cart before the horse by coming up with a twist before determining how the story would lead up to the twist. One obvious example of this is one of the first major ones the story throws at you: Erlina and Brugave’s betrayal. At this point in the game I think most players will realize that some sort of incident has to happen here to prevent it from prematurely ending, but what they went for here just makes no sense. While I can somewhat understand the motivation of the two of them not wanting their destinies to be predetermined and their resentment of their status as Solstice Warriors, the conclusion they come to as a result of this makes so little sense that I doubt I even really have to explain it in much depth. They dislike their responsibility to deal with The Fleshmancer and the Dwellers so they join the side of the people wreaking havoc and evil upon the world? The game even goes out of its way to try to explain their motivations better but it makes even less sense. There’s a flashback to Erlina and Brugaves as young Solstice Warriors, highlighting a key moment in their life when all their Solstice Warrior peers and mentors leave Mooncradle to fight a powerful Dweller, and all of them are slain except for Moraine. The way it’s written makes it seem like a hero origin story, where seeing their loved ones fall to the great evil strengthens their motivation to fight against it, but instead it’s framed as the justification for why they join the great evil. I get why they’d accept the offer that the Fleshmancer acolytes gave them but I don’t understand why approaching them in the first place made more sense than just running off or just ignoring their duty. It just doesn’t make sense, I think it’s maybe kind of implied that Erlina was always evil and Brugaves was being dragged around by her, but if that was the case they could’ve made it more clear. It’s such a baffling story choice that highlights the developers' goals with the storytelling. Having this betrayal moment was more important to them than writing realistic character motivations, and this misguided prioritization does nothing but hurt my perception of the characters and the world. How am I supposed to take anything in this story seriously?

Not to mention, the betrayal is initially introduced as a fake-out twist where it looks like Serai is trying to stop Brugaves from obliterating the core of the Dweller that was just defeated. Again, it feels like the storytellers just wanted to put in a fake-out twist for shock value without considering the story implications. Serai stopping Brugaves at this moment implies that somehow Serai found out that Erlina and Brugaves were planning on betraying the Solstice Warriors (it’s never explained how she knew), and for some reason she didn’t warn Zale and Valere during their time together while looking for and defeating the Botanical Horror? Am I supposed to believe that in the space of time between Serai leaving the party and when she comes back in later to stop Brugaves she somehow found out about the betrayal? How could she have found out if Erlina and Brugaves were with the rest of the gang nearly the whole time? I know I sound nitpicky here, but I’m highlighting this since it’s yet another example of imbalanced priorities in the storytelling. The writers didn’t put thought into the implications of the fake-out twist, and again, it makes the story harder to take seriously.

A good chunk of the issue I take with this story also comes from how boring I found most of the characters. While there are a lot of fun personalities within the cast of this game there’s just too little depth in the story's main characters for me to care about any of them. I doubt anyone would argue against the fact that Zale and Valere are completely boring blank slates, which was likely due to the developers deciding to make their dialogue interchangeable depending on who the player decided to lead their party with. While I kind of thought Garl was kind of cool at the start, the more I played, and especially after I realized that he would die, I started to become really annoyed at how much the game was insisting on how nice of a person he was. The game just can’t help but constantly remind the player that Garl is a nice person that everyone likes, and there was a point where I started to get annoyed by it. His cheery attitude isn’t even an interesting contrast to a bleak world (even post-Dweller apocalypse), everyone in this world is kind and polite and hopeful, so much so that even in a haunted depressed town the residents are only indifferent towards you at worst. He’s a kind soul in a world completely inhabited by kind souls that typically occupy similar idyllic RPG settings, and so the writers must make him distinct by cranking up his kindness to 11. There’s a point where Garl stops feeling like a character and starts feeling more like a caricature, and this is a big reason why his death scene had no impact on me. The game is so desperate to make you like Garl so that his death scene feels impactful, but for me, it just looped back around to pure indifference, even resentment, towards him. The writer’s intent with this character was just so transparent I could never see him as a character, just as some sacrificial lamb to be killed off for story impact.

The thing is, Garl’s death scene is genuinely written in a very creative and interesting way. Just before Garl is hit with the shot that will eventually kill him, Resh’an freezes time and has a conversation with Aephorul. It’s a pretty effective moment that revels in its dramatic irony and fleshes out the interesting and complex relationship between Resh’an and Aephorul, and it even manages to fit in a fun tie-in with The Messenger without it feeling forced. It’s a shame that this moment felt retroactively ruined for me when it's later revealed that this was all set up for the writers to bring Garl back to life for the true ending of the game. This moment failed for me not only because I didn’t care that much for Garl, but also because it represents the storytelling not having the balls to live with the consequences of its decisions. The game wants to have its cake and eat it too; it wants you to feel sad when Garl is killed off, but it doesn’t want Garl to be permanently removed from the story. Do the storytellers not understand that character deaths are impactful due to the knowledge that they can’t magically be revived? That death without permanent consequence holds no weight? It’s not like he even does anything once he comes back, he just fulfills his wish to eat at the Golden Pelican and then convinces Aephorul to fight the main cast by being rude to him. The already weak story changes from one about characters overcoming their grief for the greater good to one about a bunch of kids using the power of friendship to kill a god. It’s amazing how the writers managed to make their poorly written story even more boring and generic.

Admittedly, the relationship between Resh’an and Aephorul is something I found to be genuinely interesting, but unfortunately it isn’t developed that fully and leads to another issue that drained me of the last bit of investment I had in the plot of the game. The thing is, the story isn’t actually about Zale and Valere versus The Fleshmancer, this conflict is microscopic compared to the one that is revealed later as a conflict between Resh’an and Aephorul that spans several timelines and dimensions. As a result of learning about this bigger conflict in the world, suddenly the conflict between the protagonists and The Fleshmancer within their own world feels small and petty in comparison. It became impossible to be invested in anything but Resh’an and Aephorul’s conflict, but this aspect of the story just isn’t developed enough in comparison to Zale and Valere’s comparatively small conflict. Before the end of the game, Resh’an just straight up leaves the party as a result of a new revelation about Aephorul he makes, since he needs to “return to the archives and run more models.” You’d think he’d come back at some point with his new learnings and revelations, but he doesn’t show up again until the end of the game, where in both endings he comes back just to leave with Aephorul. It’s such a bizarre choice, like the writers just got tired of writing dialogue for him and arbitrarily took him out of the story for some reason, despite this aspect of the story being the most interesting part for me. Nothing about his character arc ends in any conclusive matter, it’s just plain disappointing.

Weirdly enough, this problem of characters just kind of exiting the story for seemingly no real reason didn’t just apply to Resh’an. The way they handled Elder Moraine felt similar, like they just got tired of writing his character and so just demoted him to NPC status. The four Fleshmancer acolytes that were the main source of conflict in the first half of the game also just kind of disappear, they’re all presumably still at large by the time the credits roll. It’s bizarre, to say the least, and I honestly can’t think of any good reason for these characters to have their stories so abruptly and unceremoniously cut off.

Pivoting back around to the ending of the game, it’s saddening how anticlimactic both endings felt for me. In both endings, the protagonists fight and defeat a big evil being, which prompts Resh’an to come back and leave with Aephorul, and then Zale and Valere ascend to Guardian Gods and kill a World Eater in a jarring shift to shoot-em-up gameplay. I think a lot of the lack of impact of this ending is a result of the knowledge of the larger-scale conflict between Aephorul and Resh’an. After you defeat the great evil, even though Aephorul is not dead, the game congratulates you and rolls the credits. Even in the true ending when you actually fight and defeat Aephorul, Resh’an just takes him away and the audience is left wondering what’s changed as a result of his defeat since the World Eater still comes and everything else plays out the same way, except Garl is now alive. I think the lack of impact could’ve been mitigated had the game better explained the implications of the Solstice Warriors ascending to Guardian Gods, since what the ascension entails is kept very vague. If the ascension was perhaps better explained to have a notably tangible positive effect on the world and other worlds, I could remain satisfied with the ending resulting in them ascending, but from the way it looks they just kind of shoot off into space, kill one World Eater, then just fly around for the rest of time. As a result of the unclear implications of ascending to Guardian Gods the ending doesn’t represent a great victory for the heroes, it’s just yet another thing the game said would happen that’s currently happening. For all I know, multitudes of other worlds are currently being ravaged by Aephorul as a result of the fact that he never truly dies. It lacks both narrative and emotional impact, and unfortunately, it fails to stick the landing in any satisfactory way.

Overall:
You might argue that many of the points I brought up as criticisms are petty and nitpicky, and I would have to agree. No individual complaint I had about the game was the smoking gun revealing why I didn’t have a good time with it, but my problem with Sea of Stars ultimately lies in the fact that there’s not a single aspect of the game that lived up to any sort of standards, the game is less than the sum of its mediocre parts. No amount of pretty pixel art, decent music, or cool “wow” moments in the game will fix the fact that there’s just nothing noteworthy about the gameplay and story. It’s style over substance, and it failed to capture the magic that I felt when playing through The Messenger. While fans of JRPGs may find a lot more fun in this game than I did, unfortunately, Sea of Stars is just one of those JRPGs that makes me think I hate JRPGs. It always hurts a little when a game that I want to love turns out to be a disappointment.

Misc:
Here’s a list of nitpicks that felt difficult to naturally fit into the review. The review is already way too long but I’m choosing to include these for the sake of being thorough. The depth of my disappointment with this game just needs to be expressed on this website.
- The game splices in short animated cutscenes in moments it deems important. While these cutscenes are very well made, the art style sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the pixel graphics, and these cutscenes are often too brief for their existence to feel justified. You’ll quickly cut to a 2-second cutscene of Brugaves and Erlina waving at the main characters before cutting back to the pixel art graphics. It always felt jarring and out of place, not to mention that the important moments that the game chooses to show always feel arbitrary. There were many moments when I wondered why there was a cutscene to introduce it and many other moments where it felt like the kind of scene that would justify a cutscene that just didn’t happen. It’s a lot of effort put into something that I think made the game worse off.
- Exploring the world there are lots of subtle animations and lighting that make it feel more alive, but ironically enough the humans in this game are the least lively part of the game. While some of them wander around, too many NPCs are just placed in the center of the building they occupy, staring at their door, waiting for the player to interact with them. Not to mention, talking to all the NPCs in a town reveals them to be part of some hivemind with how often their separate dialogues are just rewordings of the same statement.
- With only a few exceptions most enemy weaknesses and resistances to certain types of damage felt like they didn’t follow any conventional wisdom (that I could discern, maybe I’m just dumb). Discovering enemy type weaknesses is often a matter of trial and error, but even after learning enemy weaknesses I’d often simply forget just because there’s no discernable logic behind them in the first place.
- The one notable exception to the above problem is that Fleshmancer enemies are always weak to solar and lunar damage. Even though these enemies should be the most intimidating ones in the game, this simple fact means that many encounters with them will be dealt with in one turn through the use of moonerang or Zale’s flame dash whatever move. Their strong resistance to everything else also led to a funny moment where I used Vespertine cannons on a Dweller, which I believe has the longest animation of the ultimates, and it would deal only 10 damage. This wasn’t a one-off thing either, it happened a few times throughout my playthrough since there’s a decent chunk of time when Vespertine cannons is the only ultimate move available to use.
- I briefly touched on it in the combat section but I’d just like to emphasize that there’s just way too many healing options between all the party members. Zale can heal, Valere can group heal, Garl can heal, Resh’an can heal, B’st can heal, there’s a combo move that will full heal, and Resh’an’s ultimate full heals. It’s so excessive, there is almost never any risk of dying, even in late-game fights where bosses have moves that just set your HP to 1.
- The Wheels minigame is 10 times more fun than normal combat.
- The moment when Serai grabs the Vial of Time off of Resh’an and throws it at the Dweller of Strife annoys me. The implications of Resh’an being involved in the conflict were clearly explained but Serai makes this dumb decision regardless and it directly leads to Garl’s death. Resh’an doesn’t even really make any physical effort to stop her. It’s not awful, I guess, I can kind of understand why Serai would do it, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
- There’s the whole cutscene/sequence with the funeral whatnot after Garl dies for real, and it felt a bit tone-deaf for the sequence to end with a pop-up textbox accompanied by a jingle telling us that the main characters have now learned their ultimate abilities. It felt kind of emphasized by the fact that the jingle causes the somber music to completely cut out before it fades back in.
- It feels like the game often forgets that you have two party members who have demonstrated that they can create instant warp portals to other locations. Apart from the fact that the whole “portal ninja” concept for Serai feels underutilized in her kit (there’s just so much creative potential that just isn’t tapped into with her concept), it feels like there should’ve been some explanation as to why we can’t use Serai or Resh’an’s portals to fast travel or unlock new shortcuts around the overworld. It feels like too obvious of a solution for the game not to acknowledge it in some form.
- Serai has the big reveal when she turns out to be a cyborg, but I can’t think of any reasonable explanation as to why she had to keep this information from the others. You’d think that informing them about her situation would help her achieve her goals but she just kind of tags along with the gang, never mentioning needing help until the protagonist's journey just so happens to take them to her world. I guess she somehow knew that they would eventually end up in her world? How'd she even travel between worlds to begin with? Did I miss something in the story explaining this?
- The revival of the Dweller of Strife felt like it was supposed to be a big turning point in the story, this was the being that killed off every Solstice Warrior except for Brugaves, Erlina, and Moraine. We even see Brisk being destroyed by meteors, but a few cutscenes later everything is fine with the world. Even Brisk goes back to normal pretty quickly. The world just isn’t altered in any meaningful way and there is no sense of urgency in progressing the main quest.
- The giant golem being named “Y’eet”, the existence of “Jirard the Constructionist”, and various other weird jokes were intentionally put in the game by the devs to kill me on the spot for saying bad things about their game.
- Lots of games have obligatory Kickstarter rooms, having them is not inherently a problem. The game going out of its way to force you to enter the Kickstarter room is a problem however since it tricks the player into thinking there’s something worthwhile to discover. All the build-up to entering the crypt for the first time builds up intrigue that turns into disappointment when it is discovered that the crypt is just Kickstarter messages.
- There’s probably something to be said about how I spent almost every spare hour I had post-launch playing this game despite how many issues I had with it. I suppose in lots of ways the game was “good enough” to play, but I think part of me was powering through out of pure spite.