Wow this game is fantastic, what an awesome surprise.
Beacon pines is charming, clever and captivating.
From beginning to end, I was enjoying the ride. In fact I struggle to even think of any flaws that detracted from my experience

This game hits precisely what it was going for, and there's so much I love about its execution. The presentation is wonderful, the characters are delightfully expressive, the writing is strong, and the storytelling is interesting

The thematic focus,setting and child adventure antics aren't even things that particularly appeal to me. I was expecting this to be a game that i could respect and find plenty to appreciate about, but ultimately not be my thing. Instead I've been blown away and continually found myself thinking "now that is an interesting direction i wasn't expecting"

This process started from my very first moment with the game. The storybook framing was immediately intriguing and exciting. Great news, the payoff is wonderful. The narrator's words and performance are constantly a fantastic contribution to moments in Beacon Pines. Here they pulled of an incredible balancing act of making this narrator gimmick feel like an incredible part of the identity of this game, without ever letting it be an aspect that dominates the storytelling. I think it's worth especially shouting out the writing for turning points and branch endings

Speaking of those, the chronicle-tree structure is easily my favorite part of the game. This is a storytelling space that a lot of games, especially visual novels love to explore. I can't think of any games that have done a better job with this than beacon pines.

The miraclous thing is that this structure doesn't waste ANY of your time. None of this nonsense where you have to replay through bits you've already seen. Not only can you fast travel to any choice in the game, but the moment you make any choice the game will dive into brand new territory. As far as respecting you as a player, Beacon Pines feels like a linear game, but for delighting and exciting you, Beacon Pines still reaps the benefits of a branch exploration game.

I am so impressed at how the timelines and player pacing are constructed in this game. You're constantly discovering interesting things, and playing other branches always feels like an extension of the overall story instead of a jarring step backwards. Every single timeline either goes in an interesting direction or promptly ends amusingly.

I adore the framing of each turning point. Your charm inventory is consistently used and reused in clever ways. The illustrations and titles of each node are absolutely wonderful.

What I really respect about this is the sheer skill with which the writers juggle the player's expanded knowledge and the character's branch specific experience. There's so many excellent uses of dramatic irony, it never becomes frustrating, and the writing cleverly avoids having to reexplain things.

The next time I play a branch exploration game, I'm sure I'll find myself thinking "I wish this was more like beacon pines"

This game also handles its tone excellently. It's quite hard to succesfully switch between comedy,tradegy, warmth and cold. Many of the most impactful stories are the ones that have the confidence and skill to pull this off. Beacon Pines is absolutely a member of this club. I especially adore the branch where you spend time reconciling with rolo... only to be flash frozen out of nowhere.

All of the scenes where the game decides to focus on the emotional core and main cast character conflicts hit well. Shoutout to the scene where luka and beth yell into the window. Maybe even better than that is all the little dialogs along the way

Finally I enjoyed the way this game is packed with twists. It keeps the reveal train rolling the whole time. It's a pleasure to be so consistently surprised with the direction things go in. {And this never feels like the game going "off the rails", even though some of the twists out of context feel like they would fit that}

(warning for spoilers and long rambling thoughts

This game rules. Overwhelmingly it feels like an adventure that is excited to showoff its gauntlet of incredible places. Regardless of any flaws, the world you get to travel through here made this undoubtedly worth my time. Every single area looks awesome and the game is full of highlight environments. It's almost like this is the only paragraph of the review that truly matters, none of the game's weaknesses overshadow this and none of its other strengths feel anywhere as impactful on my experience

Your traversal through these environments makes their visual design shine even more. Your travel path through each screen is often quite interesting, especially due to the focus on verticality throughout all the level design. It reminds me a lot of what I love about the world of crosscode, except sea of stars has almost no depth perception issues, the clarity in environments is overall really impressive here. {With some noticeable exceptions for non-obvious places that took me a while to realize i needed to use mistral bracelet}. Unlike crosscode, the paths in sea of stars aren't meant to be convoluted layers to untangle, they're just there to make your travel much more visually interesting.

Unlike many other games with unlockable items that feel like they open up new parts of the worlds, sea of stars just uses them to change up how you move through screens every so often. The movement abilities in this game are purely decorative in that sense, it's just a different style of friction to add variety to the level design. I suspect this is something that will disappoint a lot of people, I personally like how their implementation contributes to the main strength of the game

Speaking of items though, I am compelled to mention that there are pushable sliding blocks and therefore "ice" puzzles in this game. Absolutely none of them have my ice puzzle seal of approval. Very few rooms in this game deserve to even qualify as puzzles, like i was talking about above it's just a way to put friction in your traversal. Overall I don't think these work very well, both combat and movement are vastly superior forms of friction here. Fortunately very few of these sorry excuses for puzzles became tedious for me, although some of the solstice shrines were close to crossing the line

The thing I was most afraid of becoming tedious was the combat. I'm not a big fan of turn-based rpgs generally, and it feels like in every single one I play I eventually reach some breaking point where I can't stand doing all this constant combat anymore. I am delighted that I never reached this point with sea of stars. I wish I could isolate the reason why... despite liking the combat system, I don't love it enough to consider it the main factor that staved off my inevitable apathy.

Overall my take on the combat system is that it's full of great ideas, but also ends up sounding more interesting then the motions you go through in practice. I want to make sure I shoutout the great ideas here
1. Normal Attacks refill a small amount of MP.
I wish this was standard in jrpgs. The way this changes the player's relationship with MP makes it such a stronger mechanic.

2. Your can hotswap in any party members as a free-action. It almost feels like other games in the genre are scared of doing this.... "no your party composition has to be an out of battle choice" (or at the very least if in-combat switching is a mechanic it must have some time cost).

I found this incredibly refreshing and quite liberating. It also mixes well with the above mentioned MP regen mechanic. It's cute to engage with questions like who do i want to get more MP, which health pools do i want to be on the field right now, and whose potential actions do I want to keep available for the next 1-3 turns.
It's a neat way to stay true to having only 3 party members fighting, while also letting you always play with the entire movelist

(especially since entire party buffs/heals only affect who is currently out)

3. Each enemy has a visible timer, the battle operates on units of time that pass whenever any of your party members take an action.

This is both a great mechanic in the context of the game's lock system approach and a just a solid combat structure generally. I much prefer it to many styles I've seen before, especially the common my-turn->your turn simple osciliation.

Next I quite like sea of stars' take on a break & boost system. My main point of comparison for a system like this is octopath traveller, and I like what this game does better. The main difference is that breaking an enemy's locks is (primarily) a defensive action instead of (primarily) an offensive action. This gives the player a neat bit of extra agency on how they engage with the system, although to be clear the focus of the combat is absolutely on breaking locks.
Sometimes there's points where you don't have enough time to break every incoming attack, so you must make a tactical decision. I say this because making tactical decisions is actually quite rare here, other than the rpg bread & butter resource management.

The action commands aren't that involved, but they do feel like a net positive mechanic. They're much more interesting defensively. Timing your own attacks feels incredibly trivial, but timing against enemy animations is neat.

Most of the combat is going through motions, although the system is just good enough that this doesn't feel like half the complaint it should be

It's weird how often disorient feels like a necessary move. It's easily the most useful move any of your pals have. Even if you didn't need it to have a chance at fully clearing many of the attack patterns, the pure utility it has is noteworthy. Sometimes it feels like it's breaking the game and sometimes it feels like it's required to play as intended.

The Narrative is one of the weaker aspects of sea of stars. To me that's a compliment towards other components of the game... since this is normally the primary value i derive from RPGS.

Overall the story doesn't quite land, there's not enough writing strength and attention to support it Like many weaknesses in sea of stars, the story never crosses the line to being bad or annoying. It's serviceable with some great aspects sprinkled in.

My favorite part is Re'Shan. The framing of him telling the story, and then the payoff of just straight up walking into his tower is legendary.... and then even better he joins the party. I love this concept for a party member. Sea of stars doesn't quite use the potential of this fully, but what it does capatilize on is still so cool. The endgame quest where the puppet sends you through ruins and had the chest contents on him the whole time is hilarious. Things like duplicating himself for when the party splits, and peacing out while leaving a puppet are great.

The game does a great job of balancing the feeling that he's not playing by the same rules as your group, meaningfully contributing, and not stealing the spotlight. That's a hard hat trick to achieve.

The conflict between the immortal alchemist and the fleshmancer is a strong conceptual layer to wrap the story around. In some senses I wish it was directly what the narrative was about. The journey of solstice warriors to go fight evil is nowehre near as interesting. I think I would have liked for the game really commit to exploring this, especially the interpersonal conflicts. It generally really annoys me to hear people say that videogame narratives are magnitudes weaker than other media. I do have to concede that it seems like there's so many types of stories that videogames are afraid to tell. What I want sea of stars to do with its story is the kind of thing that fantasy novels would take in stride

I really like the scene where Re'Shan stops time to talk to Aephorul. It's excellent how the first thing the fleshmancer comments on is the artistry of the trick. I like the thread of respect that connects them even as they're are fundamentally opposed to each other. I love the way someone being moments away from death is simply the background for this conversation, and barely focused on. Yet despite liking this conversation, it's still a shadow of what they could have done here. To return to other media comparison, this conversation is something that easily could fill an entire short story.

Speaking of this scene, wow the punishment for Re'Shan breaking the rules is so light. ALL THE FLESHMANCER HAS THE RIGHT TO DO IS JUST KILL ONE PERSON? How the hell did he agree to these rules. I was expecting the consequence to be some permanent damage or serious complication to the world. This actually does happen as a result of making the messenger-era demon king, but it still feels like such a low direct price {even though garl's death is made impactful and given a suprising amount of space in the plot which I like}. I can kind of see it as "you hurt my dwellers, I hurt your solstice warriors"but this still bugs me. Especially since honestly the current conflict in the home-world is pretty much solved as a result of breaking the rules here. From their current perspective, they don't have any dwellers left, original mission is accomplished, we're just interested in taking down the fleshmancer generally now.

The main cast is a solid start, but they didn't put in the writing attention to support them as the focal point of the story. Valere and Zale are incredibly simple characters, and only have slight differences between each other. Garl is likeable and has solid moments , but lacks depth. Serai is cool, but her one paragraph character pitch is basically everything to her {except i guess being the designated impatient person in the party}. Re'Shan the character doesn't get much spotlight, most of his screentime is more him filling a role and helping out as the immortal alchemist rather than expressing himself. {The one flashback scene he gets feels like "you get a little character as a treat", all the characters should have had this bare minimum of exploration throughout the game} B'st is interesting but comes in too late to do anything with them, their inclusion is still something I appreciate. {Shoutout to B'st's travelling animations, they are incredible}

Teaks is a character that only exists as a vessel for a specific role, although I do like that role. Her stories are absolutely the best writing in the game, and I loved reading all of them. They breathe a lot of life into the game's world, and are just incredibly interesting This is where all the cool concepts are hiding, and quite a lot of them fit well with the adventure as its relevant to you. I think I appreciated these even more than the shopkeeper stories in the messenger, which is impressive given how much those are a higlight of that game.
Also shoutout to the time's where the main-plot uses teaks magical ability to absorb knowledge into her book. Love when games do that. The idea to do that to get the documentation for the computer system feels very clever

If I ever make an RPG, one of the main party characters will be a historian. There's more potential space here than just a side storyteller character.

One of my favorite things to see a story explore is the power to see into the future. I was intrigued by sea of star's use of prophecies. Unfortunately the game just absolutely fumbles them.

If you using prophecies to solve conflicts in your story, instead of introduce new conflicts what the hell are you doing. Using prophecies as a tool to conviently solve plot problems and make things happen is simply terrible writing. Valere's prophecy to make bridges over water is eggregious in this regard. I don't think the game ever actually uses zale's "face the darknesss inside of you". Re'shan's prophecy is so intriguing, and the actual execution of it makes me wonder what part the story needed the prophecy for {and that's coming from someone who inherently loves their inclusion!}

The 2nd set of prophecies has the most potential, Hearing "yeah you're going to fail against the dweller in mesa island" rips open such an interesting tone for the story. yet despite this technically being true, the game doesn't gives proper thematic payoff to it. Like I said earlier, despite the bad stuff that does happen as a result of breaking the rules, overall it feels like mission accomplished. Then what was the point of garl's prophecy to know to ask for the flask of borrowed time? You could have just written the story to have that happen in a much less awkward way.

The prophecy for garl to soothe a soul is almost good. The problem is that prophecy just simply gifts him his entire plan. This should have been a plan that garl devised of his agency. Come on, this is such an embarassing mistake to make. You were so close to making the warrior cook swansong an excellent sendoff to garl and satisfying payoff.

Despite thinking all the prophecies were fumbled, i still gain value from their inclusion. I just like oracles in stories, and i specifically enjoyed encountering several different ones over the course of this game. The scene where yomara prophecized that garl would appreciate her delicious pear was incredible. The juxtaposition of this being considered an important prophecy when she has a much larger scope of insight is hilarious.

The way the game begins is simply baffling.
Why does the game begin on the mountain trail, only to flashback to mooncradle, and then we're pretty quickly back to the point we're started. I cannot comphrend why we didn't start in Mooncradle. What could possibly be the payoff of stepping backwards and catching back up to a point with so little game-time between the two.

That's not the worst part though... the mooncradle portion is an unbelievably slow start. It's incredibly boring. It's stands out as bad even among a genre that loves to make its stories start from nothing. I can't even excuse it as nesscary setup like some epic fantasy novels are notorious for. The real "nesscary setup" actually still just happens along the way and there's just so many ways they could have made zenith academy more interesting. Then there's so much empty space in the literal years that this intro takes place over, it makes the bits that they thought were necessary even more jarring to playthrough.

The music is pretty cool, but sea of stars commits the cardinal RPG sin: battle music. Are you enjoying this interesting new track that sounds great and contributes to the atmosphere of where you are? What if we interreupted it to play a generictrack you've already heard 47 times? This is one of my pet peeves in games. Sea of stars even has some areas where this doesn't happen... it sticks out even more to do this on a case by case basis. I wish more games did transitions between exploration and action versions of a track, like hollow knight or magenta horizon do.

Speaking of track transitions, controlling the time of day is an impressive gimmick. The way that the music and lighting change continuously as you're rotating the time is awesome. This is the kind of technical achievement and unbelievable artistry that sells games according to marketing departments.

Instead of being a headliner feature, this is more just a causal high effort thing the game has done. Sometimes there are bits of world interaction that utilize this mechanic, but overwhelmingly it's not a design focus of the game. This gimmick could easily be the center of the game, it's interesting to see that it's mostly included "just for fun". This allows it to be used for cosmetic preferences & variety, since you are not constantly rotating the time for traversal and game-state purposes.

I'd say it is underutilized, but perhaps it's better this way. It's not like the missed potential is really in the world traversal or rotatable light beams anyway. Maybe they should have cut the light beam stuff actually. I find myself imagining a game that uses this in its combat system, maybe something like the planetary alignment in magical starsign.

At first, this mechanic seems baffling. Why would they restrict its use just to specific sigils? Its to create artificial hype once the game lets you do it anywhere... I guess it works, that was somehow a moment that surprised me and made glacial peak hit well. The game uses this design philosphy in several places. Like the world map is annoying to traverse and painful to backtrack in.... but that makes it feel awesome when you unlock flight. Is the time you pay before then worth feeling of satisfaction and power in the late game? I'm not sure, but why the hell did you put the rainbow conch person in a place that requires going through all of jungle path again before you unlock flight.

Speaking of rainbow conches, having to find all of them for the true ending was a waste of my time. I probably collected 80% of them along the way. It sure felt frustrating to see a lot of the ones I had "missed" where intentional places where you had to use future abilities. What is the point of this forced backtracking? As i mentioned before, the traversal abilities in this game don't go for the feeling of unlocking more of the world... so what were they cooking here. This kind of backtracking feels lazy in metroidvania games (where it fits much better)... here it's just bad. I used guides to find the rest of the conches, one of the rare times where sabotage studio took the bad part of a nostalgic genre.

Speaking of wasting my time, why does the true ending require you to do the normal ending. Was it necessary to make me go through the overlap twice? I had every condition for the true ending when i finished the game the first time... why not just let me go straight for it. Maybe it's because the true ending hurts the story. Reviving garl feels cheap. It's the kind of thing showrunners would do after killing a character and realizing "oh shit they were too popular"

Honestly I kind of liked the unsatisfying way the fleshmancer orginally just says "fighting solstice warriors is beneath me, later". Being able to fight (and beat!) them in the true ending doesn't feel earned.

The fleshmancer fight takes forever, but thematically it still feels like he's nerfed. Why exactly can all of my party members survive hits from his beam of death that kills garl? Is the armour in serai's world just that good? Did garl get complimentary nanofiber armour when he was revived? Why does he get a complimentary wish anyway? Isn't being revived a miracle enough? True ending really does feel like fanservice

Speaking of fan-service, Sea of Stars is more intent on being a messenger prequel than I was expecting. The way autumn hills faithfully matches up is incredibly neat...the whole of mesa island is a cool nod. The scene after Serai breaks the rules especially feels like the writers going "Look! This is the orgin of that messenger thing".
It's like the developers took all their prequel energy and put it into 5 hours of the game, and then got it out of their system {except for the mandatory shrine display scene at the end of the game of course}

Sea of stars went on longer than I was expecting, and here that was a lovely surprise. Going to serai's world feels like you are about to go to the final dungeon, but surprise it's another world - 10 more hours of adventure. And that 10 more hours is quite cool! It's neat to get such a vast setting shift, and shoutout to changing the UI too.
The areas in her world are slightly shorter, this feels more like an intentional pacing decision than any shortcut of dev effort. They're able to get good mileage out of this extra setting

Sleeper and Mesa island stand out above the others. They have great diversity of subareas, with each of them feeling memorable and interesting.

The most generic part of sleeper island (moorlands) went ahead and showed off visually with its sense of elevation. I thought at first that was just the artstyle most of the areas would use, in hindsight it became more memorable. I love how you approach sleeper island from the top, it's the opposite of how most games would do it and it feels like such a strong decision.

Wraith island is my least favorite, not for any lack of quality though. The spooky vibe simply vibes less with me, and it's the most cohesive thematically. The latter bit is a complaint, because variety appeals to me so much

When I played through Chrono Trigger, the dungeons were the most miserable part of the experience. They were the sludge i had to trudge through to get to the parts that were remotely interesting. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised that the dungeons of sea of stars were incredibly enjoyable, often highlights of the journey. Shoutout to the wizard's lair, antsudlo, sky base, and clockwork castle

It's frustrating that you temporarily lose access to certain special items when the party (unexpectedly) splits up. Especially annoying to just not have eye of yomura (or abascus) because the person wearing it was taken out of my party... when that doesn't matter otherwise.
I don't think the party splits in this game are even that interesting, definetly not worth doing.

This game has a lot of things that didn't feel strictly necessary. Overall that's part of what makes it feel like such a high-effort experience. {I generally don't like to call any game high effort, because game dev is hard. Almost every commercial game is high effort, and consumers are really just guessing when they make evaluations of how much work something was. A game being made with passion or love isn't a special thing, it's the default. }

The cooking system is at least an improvement from the way items normally work in jrpgs, but it's still not particularly interesting or valuable. Impressive that they drew art for all the food though

I don't really like fishing minigames, this one is decent though.

I loved the quiz master, I generally find it satisfying when games test me on my memory. I remember a lot of things without having to put effort into it, it's always a great surprise for that to be relevant and rewarded. Also it's fun how the questions try to dig out things that maybe you weren't paying attention too. There's two terrible flaws here : the division into casual/expert quizzes and the placement of question packs in the world.

It feels like you're not meant to do both the casual and expert quizzes, so i just did all the expert ones. Those are punishing to the point of being annoying and tedious to do, but i want to see all the questions. The game shouldn't present both of them as an option, it's a waste of the players time because of how much they overlap. {especially since completetion is tracked seperately for them}.

Then what's the deal with the last 3 quizpacks. Ok I go to the final dungeon. Immediately find the last cypher collectible which encourages me to leave and go see what that leads too. Quiz pack, goes i'll quickly go back and do that. Ok I'm almost at the final boss. Oh oh another quizpack, let me go do there before i finish the game. They're kind of ruining the vibe of the final dungeon by giving me this collectible here.

Wheels is decently fun, although it's just 1 more layer of depth short of being good. I guess one way to say it is I was excited to do each game, but happy when each one was over. It's a solid start, but you're not making any particularly interesting decisions. The presentation of it is cool, and the experience is good enough that it's definitely a good inclusion in the game. Just something that could be better.

Why does one of the wheels champions require you to backtrack to the watchmaker (before you have flight too!). It would have been a better use of my time and a funny joke for there to already be a wheels table in repine.
[ You might notice that i've bringing up a lot of very small and specific complaints like this. I hope to emphasize that this game is good, but there's a surprising amount of strange decisions that add up to detract from it]

Mirth and the crypt are neat. Their introductions are well placed pacing wise, after a big shift in the story and a noticeably long gauntlet of dungeon/combat gameplay.
It feels like they found the exact point in the journey throughout the game where i turned out to be willing to look at statues for an hour. Wow the scale of the crypt is mind blowing. It's quite pleasant to look through the backer statues. Probably the best version of a mass Kickstarter backer insert i've seen in a game

Alright capping off the sea of stars thoughts there
i'm free