Man, I really want to love this game, but everything inside is so fucking dated and dragged out. Story is great but so stretched. Open world is beautiful but crossing it is painful (why no jump). Mini-games are core of the spirit of the game but they're all so fucking tedious and unbalanced. Everything is so slow and clunky. Combat is very interesting but has massive flaws (why no iframes on dodge ????). Also, open world activities are really bad past the first zone. And losing the mount to re-learn it everytime, oh god.

Feels like there is a lot of passion on this remake, but it's undermined by a lot of lazy design and dated ideas.

A real disappointment. Gameplay wise it's better than the original, you have more options and it flows wonderfully. My problem comes with the level design. You can tell this game had a larger budget and it certainly shows, just not in a good way. They've gone the route of bigger = better and it just doesn't work with this style of gameplay. The original was perfect when it simply had you going from level to level seamlessly. This time there is a bunch of pointless, boring crap to halt your progress and all feeling of momentum. A real tragedy, this could've been great.

The Dev's were definitely working with a bigger budget this time around and I think some of it was placed correctly and some of it wasn't.

- Gameplay is better than the 1st game.
- Music is just as peak as before.
- Environments are more varied with their themes & color palettes
- Some of the areas feel way too big and make the game a slog sometimes
- I preferred going from level to like in the first game rather than having a central hub between levels.
- I did not care about the characters very much. Kira was fun at least
- Bike gameplay feels good when it works, but can be pretty buggy and frustrating at times.
- Feels like some of the collision on the platforms isn't as tight as it should be and caused more deaths than I wouldve liked (or im just bad).

Good game. Wait for a sale

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Quick video review: https://youtu.be/9XcWHDRiUIk

Last Train Home is a lot of things. It’s a real time tactics game, but also a survival management game. It’s an RTS, but with a full fledged historical narrative in a setting we don’t often see. Some of these it does well, some it doesn’t.

Gameplay
The game basically has two sides to it: the real time tactics of its individual missions and the larger RTS, survival resource management side of things. The former is fairly straightforward. You deploy a squad of soldiers to a given mission and complete a number of objectives to win.

It’s nothing too complicated, but it’s definitely not bad. The game gives you a variety of unit-dependent skills to use, a cover system that basically decides the victor in drawn-out battles, several different weapon types, intuitive field of view tools, and an entire slate of hotkeys to manage your gameplay. That’s all great to have, but it is also unfortunately coupled with some shoddy AI and combat that can come across as stiff. A lot of the time, you can simply rush in and wipe out enemies by having the sheer numerical advantage and if you don’t want to go that route, you can simply wait behind cover and let the AI wander towards you and just die without fighting back.

It’s a bit weird overall. The missions sometimes work and are fun, but sometimes have little issues like this that make it hard to take seriously. Still, I would say it leans more towards the fun side of things.

Similar things can be said about the RTS gameplay. You basically have this train serving as your home base and need to send squads out to gather supplies, disembark at stations to trade with local merchants, and tackle side objectives along the way to your next big destination. It’s a pretty cool system to have on top of the regular mission stuff and I quite liked being able to customize and upgrade my train, manage my units with all the different class types and abilities, and the random events that popped up occasionally were cool too.

However, this also comes with its issues. The actual act of making and sending out squads is probably my biggest problem. It’s just so unintuitive. You can’t filter by specific traits, so a lot of the time you’re stuck manually sorting through units to assign to squads and these units cannot be placed on more than one. You can’t rename squads, you can’t auto-assign at all, it’s really just a bunch of micro-managing and really brings down this aspect of the gameplay.

Story
The narrative here is genuinely interesting and a great driving force for the game. It is a bit janky in some areas - like the lack of pause between most dialogue lines - but the setting is super unique, it’s all voice acted in the original languages spoken by each country, and it's fairly fast-paced without feeling rushed, making for a pretty engaging overall experience.

Performance
The game looks great at 4k, max settings on my 3080 Ti and manages to run incredibly smooth on top of that. Over 100 fps without many dips, stutters, or other such technical issues. Maybe I am just used to games from this genre performing poorly, but I was impressed by the polish here.

Overall
So I would say Last Train Home is deserving of a light recommendation. It may have its issues, particularly with its AI and reliance on tedious micro management, but the gameplay is fun, the RTS train management side of things is super cool, and it's all tied together by an engaging narrative. All while running smoothly with great graphics on top of that. With some quality of life upgrades, I can really see this one being a great recommendation for the genre. Even in its current state though, it’s worth a look on sale at least.

I’m not going to lie, the only reason I even play RPGs are for the story. I feel that’s the heart of this genre, but also it’s Achilles’ heel. Nothing ruins a RPG faster to me than a poorly written story and Sea of Stars has one of the worst. The story is a disaster and most of it doesn’t makes sense partially due to the world building which is all of the place and without any clear direction. There are so many plot holes and certain things are just never explained throughout the story and sometimes you’re left with questions that are just never answered.

It also didn’t help that the dialogue in the Sea of Stars had some of the worst I’ve read and is best described as cringe worthy. The entire cast of characters felt like tropes and lack any real depth especially the main two characters, Zale and Valere. Holy shit, these two are some of the most boring characters I’ve ever seen! Neither one have any unique personality traits that make them stand out from the other cast of characters or even one another. Valere and Zale feel like one character most of the time and talk like your local average NPCs.

The ending of the game was extremely unsatisfying and felt so lazy. Granted there is the true ending that you can unlock, but you’ll have to spend several hours by completing specific side quests in order to get it. After watching the ending on YouTube because I couldn’t stand to play this game anymore and I’m glad I didn’t! In my personal opinion, it’s not really worth the time because ‘the real’ ending barely changes anything and the one change there is, takes away the only emotional moment in the entire game.

Another thing that really annoyed me was that the main antagonist didn’t get any real form of retribution in this ending despite all the horrendous things they did to others throughout the story. The worst they got was a case of wounded pride. I’m not saying the villain needed die, but why couldn’t the protagonists trap them in a time loop or something. Honestly, I think I’m putting more thought into this than writer/s did, clearly.

The combat is pretty mediocre and kinda of restrictive. Each character gets three skills and one ultimate which doesn’t really give you whole lot to strategize with and makes the battles repetitive. There are combo moves that you can use, but I found I mostly just used mending light to heal and to boost my ultimate meter. The rest of the combos I found to be kinda of useless. What also brings down the combat is that the fights can go on way too long especially the boss fights. On a bright note is that game gives you relic you can buy in game that make the battles easier.

Even with all this there are some good things in Sea of Stars. Outside of maybe Eastward, the pixel art is probably the best I’ve seen. I enjoyed the exploring of both the dungeons and towns. I found it fun discovering secret rooms and solving the puzzles which in all honesty were kinda of easy. I did find it annoying that in some of the towns you weren’t able to go in half the buildings. Most of the music was really well done and some of the tracks were really catchy. I think that’s mainly from Yasunori Mitsuda’s help with the sound track though.


Overall:

It isn’t enough to have both gorgeous pixel art and a good sound track in an RPG. You need a solid story with compelling characters to really bring it all together. It’s seems to me that Sabotage cared more about the visual aesthetics and the music than the narrative they were trying to tell. Sea of Stars is disappointing as it is soulless, and I’m so glad I played this on Gamepass instead of buying it. What a waste of time! That’s thirty hours of my life I’ll never get back.


Pros:
+gorgeous pixel art
+good sound track
+fun exploration and puzzles

Cons:
-awful story
-dull characters
-cringey dialogue
-lazy ending including the secret ending
-battles go on way too long
-combat feels restrictive

The bottom line is that Sea of Stars is an ultimately mediocre title that manages to cobble together its form by stealing things from a dozen other, older, better titles. Each thing it steals is implemented worse than the game it steals from, but still good enough to not be bad. The act of playing the game is fine. It's Fine. It is the ultimate definition of Mid. Mid of Stars.

To list all this game's faults on a lower level than "wow it looks pretty" would to be sit here all day, but I can't help but go over some of the biggest issues I had during my time with it.

The first and foremost is the writing and plot--the plot by itself is pretty standard, just your basic "go kill the demon king" storyline when you get down to it, but its building off lore from a game pretty notorious for having nonsense lore(The Messenger) so it ends up being nonsense here as well--none of the worldbuilding details or twists really ever land because you never get the sense that this world is anything more than levels in a video game. There's like maybe five actual towns in the game, for gods sake. This is compounded by the character writing that manages to be completely uninteresting at best, and positively dreadful at worst. The worst of it is a major side-character in act 1 that speaks exclusively in video game references, who basically ruins every scene she is in and kill what little pathos there can be in this game. Once she steps aside, it gets a little better and I'd even say act 2 cooks for a short time, but then they do the very bold decision to put the only two characters with any sort of internality on a bus until literally the final boss door. Its frustrating. That's not to speak of the other issue with the game not respecting itself, every scene that gets a little tropey immediately gets a Marvel quip to kill any tension and remind you you're seeing scenes played out in a dozen older games with way more self-respect. It sucks.

Then, there's the game pacing. As mentioned, the game has I think six actual "towns" in it, and you only visit each of them at a single point in your journey which means you consistently go 4+ dungeons at a time without any "downtime" where you can sidequest, play minigames, talk to npcs etc. They completely missed the memo on the "vibes" of a jrpg in spite of aping these games so hard--those points where you're just sort of idly walking around town are important and this game just doesn't have any of that. This is compounded by what I'd call location issues--backtracking even after you get to the end of the game with all movement options is painful, consistently involving traversing old dungeons or going through two-three extra screens to get to where you need to go, so the game actively disincentivizes you from trying to do anything besides progress the main quest.

The actual gameplay is split into two--puzzle dungeons generously described as "Crosscode but worse" and combat described as "Mario RPG but worse", double-hampered by piss-easy difficulty. Like, this game has 8 different accessibility options but I struggle to find how anyone would need them when the game difficulty is toggled so low.

Which sucks, because the one place the game excels in is the economy/item management, you have a very limited inventory that heavily incentivizes consumable usage, and also the gold is a really tight resource that you have to manage. In theory, this is great and adds an attrition factor the long dungeon dives mentioned earlier--in practice, the difficulty tuning being so low means you never interact with those systems because you can easily go through the game never using consumables which means you can sell all the crafting supplies for a surplus of money.

Even the OST manages to not really be striking, like its perfectly serviceable but I never really found myself humming a tune or getting hyped by a song. Its just, rpg music. You could replace it with the rpgmaker default soundpack and I think the experience would have been exactly the same.

And yet, in spite of all this, I still finished the game including the true ending that demands like 95% completion because it was juuuust that not bad enough that I could sunk cost fallacy my way through it.

The final thing I'd leave you with that speaks to the shoddy nature of the game is the opening--after the framing device, the game opens with our new heroes going off to their first mission. You fight exactly one tutorial battle vs a goblin, then it forces you into a flashback where you see their backstory. This last an hour and leads up to exactly the beginning of the game. Why did they have the flashback? Why would you not just start the game from the backstory sequence? Its the sort of thing literally any editor would notice and rectify immediately.

Truly, the Mid of Stars.