One of the best remakes I've ever played, even though it stayed true to the original, there were a plethora of QoL changes that make this the best version of the game. There are a few problems, but the good parts REALLY overshadow them.

Some of the problems are: Tartarus still sucks ass, this type of dungeon is terrible, but the gameplay alone makes it bearable, the school Social Links being tied to school days, specially your party members, is awfull, the club is incomplete, it's REALLY ugly and they completely BUTCHERED Burn My Dread -Last Battle-.

The best thing they've done for this game, and they need to do this as well for P6, completely voiced Social Links. This makes the bad ones more fun and the good ones even better, even most dialogues across the game are voiced, this was awesome.

Not nearly as good as Assault on Dragon Keep, and just like the normal game from Borderlands 3, it's carried by the gameplay.

The Good: Melee combat is really good and fun, the spells are a worthy replacement for grenades, and I think they are 100% better, weapon variation is as good as ever, the gunplay is flawless, the easter eggs are awesome, they are usually the best missions in the game, Mr. Torgue being in this game is also perfect, I enjoyed the Overworld and these incopetent writers from Gearbox were finally able to create a good villain.

The Bad: I didn't like the enviroments, they feel too overdesigned, which is a recurring problem with this game, the classes are really boring and having 1 skill tree each is annoying and doesn't encourage variation, the story is pretty bland and boring, almost all new characters are annoying and cringe.

The Ugly: The entire UI is dreadful, HORRIBLE to look at because it's too OVERDESIGNED, too many details that just hinders comparing gear and using the minimap for example. The endgame is also a joke, chaos chambers are boring as hell, and that is the only good farming spot, just awful.

An awesome and worthy sequel! They managed to make the game feel different enough to the last 2 without changing much, and the game is also not long enough to feel repetitive, really liked the amount of time to 100% the game.

The story is just a bit better than the first game, the side activities are a sidegrade in my opinion, some are better, some are worse than before, the gadgets in this game is are ok, I prefer the old ones and the new abilities are really cool, just wish their cooldown was a lot lower or that they recharged between combat encounters. I also expected to be more original suits, but the new recolors of the repeting ones does wonders to most of them, and unfortunately, most of the new original suits are really ugly, with a few excepctions.

What was a lot worse for me were the crimes, holy fuck they are even worse than the ones in the first game, specially the car chases, they are completely automatic now. And the last big negative are the face models, I don't know what they did but it sure does look worse than SM Remastered and MM, but the worse offender is definitely Mary Jane, wtf happened to her face, at least they made her playable missions more bearable.

Overall, it's a sequel that actually is better than the first game, but not by a lot, just slightly better!

The story of two orphans with magical powers that get put into an abusive magical training school to fight evil. The become so powerful during their training that the game itself is mind numbingly easy (even with some of the difficulty modifiers called "relics" turned on) and the story is mostly ok to downright awful.

I only got the normal ending (which is horrendous) and would need to finish the Collectathon embedded in the game to get the true ending and I will not do so because the game has shown throughout it's entirety that it's not going to change.

Here is a list of things this game has:
-A youtuber NPC who won't shut up
-Characters with 1 good skill, 1 useful skill, and a skill you never use
-A battle system that is fun but barely has any changes after the first 2 hours of the game
-A battle system so easy my golden retriever could beat this game
-The standard JRPG minigame that absolutely sucks here
-Heavy lack of interesting sidequests to do until the very end
-Puzzles that require 0 thought and mostly just waste your time
-Perhaps one of the worst normal endings to a game I've ever seen
-A really cool and fun storyline in the middle of the game that shows this game could have been much better from a story perspective.

Yet I still found myself playing through essentially the entire game (~35 hours) and thus i am resigned to score it at least somewhat favorably. I know for sure that I will never go back and revisit this game.

I've been waiting for this game with bated breath ever since the first trailer, and upon learning that Yasunori Mitsuda himself, one of my favourite musicians of all time, wrote some music for it, and then playing the demo of it during the recent Steam's demo exhibition, my hype for the game steadily progressed. Needless to say, once again I'm reminded that one should count their chickens when they hatch.

Sea of Stars is one of the most mediocre games I've ever played. It's not bad, I dont regret the time I've spent playing it, but it just doesn't have much to offer beside nostalgia for the better games I've played through many times and absolutely stunning visuals.

This is the one positive thing I can say about the game without any "but"s - it looks fantastic. There's an insane amount of effort put into presentation of basically everything, even the minute things: every food item has its own sprite, every island you can visit has its own unique resting site that you might not even see if you don't make it a habit to rest on the overworld map, almost every location follows the day/night cycle, the title screen changes depending on your progress through the game, there's maybe about a dozen animated cutscenes (I think they kind of clash with the otherwise pixelart aesthetic, I've had the same problem with Chrono Trigger's PS1 rerelease, but they do still look really nice), all characters have alternate spritework just for one scene you might miss, all weapons have their own sprites, et cetera. The visual design of every location is great, they're all memorable and distinctive, and everything in them fits together nicely. The characters and enemies alike are all very well animated.

The combat is good initially... but it stops introducing new elements very quickly and ends up stagnating. If you've played the demo, you've seen most of how the combat goes - it's turn based and you control three characters, who have a basic attack (if you press the action button when the animation suggests so, you get an extra hit in), a couple of skills that use mana which regenerates with basic attacks, an ability to infuse the basic attack with magic generated by hitting enemies without the infusion, and food items which regenerate health or mana or both and have a total limit of 10 at a time. There is a combo meter that fills in through using skills and breaking enemies stance, and you can use it to make a pair of characters execute a special skill. About 10 hours later or so you also get to swap your characters mid-battle which is a free action, and the characters gradually get their ultimate skills, which use a yet another separate meter and have their own long flashy animations a la Limit Breaks or summons in Final Fantasy games. When enemies attack, you can time the blocks and take reduced damage.

This might sound like a lot to take in, but getting a grasp of it doesn't take long, and after than the combat is mostly static. The combat livens up a bit when you get to swap the characters around, but that novelty wears off pretty quickly as well.

A lot of skills end up strictly inferior and since they use the same resource, there's rarely any reason to deviate from the ones that work best. As an example, the fourth party member has the ability to delay opponent's turn, and it ends up dominating every other ability they have. The third party member has a very strong healing ability, and it dominates the rest all the same.
The combo meter fills up too slowly to use in most circumstances outside of the boss battles, and for the most of the game it's dominated by a single ability - a party-wide heal. This happens with the ultimate meter as well - the fifth party member simultaneously deals damage to all enemies, delays their turn and heals the entire party. No one else's ultimate has nearly as much utility.

The story operates completely on mcguffins and prophecies. No one can make a step without being bound to do so by Fate, which is used extensively to handwave away the impossible knowledge the characters suddenly obtain about what to do next and the lack of motivation to do so. Very few characters in this story actually want something from life, and when they do, they end up doing things so colossally stupid it becomes, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious.
Plot sort of starts in the middle and ends in the middle as well, there's very little progression to be felt throughout the game.

I feel there's only one party member with a distinct personality, the rest are kind of bland and uncharacterized. There are occasional comic reliefs which work decently well and don't become annoying by overstaying their welcome. The villains are all caricaturely evil, most of them in a cartoonish way, and some in the complete disregard for morals way. The background characters come and go without leaving much of an impression.

The world, despite extensive lore dumps, feels extremely artificial and tailor-made for the adventures the party is having. The progression through the world feels artificial as well - as I've played the game, I quickly learned that there's no sidetracking to be had, for almost the entire game there's been only one unexplored location available, which I had to traverse to get to or to otherwise unlock the new singular unexplored location. The game opens up a bit right at the end, but only just a bit - the best of it's efforts on that front will lead the player to about 3 screens or so of the optional area and a rematch against the boss the player had already fought, the other lead to 1 screen worth of a rudimentary puzzle, another boss rematch, or a short series of battles.
This, to me, was the probably the most disappointing bit - JRPGs typically excel at gradually widening the scope of themselves and allowing the player more and more leeway in what they can do as they get access to more and more optional locations bit by bit. In most JRPGs, getting a ship represents the moment of the game opening up for real. In Sea of Stars, it means nothing except that the player can now traverse ocean to get to the next singular unexplored area currently available to them.

Gameplay progression systems also happen to be boring.
Leveling up provides benefits so minute I don't understand why the devs didnt simply tie level ups to boss battles only, while making them more substantial at the same time. The game limits grinding severely either way - the amount of experience points needed for the next level scales very fast, as does the experience defeating enemies provide as you go through the game. It's therefore very hard to over- or undergrind which is good, but, again, I don't see why they designed a problem they needed a solution for when a game in Chrono series that they're so clearly paying homage to already completely sidestepped the whole issue two and a half decades ago. The skills/combos are already tied to story progression and collectible scrolls anyways.
The weapons and armor dont have anything to them except numbers, no special effects or anything (with one singular exception of a set of weapons that deals higher damage to undead), so they end up being disposed of as soon as the player finds a weapon/a piece of armor with better stats. The accessories are a bit better, but still like a half of them are just stat bonuses. Some of them are pretty transformative, though, and one is outright game-breaking.

As the story goes, the player gets access to a few knick-knacks that allow them to get into places they couldn't before, and this brings me to the secondmost sore spot in the game for me - collectibles being tied to the true ending.
I don't mind it in principle, what I do mind is the lack of quality of life features typically associated with such endeavors. Backtracking is very painful in this game, especially early on. What's even more painful is the lack of any sort of list for what you're missing in which location. There is a parrot that screams the random articles of the remaining collectibles in the area at you, but it's random, it's one at a time, and it takes forever to ask it again, and it includes in its tally the abysmal minigame that replaces the sort-of-traditional-for-JRPG-genre collectible cards minigame, which I wouldn't want to inflict on my worst enemy and which will be absent from this review lest I descend into words not lightly used in the civilized society. Collecting all the Rainbow Conches was not a very entertaining experience.

The soundtrack has some nice pieces, but overall it left kind of an amateurish impression on me. In a lot of songs the lead melody feels way too loud compared to the rest of the instrumentation, and a lot of songs suffer from the kind of uncanny sound you get by placing the same exact note with the same exact velocity using the same exact primitive instrument that has only one sample tied to it per note or maybe a deterministic synth generating the sound. The instruments themselves are often pretty obnoxious (especially the marches song, that one had me turn the music off until i got through the area). Nevertheless, I like the day/night cycle also cycling through two variations of the same song, and some songs having the dynamic stopping point, pretty neat.

I find myself running out of steam writing this review not unlike how the game itself seemingly ran out of steam and just sort of ended. I don't know if I can recommend this game to someone. Like I said at the beginning, I don't regret my time with the game, but I also don't see any particular reason why I would want someone to experience it.
It's a very okay game.

If only I could give this game a 4.9, it's almost perfect, since it basically improves most things from BOTW.
The new abilities are a godsend, they are 1000% better than the ones from the last game, Ultrahand, Ascend, Fuse and Recall are extremely fun, engaging and intuitive. Ultrahand by itself has infinite possibilites of use, it's that useful, this game is truly a sandbox.
Now, the game still has some problems, some of them carried over from the last game that I got upset that they weren't addressed. The horses are still horrible to control, the economy is just as bad since you receive very little amounts of rupees from sidequests, but at least there is a good farming spot in the game that does not require you to have the best equipment available to do the farm.
The new armor sets are really not great, with the exception of the Glide Armor and the Gloom one, which are actually useful, the rest, not so much. And the armor sets from the first game returning is nice on paper, but it's dissapointing that they are the exact same, no new bonuses or an alteration in appearence. The last thing that bottered me were the new powers, definitive downgrade over the powers from BOTW, they are really awkward to use and not very good, specially the last one, that one is just straight up trash.
I've focused a lot on the negatives here because they are easy to point out and are real problems with the game that need to be said, but they are miniscule in comparison with what this game does right, if I were to write about everything I liked, I would be writing here forever.

It's my first Final Fantasy and I really enjoyed it. I know this one differs from the rest because it's not a RPG, but it's still a really good action/adventure game, with an amazing story and cast, an awesome OST, a good combat system and one of the best boss battles I've ever played.
It's not all roses though, the story might be good, but it unfortunately has horrible pacing, it has a Peaks and Valleys structure, but the game does NOT take advantage of the slower parts, it just shoves numerous fetch quests your way until you get to the good parts again, it's really annoying. 90% of the sidequests are useless, you're just an errand boy on them most of the time.
The combat is also good, but it feels too simple, it lacks a little bit of extra depth, like status effects, buffs and debuffs. And the amulets are really bad, most of them are useless, I didn't really feel like I needed to change it much, because they didn't make a difference.
The one thing that disapointed me the most were the explorable areas, they are SOOOOO lifeless and boring, the game does not encourage you to explore and even then, they being so bland doesn't help either, it's extremely forgetable.
But I still think this is worth a buy, the negatives do not outweight the positives for me, I had a lot of fun playing and I was easily losing track of the time while playing, which is a really good sign.