Stand Name: Down With The Sickness
Stand User: DestroyerOfMid

Power: B
Speed: B
Range: D
Staying: C
Precision: C
Potential: C

Description: A shadowy humanoid figure that primarily fights using a scythe. When an object or organism is targeted by the user, the stand will render its judgement upon the target by shouting “PEAK” or “MID.” If the stand shouts the former, it will lack any means of damaging the target. However, if the stand shouts the latter, hits from its scythe will completely destroy the target at the atomic level.

Sea of Stars is almost a perfect game, and I mean that in the worst way possible. The presentation of the game is fantastic; it might have the best pixel art I've ever seen. The music is superb and many of its songs have become regulars in my playlist. The gameplay is excellent and challenges itself to solve common pitfalls of JRPGs, like players hoarding their resources. The combat itself is like a blend of Chrono Trigger x Mario & Luigi, and I mean that in a really good way. Overworld traversal is surprisingly fun too with the equipment Sea of Stars gives you combined with great level design.

If any of what I just said is what you care about most for a game, you can stop reading the review now. Sea of Stars will be an amazing experience for you and I highly recommend it. For me, though? It had one of the most disappointing stories I've ever seen and turned what could have been one of my all time favorites into just another "pretty good" game.

I don't like making reviews filled with spoilers, since I feel it defeats the purpose of a review. It's difficult for me to give my full thoughts on the game without spoiling the entire story, so I will instead give a list of what I didn't like about the story while staying as vague as possible.

-The character writing is some of the worst I've seen in a JRPG, especially for the protagonists Valere and Zale. I honestly struggled to remember their names for the first few hours of the game because their characters are such nothing pieces and they never go anywhere interesting.

-The main antagonist of the game is a brilliant idea that's, in my opinion, executed horribly. There's many ways they could have showed the villain's impact on the world, or explored relationships the villain has with other characters more, but Sea of Stars just doesn't do anything with it.

-The "normal" ending was so horribly unsatisfying that I honestly don't know why they bothered putting it in the game, let alone making seeing it a requirement to get the "true" ending. The true ending is honestly worse in some aspects, but is at least better gameplay wise.

-The writing as a whole is pretty bad. From my understanding, Sea of Stars did not have a professional writer and it unfortunately shows. Really badly. In the English translation at least, grammar issues are common and characters often don't speak in a natural way. While the meaning of what they say is still clear, it makes the game feel a lot more unpolished than it should be.

-I'm aware this game is a prequel to The Messenger, but I haven't played it so I'm unaware of how its story is supposed to connect to that game. However, there are several major characters in the story whose arcs are literally left hanging and we never hear from them again even though their plotlines aren't resolved, so as a standalone story, Sea of Stars fails miserably in terms of dealing with loose ends. At least an acknowledgement of what happened to them would have been appreciated.


The story of a game tends to be what I remember the most about the game. I loved playing Sea of Stars, but I fear its really bad story will make my opinion of the game only get lower with time. If it even had a passable story or half-decent character writing I would have been comfortable giving the game a 10/10. The other aspects of the game really are that great, but I struggle to find anything redeemable about the story. For that, I'll have to limit it to an 8/10 at the absolute highest.

3 months later edit: Yeah it was just as I feared. The story/writing soured my opinion on the game as a whole and I'm almost actively disliking it now.

cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?

as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.

perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments