The original clunkcore platformer rises again for what has to be its finest outing yet. It’s a storybook with a tendency towards sadism and slapstick. The dirty tricks, hidden traps, fatal falls, and impossibly difficult creatures all seem intended to provoke laughter as much as rage. Endless swarms of zombies crawl from graves and surround you, giant ogres charge and trample, red devils fly and evade every attempt to hit them and then quickly skewer you. The endless waves of creatures with silly designs and that carnivalesque song playing in the background makes this whole quest feel like a medieval monster mash. For the masochist who happens to like this style of overencumbered platforming, it can be a graveyard smash. Still, the designers have managed to make the experience more approachable in some respects. Legend difficulty feels like only some Arthurian hero could see it through. The monster population is higher than any other mode, but poor Arthur is also weaker. It only takes two hits to die on Legend and checkpoints are very sparse. The Knight difficulty still feels searingly difficulty, but has more checkpoints mixed in and generously allows you to take three hits before you expire. The Squire difficulty makes your armor better and cuts back on the number of enemies. Page difficulty makes the good knight invulnerable.

Eight paths directly into the innermost retro chambers of my heart.

Do you like lavish vintage console RPG-esque art? Do you like strolling around a cozy town talking to charming little people while listening to a soothing song? Do you like solving strategic puzzles to defeat gargantuan foes in mortal turn-based combat? This games takes all these disparate elements and puts them together into a single composition. The result has moments of elevated intensity, but this adventure is most remarkable for just how very comfortable it is. You can really spend a lot of time in here (and I did) because the experience is almost soothing. The variety of emotional tones and excellent pacing provide a refreshing rhythm to the experience. It’s never too one note. In the narrative, the sad stories are balanced out by the happy ones. In the gameplay, the cognitively engaging combat challenges contrasts with strolling through the cozy towns. In light of all this, I found Octopath II to be the most impressive retro-inspired JRPG to date.

In the abstract, it’s a strange mixture—fighting monstrous superbosses then dipping back into a flaneur-like existence in an adorable town. The chilling and the killing take turns on center stage—so to speak. It’s almost a paradox at the heart of the genre. (On the other hand, there’s something so charming about fighting all those wonderfully drawn sprites that it barely even registers as an act of virtual violence.) I can imagine that some people might intensely love exactly half of the experience and intensely hate the other. And which half you like depends largely on your disposition. But that contrast, that range of emotional intensity, that almost paradox, is an almost essential characteristic of this genre. If you like that mixture, then this is one of the very best examples.
If so, then go ahead and collect your tiny characters, get in your little battles, walk around the tiny towns and talk to all (yes, all) the other chibi people, then get in a little boat and sail across this vast miniature world.

Now let’s talk about some details.
The HD-2D style is even more stunning this time around. The detailed sprites, varied environments, and cozy towns are all lovingly crafted in their own way. Even the menus and text boxes and fonts have a certain tasteful, classic, restrained, Square look. The soundtrack is almost unfailingly good—and when it’s not to my taste, it is thematically appropriate.

The combat is excellent and consistently engaging. It’s smooth, it’s fast, it’s puzzle-like. There are resources to manage and strategies to ponder. It is similar to much else in the genre. Exploit enemy weaknesses, pick your attacks, use your boosts and specials wisely, manage your health and mana and status effects well—and you’ll eventually win. That sounds simple enough, but way it comes together is one type
of turn-based perfection. For comparison, the only (non-tactical) turn-based combat I’ve found this cognitively intriguing and would probably be SaGa Scarlet Grace, FFX, and X-2.
And these encounters are designed for speed. It’s like the designers asked “Can we make turn-based battles blazingly fast?” And they did . The transition to the battle screen is fast. The menus are responsive. The action animations are quick but impressive. The rewards screen is brief and takes a minimal number of clicks to get through. If you’ve never experienced some the molasses like battles during the PS1 and PS2 days, know that these are some high compliments. Trash mobs can usually be dispatched within a minute or so. Bosses and superbosses are appropriately challenging and will take longer. The progression systems (which are a mix of leveling, skills, jobs, and gear) are rich, interesting, and breakable in the best possible way. The towns are memorable and filled with charming npcs (often with hidden lives that range from comical to sinister.) The world feels vast and mysterious and rich. The way the world map is designed avoids those all too familiar boredom inducing vast empty spaces. There’s a SNES or PS1 openness—where the vastness of the world done in miniature just like the chibi sprites.

And this world is bursting with side quests and secrets. Dungeons are just about the right size—long enough to present some challenge, but brief enough to avoid degenerating into a slog. And, like in the original, there’s a neat visual search and path finding mechanic when it comes to side paths and treasure. This is a simple and common diversion in classic JRPGs— see the treasure chest and then puzzle out how to get to it. But due to the fixed camera angle and HD2D art style, there’s a bit more depth in the scene. This means designers can make the most of occlusion to misdirect and confuse the player. (This wayfinding element plays sort of like Toad Treasure Tracker if you couldn’t rotate the camera and there were fewer puzzles.)

The designers also introduced a day/night cycle along with the ability to shift between the two times at will. By changing day to night or vice versa, you can adjust the encounter rate seamlessly. And it makes for some puzzles here and there in the dungeons. The day/night cycle also made the towns feel even more lively because the npcs have different habits.

The stories on the individual paths vary in tone and quality. The tone goes from comedic to melodramatic to darkly tragic. The quality ranges from not so good to okay to alright to cute to that was sort of poignant to the absurdity of that made me laugh. And yet I played every story because it’s just a pleasure to spend time in this world. And besides, many of the characters are likable enough— and when they weren’t, the combat mechanics kept me going. The creativity on display in the boss fights made it worthwhile to me. Each boss is an oversized pixel art spectacle on the outside with some intriguing puzzle box mechanics on the inside. These boss fights were really their own reward. And then they typically rewarded you with something interesting.
This review began with the phrase “Eight paths directly into my heart.” More accurately,it could have “eights paths set in a world whose systems and atmosphere lead into my heart no matter how much I did not resonate with the narrative in the path I chose.” That’s a bit too long for an opening line though.

There’s quite a bit of depth in the progression systems here. Interesting gear, job classes, and special secondary classes. Hunting for synergies in the menus is fun if that’s your sort of thing. Grinders should find plenty to do here: superbosses, ultimate weapons, hidden dungeons. For the first time since probably the PS2 era, I personally did every bit of optional content. And I was still sad to see it all come to an end.

An attempt to turn rally into a form of meditation that happens to also be a game—and with beautiful results. Rally is a motorsport and, as such, is made of very physical elements— fragile humans in hard helmets and full body protective gear get crammed inside small cars with large loud engines and grippy tires. And they carve paths over a variety of rugged terrain in all manner of weather conditions as fast as they can manage. And, hopefully, faster than all the other teams. Rally is a form of competition between human beings (which we take part in via machines we control). But the more fundamental conflict at the heart of rally is a struggle against the physical terrain itself: tires fighting against a brute geometry made of tarmac and gravel, dirt and mud, snow and ice.

The art of rally manages to distill this fundamental conflict of physical forces into a quiet yet intensely focused digital experience. The digital distillation is composed of almost abstract shapes, brilliant colors and simulated outdoor lighting, iceberg deep virtual physics, and patterns of controller inputs. And the game we are left with feels utterly incredible. The handling model and the way it changes with the terrain is something like a wonder of gamefeel.

The core offering is a career mode where the player competes in a sequence of tournaments organized chronologically through different years. The courses have their charm and are visually reminiscent of prototypical landscapes associated with a particular country. A minimalistic (and occasional whimsical) history of “the golden age” of rally is told as the player works their way through the years. This is not so detailed—and I at least would find it less interesting if it was— but it provides the right flavor. The career mode can be plenty challenging for newcomers and gets increasingly demanding as you move through the tournaments and unlock more powerful vehicles. Free roam locales present a way to get the feel for a vehicle, an area, and some tricky obstacles in a very low stakes environment. The time trial modes, online leaderboards, and daily challenges offer the pursuit of endless perfection for the aspirational player. At the end of the day though, the game is a set of courses and a collection of vehicles. And that’s a good thing. It’s a set of stunning tracks each of which offers a unique challenge and is essentially an opportunity to enter a state of flow as you attend to the carefully crafted virtual sensations. Which virtual sensations you experience depends on the track itself, the weather conditions, and which vehicle you choose. The feel resonates outward from the controller and is continuously created through the simple but demanding task of guiding your car through the track. It is something like an art. And a very demanding one. And one you can get utterly lost in for vast stretches of time as the excellent soundtrack fills the air. And, unlike the art of archery, the art of rally can be practiced in the comfort of your living room.

It feels like racing games have sometimes fallen out of the general conversation surrounding the medium of videogames (if they were ever a part of such conversation in the first place.). The idea behind the genre is simple, intuitive, familiar. Travel from point A to point B. Drive from here to there—as fast as you can. Maybe it all seems too simple to be worthy of discussion. But the devil’s in the details as they say—and, when you get the details right, all the magic is too. That’s what we can witness in the art of rally— the developer has nailed something small, something focused, but done it so well that it stands above many games with much loftier ambitions. And it might take something like the art of rally to get the less automotively enthused to see that this genre and the experience it can provide is very much worth talking about—something stripped down to the essentials, the sheer mechanics, something torn out of the usual commercial context and freed from pricey brand names and energy drink logos.

Just how exactly you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is what makes these things special. And that can be hard to even see and harder still to describe—how it works, why it’s interesting, how exactly it stands out from others in the same genre. It takes time and experience to recognize the elegance of the systems, the interesting challenges the courses present, and the opportunity for mastery that they provide. Spend a few hours internalizing the art of rally’s controls and the basic handling and you start to get a glimpse of just how incredible this is. But there’s a sense that this is just the beginning.
Games like this can be enjoyed by anyone, but maybe can only be fully appreciated by the players who become true masters of this art. We might be able to approximate this sort of insight if we could just pretend this was the one cartridge we had all summer long. If I ever reach that higher plane of understanding, I may have much more to say or there will be nothing left to say at all.

This minimalist dream took shape in the halcyon days of parkour. But for all its roots in a specific cultural moment, Mirror’s Edge took a sport and focused on abstracting its fundamentals so intensely that it became timeless. It was at bottom an attempt to translate a very embodied physical activity into a compelling virtual form. And so virtual first-person parkour was born. More than a decade later, Mirror’s Edge has never really been surpassed in its genre. The clean yet vibrant visual style remains stunning. The mechanical simplicity and hidden depths in the systems makes the gameplay ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ in the best way. There’s a way the challenges presented by the game—kinetic, tactile, rhythmic— are embodied in the controls. The feeling of mastering a rapid sequence of precisely timed inputs and watching the parkour acrobatics flow smoothly across the course is as gratifying as pulling off a combo or special in a fighting game. An intense sense of speed is created through the sights and sounds. As the pace picks up, footsteps get faster, falls sound harder, breathing becomes panting, the wind rushes by louder and louder as you cut through space. When you hit full speed, a district visual signature appears as a blur around the periphery of your visual field. Then you know your movement is white hot. Running just feels fast and this is more of a triumph than it seems. (There are racing games featuring the latest supercars or futuristic anti-gravity vehicles that feel slower.) But it takes work to reach that speed. Inputs need to be correct, clean, and timed just right. Play well, go fast. Keep playing well to keep it up. When played with speed as the goal, the game becomes about achieving, handling, and preserving momentum. Chain strings of movements together perfectly and speed through the pretty dystopia with grace.

The peak experience here for me—a virtual Everest peak of an experience— will always be the abstract time trial levels. There’s nothing quite like practicing time trials in beautiful voids— running across structures built from pure geometry suspended in nothing but air and sunlight with all their surfaces either painted bright white or in supersaturated technicolors. The time trial levels are places where a game and an abstract sculpture have come together. In these places that seem to exist almost outside of time, I spent days trying to run through them just a few seconds faster. And I was not alone.

Were we all just killing time or saving it?
Whatever it was that we virtual runners were collectively doing, when you are in the right state of mind—which may be defined by a desire for movement and tranquility at the same time— the experience is (should I say it) transcendent. Sitting down to run these trials becomes a ritual for unlocking a higher kind of focus. And it’s a ritual that can be repeated without a natural limit. The next run could always be a little faster.

Waves from the future, now lost in the past.
Play this awhile sometime when you are sad and want to see what happiness was back then. Ride the waves at sunset, speed through heavy fog and watch it clear to reveal a mirror-like lake, see the tides come and go. Wind between buoys and feel your speed pick up until the power is maximum. All to music that the courses themselves must have written. And the game really shines when you try to go fast. Try to win some championships. Try some challenges. Get some fast times and high scores. All this just lets you fully experience the waves—the low rolls, the lone high swells, the choppy stretches, and rough wild water. These virtual wave sensations were a revolution in gamefeel. The designers somehow managed to make you feel the condition of the water underneath your low poly craft as you navigated via inputs on a trident shaped plastic object. Few games have replicated these sensations quite so intensely as this early effort.

And maybe one day there will be a new wave of digital waves like this. Until then these will be there for us, sleeping in old cartridges, just waiting for us to turn the simulation back on and race again.

A game made out of an undead man, two guns, a coffin, and… a meter. Walk slow, shoot fast, build meter to earn special shots— use them well or die. Play better, build that meter faster, clear the room even faster. Blast through corridors, shoot away on the rails, clear out rooms to get to the next door—just keep marching your bullet storm forward relentlessly. And in the right state of mind, all this can be a pretty good time.

What I found interesting right away was the way it all feels. Grave is big, heavy, overburdened by the coffin he carries, and so his movement is deliberate, slow, even sluggish. But his basic attack speed is very fast. It’s a combo not seen in many action games. Beyond that, there’s enough verbs and systems here to make the gameplay satisfying. You walk very slow while shooting and you must keep shooting almost all the time. (Guns are firing so incessantly that after a long session the nerves in my hands almost felt overloaded from the constant aggressive rumble emitting from the controller.) You can run if you stop shooting, but it’s more of a jog than a sprint. On offense, pistols are basically always on with a variety of meter eating special one-off attacks sprinkled in. The pistols fire fast while walking, but even faster still if you stay in place for a few seconds. This lets you trade mobility for damage at any time. Pistols can be charged up to release a charge shot to bust through enemy shields. A 360° rapid fire attack stance be used if you have enough of a chain going and is pretty useful if you are getting swarmed. A double damage mode can be triggered if you have the meter for it, but you won’t build more meter while it’s active. As for defense, you can dodge roll (it’s a pretty heavy roll), melee goons that get too close with the coffin, parry incoming projectiles with said coffin, launch hook from said coffin to drag an enemy in to use as a body shield. As for healing, well you just keep shooting. Basic shots don’t heal, but special moves restore health. This is an action game inhabiting its own subgenre. Not much else feels much like this at all. For that alone it’s worth trying out. There’s something here for those who like arcade and action games. There are additional difficulty settings and a ranking system. Typical of good action games, these can both bring out the best in the combat.

I definitely saw limitations here— uninspired enemies recycled way too frequently, not so original locations, an indifferent story, and a pretty silly attitude. Yet I kept playing because the action was plenty satisfying to sustain a playthrough. And I’m even left with the urge to go back one more time on a higher difficulty. Is purely mechanical satisfaction enough to make a game good? If so, this is a good game. The mechanics are the message here and the message is the medium and this medium is a videogame.

Note: patches may have improved this game significantly since release. The most clearly important change has been that an auto-fire option is available now. Hard to imagine tapping the triggers as much as this game would require without auto-fire. Played the game on a PS5 about a year after release. The Switch edition apparently has even more changes. Some may be for the better. Will update this once I get a chance to play it.

This is arcade design transformed into aesthetic experience. This is a shooter made into a poem. And that sounds absurd— but, in some sense, it seems true every time I play through this one more time. This is a flight through ancient places held together by the beauty of their images and songs; modern settings torn apart by machines, humanity, ambition; all punctuated by struggle, death, and dragonfire. The pacing establishes a rhythm between the gripping and the tranquil. And the sheer artfulness of every element sometimes allows a meditative calm to emerge inside moments of intensity. There are perfect moments made from cutting through a blue sky threading a dragon’s flight through bright twisting barrages of laser fire.

And for all its poignance—which has stayed with me for twenty years now— this is as much of a video game as it is anything else. The shooting and movement is fast but graceful. The game can be demanding enough to be rewarding. And
the mechanics have enough depth to make moment to moment tactical decisions feel significant. Shooting incoming missiles out of the sky, dashing out of danger at just the right time, building up your meter and making the best use of it to survive —all that feels great. And then there are the the three dragon forms your dragon can swap between on the fly. Each embodies a trade-off between speed and damage. Any form is capable enough to clear the game, but they provide a flexibility to the play that wouldn’t be there without them. The way you bring about destruction and vengeance with a continual stream of orbs and homing lasers can be strategically satisfying and kinetically elegant and beautiful— but the explosions dotting the sky and across the earth still add up to something more than arcade gratification. The designers have, at points, somehow woven regret into the gratification. The stunning world in the background is shot through with a kind of quiet sadness.

Panzer Dragoon proved that the rail shooter could become a work of art. Zwei was the perfection of that ideal—pure, simple, strange, beautiful. And with Orta they retained the same strange magic and made it all just a little more sophisticated than they had before.

Maybe this was born too late. It’s a beautiful resurrection of a style, sensibility, and approach to design that is apparently destined to be continually forgotten. It is and is not retro. This is like the game we dreamed about after experiencing its ancestors long ago. It’s an earlier ideal of pure action given high def form—faster, stronger, smoother, better than what came before.

A lone swordsman slashing through a dystopia at high speeds. Run fast, slash faster. Jump, double jump, and climb your way to the heart of the empire. And it all feels so good.

You begin the game with the abilities of a hero and then the game gives you more along the way— and expects you to fully master everything it gives you. Jump, slide, and dash at just the right times. Quick swap between those eternally cool plasma swords to dispatch different threats: break enemy shields, reflect incoming lasers, start fires, and freeze enemies. Use specials to summon futuristic animal companions for aid—keeping an eye on timing and positioning and the meter. And you have to be quick about it all to survive. But it all flows naturally once it’s really in your hands.

The existence of a map and the possibility of exploring and backtracking might have set up misleading expectations: “look there’s a mysterious city to be explored however you see fit.” But that’s not quite the spirit here. The game is at its best when you are moving fast. So just follow the arrow for a really good time. Stray a bit from the path if you want to find some upgrades to make the experience a bit easier. But exploration is more or less a diversion from the core experience.

The all-knowing arrow hovering in front of you will unfailingly guide you through everything if you let it. This creates a kind of focused linear simplicity inside an interconnected environment. Fight your way into and through a futuristic citadel, down to the lower depths of the oppressed underworld, up to the top of a panopticonic tower looking over it all, slash through the dystopian leader, and watch the sun set on empire as you reenter the atmosphere on the back of of your defeated foe.

Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
And some other afternoon, you can do it all again. But even faster.

This is basically perfect—for what it is. And I love what it is. They’ve tried to make something that does some new things and looks modern while also keeping that classic Mega Man spirit. Charming art, silly characters, excellent music, constrained movement, and significant challenges that will eventually fall as you the stages become a part of your memory. Hard to imagine another game doing a better job of it.

However— division still reigns. Some people say the additions to the game make it too different and so it’s just “not really a Mega Man game”. Some people say it’s just more of the same old brew that we’ve seen too many times already: “it’s just another Mega Man”. Such is the fate of all sequels in these middle aged franchises to some extent.

But neither perspective really hits the mark here. It’s the same yes, but still different enough to be engaging again—if you like classically punishing things like Mega Man in the first place. The atmosphere is undeniably Mega Man. The graphics are 2.5d with nice cel-shaded 3d models. The style coheres with the cartoony style of the concept art and some cutscenes seen in earlier games—almost an updated Mega Man Legends aesthetic. The environments and backgrounds are clean and crisp—this keeps the action and platforming very legible. 2.5d is notorious for introducing some fuzziness into precision platforming since it’s often harder to discern the outline shapes of relevant models. Never felt that here. Platforming was just rock solid. And the cel shaded style with heavy outlines around the characters may be part of the reason it all works so well. The music is trying something new. Chip-tunes are replaced by electronica-esque tracks. This worked for the game overall, but some will miss the retro music.

Design-wise, the truly new twist on the classic Mega Man series is the double gear system. All great games have at least one gauge. When a gauge is added to a game, it makes a game at least twice as good (or bad) as it would have been without it. And this double gear is a very good gauge. You can use this gauge to do two things: either slow down time using the speed gear or power up your weapons with the power gear. This is an interesting trade-off. Use either power too much and the gauge fills up and the system overheats. Once it overheats, it’s out of commission until it cools off. One final aspect of the double gear system is the ace-in-the hole mechanic— when your health is critical you can go into a double gear mode where time is slowed down and your attacks are powered up and your gauge will unavoidably overheat.

The gear system allows the game to be both more accessible than ever before and, strangely, even more hardcore. Players can adjust the difficulty to suit them at will and on the fly. A screen way too wild to survive? You can always just slow things down and waltz through in slo-mo for a bit. It’s an excellent mechanic—whether you use it to play through or just learn the steps so you can go full speed later. Want to run through the game no gear? You can— provided your reflexes can handle the new intense speed. Want to speed run as fast as possible? Use the power gear to deal way more damage than you ever could before. Want to do (a to me unthinkable) no damage run? The gear system rewards you for even attempting it. There’s an item that turns you into a double gear driven glass canon. It sets your health at a critical level which gives you permanent access to the ace-in-the-hole power. It’s so impressive that the gear system opens up the game for newcomers, but also brings along new rewards and challenges for the perennial fans.

A small perfect game—now lost beneath the dark waves of time. Obscure, nearly unknown, nearly unmentioned, and, in some ways, aplots unmatched in the genre.

This has as much clarity of artistic vision as any game of similar scale I’ve played. And the overlapping systems governing traversal and survival create an interesting set of looming risks and vital rewards. It all makes for a very deliberate type of play. The sheer movement embodies more interesting trade-offs than basic movement almost ever does. You can slowly walk along the ocean floor. You can jump in a low arc. You can grip and climb walls (with its own stamina meter.) And you can amplify your ability to move around the environment by using oxygen like at jet pack. This comes at the cost of using oxygen more rapidly than you would otherwise. Oxygen, it turns out, is pretty vital to your survival. And using the compressed oxygen to jet around makes travel faster and even allows you to reach places you couldn’t otherwise, but it comes with the additional risk that you’ll go too fast and land too hard—cracking or destroying one of your precious oxygen tanks. There is also a pressure gauge which keeps track of your current depth. This is critical because the suit you wear specifies a maximum depth beyond which you can barely survive for any amount of time. Too much time below the max depth line and your suit cracks and all oxygen is lost. So dive here but no further (or if you have to descend below then be quick about it at least.) All these trade-offs provides a sense of freedom and choice within some very significant and thematically coherent constraints. And beyond all those intricately interlocking mechanics, the subtly mysterious— almost wordless —world which the designers have lovingly crafted is pure magic.

Always thinking about taking another dive.

The rare homage that’s about as good as the classics that inspired it.

Some will insist that the classics have some je ne sais quoi in the writing or the atmosphere or the worldbuilding that elevates them above this. I’m not entirely sure about that—the reactionaries may be right in some way. But I would bet that, for most people, this game will be significantly more enjoyable to pick up and play at this moment in time.

Combat is snappy, engaging, and just a bit puzzle-like. The combat and related systems such as progression are not as deep as some of the most complex JRPGs. However, there is quite a bit more going on here moment to moment in a battle than many SNES classics (and especially in one certain SNES classic which really inspired this one.) For one, you cannot simply select the strongest attack repeatedly. You have to strike a balance of physical attacks and magic attacks to create sparks of “live mana”which lie around on the ground and can be used as a resource to charge up your most effective attacks. In addition, a break system is in place. As enemies prepare an attack, a “lock” appears above their head indicating a string of elements they are currently weak to. The lock might be (fire, moon, moon) and then it will have a cast time number indicating how many turns it will take the enemy to cast. To break the lock and interrupt the incoming attack, you must hit the enemy with all those elements before the timer is out. This type of system has become popular in modern turn-based JRPGs and it adds something to the combat to be sure. One neat twist here: if you have no magic points left to spend on abilities that will break a lock, you can use the live mana laying around to enchant your physical attack on the fly. And there are tag team-style attacks called ‘combos’ (like tech attacks in that one game) and special moves (like limit breaks). These are tied to different meters. Attacks come in a kind of charging hierarchy— physical attacks make live mana which can power up magic attacks which builds the meter for combo attacks which can help build the meter for limit breaks. Then there are the dexterity and timing elements to the combat—you can guard against enemy attacks and power up your own by performing different dexterity based mini-games. And it all works pretty well and feels pretty smooth. This is not a grinders’ game though. The combat is engaging, but not designed to provide endless complexity and possibilities. The action is a very in the gameworld type of action with an overlay of some light puzzle solving.

When a game like this aims for depth that tends to lead deep into the menus. And then menus wind up being where the real action happens. I like making numbers go up through elaborate menu mastery as much as the next person, but that was clearly not the aim here. Builds are pretty simple with limited customization options. This minimizes the amount of menu diving required to do well. Overall, it’s all handled in a way that allows combat to be engaging enough to old hands of the genre while being accessible and intuitive for newcomers. Several of the mob enemy designs are so charming they could be turned into collectible plushies—which is clearly the true test of quality. And bosses have imposing and impressively drawn sprites and mechanically these fights put enough twists on the basic combat to make them feel like unique encounters.

Likewise, basic traversal is breezy yet beautiful. Typically playable characters in games like this are firmly planted on the ground. The simple addition of a few movement abilities makes the design of the areas a bit more vertical and opens up some possibilities. Your character can jump or climb up onto reachable edges and jump down from rooftops and other high places without fall damage. This makes for some entertaining(if pretty simple) path finding and exploration in the towns and dungeons. The towns have hidden(but not too hidden) paths that cross-cross all over them and lead to treasure chests and some peculiar npcs. The dungeons further complicate the basic traversal in a good way by introducing some novel mechanics. Again, there is a puzzle-like quality to the dungeons, but they are never punishing like you might imagine something called a dungeon would be. These are more like fungeons (forgive me) filled with plenty of funishment (that’s a technical term.)
The minigames, another staple of the genre, range from semi-amusing to truly regal.

Visually, it’s just a beautiful game. The art is consistently charming, sometimes striking. What I loved the most were the varied sprite animations for the different types of character movements. These make sheer traversal around the world surprisingly satisfying to watch. Basic movement animations are full of the little details that manage to help humanize the characters. This reminds me of how I felt about movement animations in games like the Prince of Persia and Ico. Individual enemies have a variety of different looks too. They have their casual unaggressive stroll, take up battle stance once encountered, then they’ll go wild when they charge up a special attack and look visibly fatigued when they are about to perish. All this is just a testament to how much effort the art team put into making the sprites in this world come alive.

The visuals surpass what was possible on during the golden age of JRPGs. The sound is, in my opinion, on par with the classics. The soundtrack is fitting and helps create the nostalgic atmosphere. But some of the sounds accompanying menu actions and the level up screen etc are as good as it gets. And we all know satisfying enchanting UI sounds are the true path into our hearts.

The story is YA genre fiction that tends towards the cheerful, enthusiastic, and inspirational. Some (realists, pessimists, and nihilists) might find the dialogue and party camaraderie cringeworthy—but, in my view, that’s historically on point for this type of game. One difference was that in the classic titles there was simply less dialogue. They probably had some sharp memory constraints to worry about. (The resulting brevity might be a virtue.) All the same, classic SNES RPGs from Square and Enix and so on were not particularly ‘adult’ or grimdark or elaborate. They were not afraid to be straightforward entertainments— whether the overall tone was melodramatic or silly or cute or quietly charming. Sometimes things took a darker turn, but, just as often, they wound up with an MGM ending. Rag-tag crews were assembled, bonds were built, numbers went up, and worlds were saved.

And doing it all again is a pretty good time.
This game is a tribute to what came before. It’s also one more testament that independent entries in this genre can still stand a chance.

Addendum:
Since release it seems like a select group of critics who are typically fans of the genre have been hellbent on demonstrating that Sea of Stars is a no good, terrible, very bad game. They focus on different perceived flaws. The pace of the opening and the quality of the narrative come up frequently. Valid to some extent, but depends on your taste. Commas and grammar have also been a highlighted for scrutiny. In the 90’s, JRPG fans often liked a game despite awkward writing. Things have changed since then I guess. I just personally don’t care too much about commas. The charming atmosphere makes up for some poor comma placement. When I think about it, I have never played a game because the text boxes display exceptionally correct comma placement—not even once. (And, by the way, all forms of prescriptive grammar are illegitimate. Any legitimacy they appear to have is an illusion.)
Some hate the music. De gustibus. Some find the combat “boring” and “shallow”. I suggest that those people go play one or two of the SNES RPGs that serve as key inspirations here. Then honestly compare the systems at work and the moment to moment decisions the player has to make.

Critics and JRPG connoisseurs are entitled to hate what they genuinely hate of course. But just try to have good time first—see how it goes. As a side note, I’m not too fond of the tendency to chalk others’ appreciation of this game up to naivety or because they are “not true fans of the genre” or because it was probably “baby’s first JRPG”. It’s a very convenient way to criticize something and it’s pretty alienating. Don’t we want people to like this sort of thing that we like? And if this is where people come in— why ridicule them for that?

I still largely stand by this review. Having finished the game now, I am not entirely sure how I feel about one pretty significant thing that happens towards the end—but that’s also like a thing that happens in some SNES games