Despite coming out of it with very positive feelings, sea of stars is a pretty weird experience to describe because it felt like the game consistently swung back and forth from clicking perfectly with me to feeling like a bit of a slog.
First, to quickly mention the obvious, the game is absolutely gorgeous in its presentation, from music to especially the visuals. It picked a very unique main theme of astral visuals with strong and super obvious uses of the sun and moon, but also constantly played with it to have areas with fully distinct feels and themes, and it works absolutely perfectly in every area.
The gameplay, to me, went from prretty simplified but interesting in the earlygame to very basic and uninteresting in the midgame and to very dynamic and fun in the lategame. While the earlygame remains pretty simple, it took me long enough to be familiarized with the timing system and the more strategy-based aspects of the game like live mana for the gameplay to keep me hooked. Unfortunately, the game doesn't give you any meaningful options throughout the midgame. With characters only having 3 non-ultimate skills throughout their entire moveset, zale and valere's third skills being given fairly deep into the game, and there not being enough playable characters yet for the swap and combo systems to really shine, I felt like I didn't really have any meaningful gameplay decisions to make in the midgame, which is a pretty large issue when it comes to turn-based rpg gameplay that relies entirely on decision making and variety in approach. This, however, almost entirely goes away later into the game once you have access to 5 playable characters. This ends up making combat extremely dynamic, with you needing to constantly switch party members around to break locks and use more specialized skills, and amps the decision making very highly with a bunch of ways to use the combo gauge being available. Thankfully, the game has a ton of late/post-game side content where you can fully play around with the flexibility you get.
Without going into spoilers, the narrative sadly felt like a lot of unused potential. I absolutely understand why it ended up being like this, as the game's sheer scale is already extremely large for an indie team, but a lot of it sadly fell flat. Nearly none of the larger conflicts got a satisfying enough resolution, and most of the characterization, especially zale and valere's, felt pretty empty. At times, it honestly felt like Garl gave the cast its personality and charm by himself (which isn't necessarily a bad thing because Garl is incredible and every scene with him is peak by default), but I left wishing there was more dialogue between the cast.
Overall, Sea of Stars is an incredible accomplishment as an indie game, does many things very right, and oozes with love and personality. It has some issues, sure, but honestly I'm perfectly alright with that as the sheer passion at every corner of the game, in my opinion, more than makes up for that.
First, to quickly mention the obvious, the game is absolutely gorgeous in its presentation, from music to especially the visuals. It picked a very unique main theme of astral visuals with strong and super obvious uses of the sun and moon, but also constantly played with it to have areas with fully distinct feels and themes, and it works absolutely perfectly in every area.
The gameplay, to me, went from prretty simplified but interesting in the earlygame to very basic and uninteresting in the midgame and to very dynamic and fun in the lategame. While the earlygame remains pretty simple, it took me long enough to be familiarized with the timing system and the more strategy-based aspects of the game like live mana for the gameplay to keep me hooked. Unfortunately, the game doesn't give you any meaningful options throughout the midgame. With characters only having 3 non-ultimate skills throughout their entire moveset, zale and valere's third skills being given fairly deep into the game, and there not being enough playable characters yet for the swap and combo systems to really shine, I felt like I didn't really have any meaningful gameplay decisions to make in the midgame, which is a pretty large issue when it comes to turn-based rpg gameplay that relies entirely on decision making and variety in approach. This, however, almost entirely goes away later into the game once you have access to 5 playable characters. This ends up making combat extremely dynamic, with you needing to constantly switch party members around to break locks and use more specialized skills, and amps the decision making very highly with a bunch of ways to use the combo gauge being available. Thankfully, the game has a ton of late/post-game side content where you can fully play around with the flexibility you get.
Without going into spoilers, the narrative sadly felt like a lot of unused potential. I absolutely understand why it ended up being like this, as the game's sheer scale is already extremely large for an indie team, but a lot of it sadly fell flat. Nearly none of the larger conflicts got a satisfying enough resolution, and most of the characterization, especially zale and valere's, felt pretty empty. At times, it honestly felt like Garl gave the cast its personality and charm by himself (which isn't necessarily a bad thing because Garl is incredible and every scene with him is peak by default), but I left wishing there was more dialogue between the cast.
Overall, Sea of Stars is an incredible accomplishment as an indie game, does many things very right, and oozes with love and personality. It has some issues, sure, but honestly I'm perfectly alright with that as the sheer passion at every corner of the game, in my opinion, more than makes up for that.
PeronColorado
5 months ago