Coming off of playing this game in the past when I was younger and thinking "I like zelda" into adulthood down the pipeline having played A Link to the Past a bunch randomized for some multiworlds with friends this game felt very good to come back to and 100%.
I can't really offer much more than what hasn't already been said in terms of the good, with an overall not unusual zelda experience with 4 opening dungeons to kick off the adventure and 8 more in the latter half, the main difference between this game and most others is the non linearity it gives with item choice as it provides you with a rental system in which you can get all of your traditional zelda items, such as the boomerang and hookshot, almost immediately, with the caveat the you will lose them upon a game over as it is a rental system. This brings me to the next point, the rental system is such an odd take to the Zelda series formula but works very well in the understanding that traversing the world rarely if ever actually required any items throughout the whole journey, just some actual action upgrades to pick up rocks or be able to swim, and to top it off made it really easy to rent your items and eventually buy them via the overabundance of rupees, the staple Zelda currency. Alongside the changes in which you obtain your items this adventure, another major change is your resources, gone are arrows and the bomb bag and instead you get to use an "energy" meter A.K.A this games magic meter that replenishes over time instead of needing a collectible on the ground the drops from enemies or breakable terrain such as tall grass. The only real reason this review is left down half a mark is due to one reason which you get access to once you have bombs, the Maimai collect-a-thon, the purpose of this game's collection quest is to collect cute sea-snail like creatures to bring back to their mother whom offers upgrades for every 10 you bring back with 100 in all, and, you're even provided a filter for your over world map to see how many remain in sections of it! The problem that comes with the collection process begins almost immediately if you can't play with sound on because all of them emit noise to let them know you're close, so if you don't have headphones, are hearing impaired or your audio for your device does not work, you HAVE to use a guide for several that just aren't on screen. Otherwise, the overall collection and use of this collect-a-thon is not nearly as bad as newer Zelda collection side quests both in terms of usefulness and 100% collection. This game also being a direct sequel to A Link to the Past has some nice callbacks throughout the whole game from the whole map being nearly one to one in terms of locations with only some being hugely different both in the light and dark world (known as Lorule instead of just the dark world in link between worlds) and the secrets that it calls back to with small caves and such. The whole Lorule segment of the game is also an amazing improvement to the previously mentioned dark world from Link to the Past, with the introduction of the game's flagship mechanic being wall merging, which lets you do exactly as the name suggests, and when doing so has you become a mural like painting of yourself and move around walls only being limited to what blocks where you move (broken walls or blocks in the 3d space in front of you) and your magic meter which drains relatively quickly. This also lets you get between worlds (ha) via portal cracks that appear in the world once you obtain this ability the first time you've gone into Lorule, another thing that returns in this game from its predecessors is fast travel, this time, using a bell as your music instrument of the game, but, in order to actually fast travel, you need to interact with weather veins that also act as save points in this game which will usually be in major point of interest, such as entrances to dungeons or the shop you purchase your items, after which you will be allowed to fast travel to any of these weather veins you've unlocked as long as you're in the overworld, and not just the Hyrule, but Lorule as well, in comparison to Link to the Past where you could only fast travel to specific points in the light world. Additionally, this game makes use of the 3d capabilities in such an amazing way by making it seem like you're peering down into this amazing top down adventure and sometimes even seeing it pop out of the screen from the pit that was seemingly being created to make a window to a new world. Overall, if you're down for a nice few days to a week of playing a top down Zelda game, I'd highly recommend playing it as it's definitely something you won't want to miss if you're playing this series and the experience will only be supplemented with cool callbacks if you've already played A Link to the Past!

Let me throw this out there upfront - I come to this as a total JRPG amateur. I'm somewhat familiar with many of them but have only finished a handful start to finish. With that in mind, I came to this homage to Chrono Trigger and its ilk without familiarity of the games it pays tribute to. With that perspective, Sea of Stars is full of fun, creative ideas that create sporadic moments of excitement, but it overall lacks the progression to stay consistently engaging.

Your moment-to-moment gameplay consists of a mixture of "parkour", "puzzles" and combat. Those first two are rudimentary to the point of being mindless, but in a way that was basically satisfying. When it came to scaling the highest peaks and exploring the deepest oceans, I could mostly just let the little cymbal monkey in my brain take over, but it was soothing in a way that effectively broke up the combat and story sequences, especially with the gorgeous environments and very catchy music.

On the store page for this game, Sabotage Studio boldly and proudly proclaims the game features NO random encounters and NO grinding. In both cases, I feel compelled to wonder what they understand those words to mean. I suppose it's technically true, but battles with generic goons at seemingly random points along your path, which respawn when you're inevitably forced to backtrack along the area, feels enough like grinding random mobs to me to be a distinction without a difference. That's not to criticize that so much as say this isn't the revolution of JRPG game design it was touted as. I would also clarify my use of "generic" as referring to them being unnamed characters; the designs themselves are wonderfully exciting and creative to see. There's some freaky little fellas in the Fleshmancer's castle I couldn't get enough of.

Still, the combat is the interesting little baby in the King's Cake. The game's locking system, in which an enemy's Dragon Ball attack buildup can be cancelled out by thwacking them with a specific combination of typed damage, is a wonderful idea in concept, ostensibly filling combat with a series of little puzzle sequences to put together on the fly. Still, because I'm a cold-hearted monster, I have some issues. While the game is admittedly weirdly insistent about how you DON'T NEED TO WORRY about pulling off lock breaks, like a fussy mom worried about her kid getting hurt on the playground, it remains frustrating how often they smack you with locks that simply can't be broken in time. Whenever an enemy mosies on in with a smug grin, drops his big fat gut on the table, and tells you to pop three suns, two blunt, two slash, maybe a poison for good measure, and write the next great American novel in two turns, I feel like they might as well just call out "everything-proof shield!". Sun in particular is a menace; options to pop more than one sun icon at once are sparse, to say the least. For the other side of the celestial coin, Valere has Moonerang, a move which functions as the best single target attack, best AOE attack, and would effectively break any and all moon attacks. This also highlights another issue - your selection of moves is limited, and useful moves are even moreso, so much of this 30+ hour game is spent recycling the same three or four moves. I think my hands bounce moonerangs back and forth in my sleep like an Amityville possession now. Things are meant to be shaken up by combo moves, but the vast majority of these are similarly useless. In addition, the meter takes long enough to charge it was infrequent I could do too much with it all. I'm sure there would've been a lovely little animation if I dumped three whole combo charge on doing a bit of poison and arcane damage to a single target, but such things are now lost to history.

In addition to the lock system, attacking and defending can be strengthened by properly timed taps, which are also NOT vital and you DO NOT have to do them for the love of GOD (seriously, they reemphasize that at least five or six times). The mechanic introduces a satisfying little challenge to spice up combat. Most animations are fairly intuitive when you're supposed to hit, though some could be much clearer, and a handful I never figured out, just watching a boss perform the entire first act of Goethe's Faust in windup to his attack and trying to intuit which of Mephistopheles's appearances was deemed the most operatic.

In aid of your many cruel and unnecessary attacks on woodland creatures, the game presents a series of collectibles. First, relics. While presented and sold as unlockable buffs, these are essentially cheat mode, and hardly worth mentioning. Second, armor and weapons. In an effort to reduce tedious digging around through stacks of Thunder Staff of Enlightening and Mighty Pants of Virginal Defense, equipment has been streamlined to the point of being vestigial. Sans backtracking, if you find armor, it will have better numbers than what you currently have. Equip it, do a little "yippeeeee" as you watch the numbers go up, and move on - i.e. a complete waste of time. The more detailed equippables come in the form of accessories, which actually do provide unique buffs, though nothing too exciting. Specifically worth mentioning are the party-wide buff items, which can form an integral part of the party strategy until the game arbitrarily decides to take characters away for a while, and the items they were carrying with them. The last and most frequent pickup is ingredients, used to make food items that were almost entirely unnecessary for the vast majority of the game. The fact that there's a fireplace every eight feet like the Solstice Warriors took a pitstop in a multiplayer survival game means that heals are pretty much only useful in tanky boss fights that go on for a fortnight, in which case there's a combo ability that gets the job done.

Before getting to the story, let me quickly address Wheels, a delightful little sidegame that occasionally crops up along the journey. It's surprisingly engaging, though not quite deep enough to sink hours into. That being said, the balance is a tad wonky. The only enemy I struggled with was the one deploying the Assassin-Priest combo. After trying it myself, I was just unbeatable. The Assassin just crams every enemy token into gay baby jail and stunlocks them until they die; it's kind of silly.

For an RPG such as this, the make or break ultimately comes down to the story. Here, the story could be best described as... sporadically interesting. My patience grew thin very early, as we watch two cardboard automatons named Valere and Zale file through the Chosen One Registration Office, before being set off to the big wide world in order to fulfill their destiny of doing fetch quests for every random jackoff that asks. So much of this game is made up of "sorry Solstice Warriors, destined saviors of all mankind, I won't trust you're REALLY worthy until you rescue my favorite sneakers from the Swamp of Misery or whatever". I was satisfied with that for a long stretch of time, as that token busy work lead me through wonderful setpiece after wonderful setpiece, meeting fun characters along the way and seeing all sorts of creative ideas for locations and enemies (the Necromancer in particular was pretty funny), all illustrated with some phenomenal pixel art. In addition, all the backstory / lore communicated through Teaks was actually very engrossing.

Still, that only lasted for so long until the aimless wandering wore thin. It was only towards the end, when the writer's room burned through all their hoarded-up psychedelics in one glorious session, that they roped in ideas of multiversal travel and sci-fi robots that I perked up. When the relationship between the Alchemist and the Fleshmancer came into focus, it was interesting! When we went through the 3D cyber-highway and plopped out in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, I was hootin' and hollerin'! The entire sequence of Garl's sacrifice was a genuinely poignant moment in a generally lighthearted game. When the plot develops a clear sense of purpose, I was fully onboard, but the wheels on the bicycle remain pretty wobbly throughout.

The betrayal, for example, is nonsensical. Let's walk through the logic tree: 1. I am dissatisfied being forced into the destiny of a Solstice Warrior - Fair. 2. I am not convinced this Dweller we are meant to kill will be the last - Fair. With these in mind, we should therefore ally with the Dwellers and cast the world into an infinite darkness. Uh? Wuh? Buh????? Many many hours later this is justified by their intention to leave to a different universe and the vein in my forehead subsided. That is, at least until Erlina's second personality takes over and the logic tree changes to 1. UNLIMITED POWER!!!!!!!! therefore ally with the Dwellers and cast the world into an infinite darkness. After the tragedy of this baffling twist, the Elder Solstice Warrior is so hurt he decides to piss off and give up on everything. Like, just kicks up his feet and hangs out in their town while Valere and Zale have to awkwardly swing by his house for brunch and pretend like it's not weird that he just abandoned them without a second thought and only comes by to raid their fridge and borrow their PS4 games.

Serai is a peculiar character. Introduced with a quirky cast of lovable pirates and upcoming twists signposted so hard they risk pulling a Hereditary, the ultimate reveals come with very little circumstance. The first reveal is played as a joke, but nobody ever seems all that fazed by any of it, least of all her crew, who make literally no comment on their pirate captain turning out to be a cyborg assassin. Who even are these people? Are they from another dimension too? How did she even meet them? Still, the detour to save her homeworld was interesting, and the Derelict Factory was probably one of my favorite locations in the game.

The Alchemist's plot is easily the most interesting in the game, but it ends entirely abruptly. After a revelation which I would like to see the emotional character fallout of, he holes himself up back in his gamer den and doesn't say another word for the rest of the game. Instead, he leaves behind a My Pet Alchemist for you to play with in an awkwardly transparent example of story making concessions to gameplay. He doesn't show up again until the ending and, well...

To not sugarcoat it, the ending of this game is quite frankly pathetic. After battling through a series of increasingly spongey bosses, you reach the final fight with the Fleshmancer. Or, er, rather your former mentor who is apparently evil now; the other one has shed some of his pixels to become a boss in The Messenger, I guess. After defeating her, I laughed out loud when the Fleshmancer abruptly blew her fucking head off. Then, we're treated to a GI Joe "the battle goes on" type sequence, the Celestial Warriors tell their friends that Pookie has to go back to his home planet, and there's a flashy little space battle. Ultimately, I think I would've flipped a gasket at this ending, if I didn't know there was a true ending to be acquired after the credits roll. As is, it's cute and charming as a sequence.

Then, however, I was mortified. The first action of the true ending is to bring Garl back. Make no mistake, I like that little fella. His ability to make friends with everyone is charming, even though he's about as useful in combat as you would expect a frying pan to be against Chthulhu. But there needs to be such a thing as consequence in a story, and our first order of business here is to completely undermine and destroy any impact that emotional death sequence might have had because they can't abandon a fwend. So, right off the bat I was annoyed. Then, after completing a series of tasks, most of which I had already done and which included a particularly tedious scavenger hunt, you reenter the Fleshmancer's Castle, fry cook in tow. Now comes the actual fight; since the timeline is altered, Erlina has pissed off to also pick up an extra paycheck as a side gig in The Messenger. With the Fleshmancer defeated, we're treated to a GI Joe "the battle goes on" type sequence, the Celestial Warriors tell their friends that Pookie has to go back to his home planet, and there's a flashy little space battle.

...

...

...Wait a minute.

So the true ending is almost the exact same thing, except now we have Garl as an Also-There. The Alchemist swoops in and whisks of the Fleshmancer... somewhere??? Why does he save him? Where is he going? Find all this out in the next $35 game, you little pocket books! I hope he just took him to Reno or something, blew some of those gold coins on slots and prostitutes. While the final image is sweet, this ending that you were asked to go above and beyond for is insultingly abrupt. Very little feels resolved, and the fact they accompanied the game's release with an announcement of upcoming story DLC, presumably to clean this crap up, is disgraceful. I know it's free DLC, but there's no excuse for releasing the game when it ends just as satisfyingly as Pookie returning to his home planet did - maybe the DLC will open by announcing Zale died on his way back.

The overriding philosophy of this game was "streamlining", and in that they succeeded. However, those gritty details, quirks, peculiarities, are the heart and soul of these types of games. When the gameplay and story has been smoothed down to be as efficient as possible, a certain amount of heart is lost along the way. The worst part of Sea of Stars is that it does often feel like going through the motions - doing a thing to do a thing to do a thing. In the end, I'm not sure there's much to be remembered from it aside from the tremendous polish. Polish, however, does not alone make a compelling game.

P.S. Some miscellaneous notes:

1. The weird little animatics were infrequent enough to be distracting, as well as feeling totally unnecessary - still looked cool though.

2. The facial expressions are just wonderful. Every characters' shocked or embarrassed face amused me every time.

3. Some of the character positioning for attacks was pretty awkward. Something like Moonerang sitting you unevenly between enemies could be argued to be a gameplay challenge, but Venom Flurry would often send Serai off the screen - that's a big problem for a timing challenge.

4. Garl's eye getting messed up is introduced and then never mentioned again.

5. I was unreasonably annoyed about the Clockwork kids talking about how they never aged and are still kids while they're walking around with 40-years-in-the-desert Moses beards and wrinkled up like Clint Eastwood.

I am not immune to propaganda. Show me a trailer for an indie JRPG featuring scripted encounters on the field maps, dual techs, and guest tracks by Yasunori Mitsuda, and I'll go "oh, a Chrono Trigger inspired indie JRPG, I sure hope they actually learned the right lessons from the classics" and drop $30 to see if they did.

They didn't.

(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)

I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.

I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.

You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.

Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.

Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.

The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.

Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.

I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.

Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.

I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".

Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!

It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.

Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.

Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.

No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.

Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.

Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!

Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!

You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.

Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?

The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.

Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.

Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.

Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.

This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.

Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.

The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.

If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.

An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.

In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.

It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.

In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.

But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.

You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!

How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.

I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.

But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.

Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.

Pikmin 4 is... weird. I want to preface this by saying that Pikmin is probably my favourite series besides Metroid. I struggled through 1 as a wee lad, was traumatised by the bad ending and accidentally broke my disk later, which is when my parents bought me its sequel. Pikmin 2 is an all-time great to me. I've replayed it tons, it's an overtly cruel RTS that is so special to me and, as you'll see, could never be truly replicated by a modern day Nintendo. Pikmin 3 was the first game in the series I actively anticipated the release of. The wait for it to come out felt like forever, I re-watched the trailers endlessly, consumed any content made for the game pre-release and, stupidly, watched someone play through a good chunk of the game in Japanese prior to its western release. I was 12 then and I'm 23 now, which is important as I did the opposite going into Pikmin 4. I watched the first trailer and then tuned into radio silence. I averted my eyes and ears every time it showed up in subsequent directs, muted words on twitter that could get it onto my timeline and avoided any discussion of the game within friend groups. Ultimately, I did discover certain elements against my will (character creation, glow pikmin, going out at night, Olimar's leafy appearance) but I felt satisfied in how little I knew when the game arrived last friday. I was excited, yet nervous. For as much as I loved 3, it dumbed down certain aspects of the series that I'd come to love, allowing for a much smoother experience than I was comfortable with. I feared 4 would double down on dullng the series' edges, which did end up being the case, yet it also restored some of what made the first two games unique. Pikmin 4 is weird, so let me tell you why.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, I want to make it clear that I love this game. At the end of the day, despite all of my many, many upcoming critiques, it's Pikmin! And I just adore Pikmin. This game realistically does more good than bad because it's Pikmin, but because it's Pikmin, I'm inherently going to be more critical of it. That's why the length of this review dwarfs all of my others. It's a spillage of thoughts that I had to share, so I'm sorry if it's totally incoherent.

Pikmin 4 begins with a recap of Pikmin 1... until it doesn't. Instead of getting all 30 ship parts and leaving the planet, Olimar discovers a dog called Moss and the game throws you into a playable section inside a house. Confused, I plowed forward in search of answers that I would never get.

Ths stories in the first 3 Pikmin games are simple enough. Pikmin 4's plot is simple if you HAVEN'T played those games, otherwise it becomes a convoluted mess of crossing wires that never quite adds up. Despite the 4 in the title, this game is essentially a reboot of the series. It replaces 1 in the timeline, makes things in 2 cease to make sense and even introduces characters that essentially replace those in 3 and can't I like any of it. I kept waiting for an answer at the end, why are things this way, are they really doing some weird plot that'll somehow come together during the final cutscene? And it just didn't, in fact the ending bluntly explains nothing. During the fake out credits (this game is going to copy Pikmin 2 a lot), we see Louie is on the planet. How did he get there? We return to help out our dog, Oatchi, who can no longer stray too far from the planet due to a mutation. Louie is abducting castaways and trying to turn them into leaflings. So when we finally get ahold of him, what do we learn? Nothing at all. We leave the planet, fly off into the space and the game ends. I sat there, bewildered, at the lack of any resolution. The lack of an answer is, in many cases, a good thing, but here it just feels lazy. Louie feels wildly out of character, his want to stay on PNF-404 is consistent with his story in 2, but the abduction just doesn't make an ounce of sense. Pikmin 4's story feels like an offbeat pastiche of the trilogy, trying to cater both to new players by resetting the lore and to veteran players by using returning characters and familiar ideas. I think it falls flat for the latter and while I can't say for certain, I imagine the former would also find themselves confused by the tacked on Louie plotline.

Before I get to the gameplay (which I have way too much to say about), I want to touch on the environments, atmosphere and music. The original Pikmin had 5 areas, though only 3 were fully fleshed out. Each one was distinct, from the pleasant optimism of The Forest of Hope to the oppressively dark Forest Navel and then the quiet solitude of The Distant Spring. The music contributed heavily to making these areas stand out and darkness and fog did a commendable job of making these areas feel more expansive than they actually were. Pikmin 2 followed on effortlessly with remixes of the areas from 1, yet they all feel different enough. Each of the four areas represent a different season, with my favourite being Wistful Wild, an autumnal aesthetic accompanied by an thrilling yet foreboding track that embodies finality and danger. Pikmin 3 did a decent enough job with its areas, though I felt that Tropical Wilds and Garden of Hope were a little too similar looking. Musically, I also feel 3 dropped the ball, with none of the area themes sticking in my head after I finished the game.

Unfortunately, 4 accentuates 3's issues. Sun-Speckled Terrace, Blossoming Arcadia, Giant's Hearth and, to a lesser extent, Primordial Thicket all felt like different parts of a single level. This wasn't helped at all by the gentle, lowkey tracks that accompanied these locales which I cannot recall at all. This music direction extends to the caves which scarcely even have music unless they decide to steal from 2, which is the case for the Engulfed Castle. What baffles me most of all is that Olimar's side story, which you can access after the first ending, has much more Pikmin-y tracks for the first four areas. It's certainly a preference thing, but seeing Breath of the Wild, Metroid Dread and now Pikmin 4 switch to these more atmospheric soundtracks has been largely disappointing.

To give some credit where it's due, Serene Shores and especially Hero's Hideaway were very fresh. It was exciting to finally be able to explore a house's interior outside of Pikmin 3's mission mode and the changing tides were a neat addition to a beach level. While I think even these areas could have done a little more to set this game apart from its predecessors, they were certainly highlights of the adventure. The interiors of caves were also beautiful, with the aquarium being my personal favourite. While most of the aesthetics were ripped directly from 2, they look fantastic in HD.

I'm left a touch disappointed with the way Pikmin 4 looked and sounded. Texture quality is obviously the best it's ever been, but I found the art direction widelylacking, even when compared to 3 which I already believed to be a bit of a step down from its predecessors.

Now... the game. The thing I immediately noticed and immediately hated was the automatic lock on. I didn't like the lock on in Pikmin 3, but at the very least it was never forced. Even if you were standing next to an enemy, you could throw Pikmin elsewhere. In 4, this isn't an option. It dumbs down the gameplay for sure, but it also has some severe downsides that genuinely hamper basic playability. Here's an example: I'm standing next to a treasure on a small islet, surrounded by water. I have ice pikmin in hand, I want to chuck them into the water so they freeze it. This isn't physically possible because, try as I might to create some distance between me and the treasure, I cannot aim them away from it. Small instances like this are some of the most infuriating control issues in the series. If you're fighting multiple enemies and you want to go for a specific one, you best hope that the target switch mechanic can read your mind! And if there's a treasure among the enemies? Good luck.

The controls are, to put it bluntly, awful. They simultaneously make the game easier and harder (but not in the good way). The smart stopping for tossing Pikmin (there's a delay after you throw the required number of Pikmin at an object) can be helpful, but I often found it to be hindrance. Why can't I turn these things off? Then there's leaf Pikmin vs flower Pikmin. From what I can tell, there's no way to manually select what maturity of Pikmin you want to throw. It's handy in that, if you throw them into a candypop bud, it'll always use leaf Pikmin. But, and I have no idea why this is the case, leaf Pikmin seem to be the default 90% of the time. Why would I want my leaf Pikmin to carry a treasure back? Why can't I select flower Pikmin? Let me turn this off. Let me turn all these "smart" features off. Let me control the game myself!!

Anyhoo.

Pikmin 4's structure is a familiar one, blatantly copying Pikmin 2's homework. I am fascinated by this decision, 2 always struck me as a black sheep, a formula that I loved but never expected to see again. The treasures are brilliant, I'm a little sad we can't have the branded treasures that grounded 2 in the real world, but that's mostly a non-issue due to how packed it is otherwise. The best ones are the music boxes, playing three iconic tracks from Nintendo's history, delighting me each time. Besides the treasures, you also have onions, flarlics, castaways and raw materials to gather. This gives each area a ton to find and I never felt an area was lacking nor did it ever drag on. The onions were particularly interesting as you initially only have access to 20 Pikmin on the field, which is a fantastic decision! It's satisfying to build up to 100 over a fairly long period rather than getting there in just a few in-game days. You're now also restricted to just 3 types of Pikmin on the field at a time, which I also feel was the right call. After all, every single Pikmin is in this game (except Bulbmin, my heart yearns for you) so it could be overwhelming to use them all simultaneously. My only gripe is that the areas are usually designed around those 3 types, and the game blatantly tells you which they are so there's no room for surveying the land to figure out what you might need, or even using alternative Pikmin types to accomplish tasks rather than what the game intends.

There are a few notable additions to Pikmin 2's structure which set this game apart. Instead of a world map, you have a hub where your crew and all the castaways gather. Many of them have side missions to complete which, if you're already looking to collect everything, you'll breeze through without issue. You can upgrade your equipment with materials and even train Oatchi, which I'll touch on later. It's pleasant having so much to do at home base, though part of me wishes we could have been more involved in the expansion, even if it was as simple as commanding a group of Pikmin to build some structures or something. From here, you also get access to night expeditions which left me underwhelmed. You use the new glow Pikmin to defend your base(s), but it's easy and a tad monotonous. It feels disconnected from the main game and never asks much of you, so we're still a ways off from having the a brutally difficult option to continue exploring during the night. They use these missions to reintroduce the Smoky Progg from Pikmin 1 and as much as I enjoy a little fanservice, it loses a ton of its mystique in this setting. A solid threat for a mode like this, but a meager shadow of its former self.

Lastly we have the Dandori Battles and Challenges. The challenges are ripped straight from Pikmin 3's mission mode, which was the best part of that game. To no surprise; they're great here too! Not quite as enjoyable due to lack of a third captain, but I was never disappointed to come across one. The battles are competitive collection jobs, the multiplayer of the game taken and moulded into singleplayer. They're not very good but largely inoffensive, which is what I would say if they didn't punctuate big story moments! In 3, these would be scored by impressive boss fights, the best in the series. Besides the final boss, 4 reverts back to 2's philosophy of quantity over quality. This was reasonable back then, but after seeing what was possible, their absence here was sorely missed. A mix of the two would have been perfect!

Most of the bosses this game does have are plucked directly from 2, in many cases to their detriment. When you have such an easy comparison point, it's poor showing when it's clear that what you've made is a blatantly pale imitation. The prime example for this is the Engulfed Castle and the Waterwraith. This iconic enemy is a terrifying threat in Pikmin 2's Submerged Castle, stalking you through this 5 sublevel nightmare. In 4, the music is the same, the aesthetic is the same, even some of the layouts are the same, but the kicker is that it's a total breeze. The Waterwraith showed up 2 times during the first 3 sublevels, once while I was leaving the first sublevel and again while I was transporting the final treasure on the second sublevel. Apparently I cleared the third so quickly that he decided not to appear. And sublevel 4 was the boss fight, which was identical to Pikmin 2. Pardon the pun, but why copy that game if you're just going to water down its toughest challenges? The cruelty of the Submerged Castle was what gave it so much charm! The answer is that they wanted to appeal new players with 'Pikmin's Greatest Hits' which is fine, but as a verteran I can't help but feel deflated by its new incarnation.

This is the case for many of Pikmin 2's bosses, though exact replicas of its caves are thankfully uncommon otherwise. 4 tends to shorter cave lengths, with much more forgiving design throughout. Alongside the rewind function (which, again, would be nice to disable), you're unlikely to have a situation where you don't have enough Pikmin to finish a cave. It's a stroll in the park, I'd always march around each sublevel with 100 Pikmin in tow instead of splitting them up, which I did constantly in previous games. This is partially due to the difficulty (lack of instakill threats), but also due to Oatchi, who we'll get to soon. I liked a lot of the new gimmicks, such as the conveyor belts from 3 and the fire you had to carry between torches, or whatever they're called. I'd like to see more of this, go all out with the weird stuff! 3 had plenty other great ideas to steal, like the 2D portions in Beastly Caverns or the oddly absent electricity conducting properties of the yellow Pikmin. Anything to set these caves apart from 2 would have been brilliant, because they were at their best when trying something new. Below Grade Discoteque is one of the most distinct dungeons in the game, concluding with one of my favourite fights in the series. It needs to be seen (and heard) to be believed.

So there's bits of 2 and 3 in this game, but what about 1? Pikmin 4 has you covered with Olimar's Shipwreck Tale, a miniature game within the game that sees you collecting 30 ship parts in just 15 days, mimicking what you did in the original Pikmin. It's great, there's little to say about it but the areas are remixed just enough, it's plenty nostalgic and as mentioned previously, the music is better than the main game! It's not that long but not too short either, just another layer on this gargantuan multi-layered birthday cake of a Pikmin game.

At last, I am ready to address the canine in the room: Oatchi. Every game prior to Pikmin 4 has increased the number of captains by one. 4 bucked this trend, which I think was probably the right thing to do. We've gone back to two, as much as I enjoyed how much you could micro-manage in 3, I believe it's best off a little simplified. You still have the 'go here' function, yet I rarely found myself using it. Perhaps that's partly due to the lack of a Wii U gamepad, but I think the more likely cause is Oatchi. He's very cute, but he fundamentally destroys Pikmin. While you do have to upgrade him to get there, Oatchi is both the ultimate captain AND the ultimate Pikmin. He lacks the ability to charge Pikmin forward but makes up for it with his own charge (which eventually stuns enemies) that flings all of his Pikmin onto whatever he headbutts, MELTING enemy health. He can also jump, swim, jump while swimming and do almost anything a Pikmin can, the major exception being that he can't be thrown. He's eventually immune to all elements and has a final carrying weight of 100, with the ability to swallow objects becoming one of the quickest ways to transport massive treasures.

These features alone would make Oatchi the ultimate companion character. Your create-a-character (I called him Bill) is outclassed in every way, with only a few areas off limits to the dog. However, there's one more aspect of Oatchi that tears apart the fabric of Pikmin: Oatchi can carry not only the captain, but the Pikmin too. This means both captains and the Pikmin can get up small ledges and cross any body of water all the while not being held up by their movement speed. Water rarely feels like an obstacle to Pikmin now, nor do other hazards such as poisonous or fiery floors. The biggest issue this creates, though, is that Pikmin is no longer messy. The Man-at-Legs is in this game with virtually no changes. The challenge of this fight came from deciding which Pikmin to bring into the fray; leaf Pikmin may not be able to make it to cover in time, therefore being risky prospects. So you'd position one captain in cover while the other took on the beast, potentially having to move cover if the beast got too close. In 4, the Man-at-Legs is a completely non-threat as even the slowest Pikmin hop onto Oatchi's back and can run circles around the helpless critter. There are countless instances of this as Pikmin scattering about in the prior games caused a majority deaths. You had to be patient, careful about your approaches, restrictive with the number of Pikmin you brought to a fight. Squeezing a full group of Pikmin under the Beady Long Legs' feet was nigh impossible - not anymore. Of all the criticisms I've leveraged against this game, this, alongside the controls, is the most damning and contributes to why I don't see myself replaying this one like I do the first two.

And yet, despite everything, I love this game. I know this is jarring, and I'm confused by it too. This game is the sum of its parts, and its parts are taken from 3 of my favourite games ever made. Even if each part is worse in this entry, it's Pikmin, and I fucking love Pikmin. Pikmin 4 was a joy from start to finish, I'm a fan and I was serviced! I may not replay this one, but I more fun with that single playthrough than I did playing 90% of the games on the system. I hope Pikmin can course correct somewhat for the fifth entry, yet despite the direction things are heading, I will be there, day 1, no matter what.

Some disjointed final thoughts I forgot to include above (I promise my reviews aren't usually like this):
-The Piklopedia is great here, though I wish they'd brought back the music too. Writing for both it and the treasure catalogue is fab. Character writing is decent, though the story has far too much dialogue in the beginning.
-Why is there no jingle when I reach the final sublevel? And why put Pikmin 2's boss theme in this game if you're going cut out the best part of the song?
-Glow Pikmin are very cute. Ice Pikmin are a strong addition but similarly to rock Pikmin, they don't look like what I think a Pikmin should look like.
-I enjoyed the final boss, but it felt like a Mario boss more than a Pikmin boss.
-Enemy variety is amazing, I love the Miniature Snootwhacker and want to be friends with him.
-Seriously, why no Bulbmin?

If my review seems overly negative, thats because I'm comparing the game to other Pikmin games, and there's quite a bit this game does worse in comparison. Frankly this is possibly the weakest one. However this is still a Pikmin game and still very fun. I highly recommend picking it up.

Positives:
-This game has 6 large beautiful areas to explore, more than any other in the series.
-The game no longer holds Pikmin from you based on story progression, my biggest gripe from 3. It actually feels like you can progress, explore and collect, like the first 2 games.
A lot of QoL changes have been made with the Pikmin AI.
-The best looking Pikmin game and one of the best looking games on Switch.
- A lot of content, particularly after the first sets of credits roll. Olimars Shipwrecked Tale and the Trial of the Leaf Sage in particular are very fun.

Major Negatives:
-Night missions suck. Its just boring tower defense mode that doesn't even have the decency to adequately reward the player for suffering through them. No medals even, like the Dandori battles or challenges. I stopped doing them about halfway through the game. They don't count for any areas completion as far as I'm aware.
-Despite how lovely the stages look, I don't think a lot of them are well designed Pikmin levels. There are very few moments where it feels like they type of Pikmin you brought with you impacts your progression, and this is almost as true in challenge stages. This is probably because of the new Onion system. Pikmin of any type can be found pluckable in caves but more can't be created without an Onion. Only the Pikmin 1 trio onions are found early, and only the Ice Pikmin onion can also be found before the credits. I think the thought process was not to make a Pikmin type too necessary, as well as having the areas feel less like video game levels. I thought previous games were much more smartly designed around this and it's possible the act of juggling 8 Pikmin types was too much for them.
-The main story is too easy. Oatchi trivializes most combat encounters both by protecting Pikmin riding on him and by melting enemies he charges into. While the dash has a cool down there is almost no punishment for charging in with reckless abandon. Exploration is also easy since he has the ability to swim and you can even upgrade him to basically be a second captian. Its possible this is related to my previous point but I believe even without Oatchi it would still stand.

Minor Negatives:
-I don't like the games attempts to be basically like every other game. Currency for upgrades, large hub area, that sort of thing.
-Side missions are pointless. Most characters basically want you to things that you're probably already doing and just rewarding you raw materials for it. They also don't auto give you the reward you have to talk to them. A simple achievements system would have worked better.
-The flow is very disconnented. If day missions lead into night missions I might hate them less.
- Characters are annoying and speak when your doing anything. I tend to skip most of the dialogue here. Even Olimar will talk to himself when he's supposed to be alone.
-Despite how much I like the gameplay of Olimar's story, it basically just retells Pikmin 1 but worse.