Not Suikoden but I'm glad this is a game that exists.

Overall I had a pleasant experience with the game but there are some points that really brought the game down.

-Battles are too slow and character balance is all over the place. I wish there's a 2x option in the future. Magic is really useless early to mid game and suddenly becomes super good because of the bump of stats mages get past a certain level.

-I know this was trying to mimic Suikoden and old JRPGs but the inventory limit and being able to switch runes at your castle or towns limited how much I wanted to experiment with setups and runes.

-Speaking of (magic) runes, it's a good concept but lacks a lot of variety and you almost never use the good stuff because of how expensive they are.

-I value the soundtrack a lot in my reviews and sadly EC:HH really lacked here, there are some good 4-5 songs that I enjoyed but other than that it felt uninspired and really basic.

- The cooking and Beigoma sidequests are the most unfun things I've ever done in a game in a long time.

The good:

-Momo

-The english voice acting was superb and it really caught me off-guard because I was expecting an average VAing with how many characters there were but I was thoroughly surprised. Sure, there were some bad ones but the vast majority were great.

-The racing and card games were fun unlike the other two, the egg one reminded me of FF7 chocobo breeding so that's was nice. Had a lot of fun in those.

-The story was just alright. The premise is interesting enough but it never delivered that climax that I was expecting coming from Suikoden I-II. The (over) world feels a bit empty at times but there's a lot of biodiversity and races that make up for that.

Overall it was a good experience and I'm glad that I backed this game many years ago. There's definitely a lot of room for improvement and I'm sure their next game will be better.

Rest easy Mr.Yoshitaka Murayama and thank you for everything.

There's not much I can say about this game, I'm very biased towards it because it was one of my favorite SNES games back then and still is one of my favorite games of all time.

I was a bit worried that the 3D graphics would take away the charm from the original game but after playing it, I think going full chibi was the right call. The charm is still there and it manages to capture the humor and wackiness of the OG.

I played the game with the modern soundtrack and it was a delight, Yoko Shimomura is a musical genius and I love what she did with this game. I still like the SNES version of some songs but overall the modern versions are amazing to listen to.

One thing that I don't understand is that they added an easy mode but couldn't bother to add a hard mode. It would've been great for veterans of the game and genre because this game is very easy and a bit of challenge is always welcomed.

One example are the post-game bosses, having a hard mode with those new boss mechanics would've been a treat and it's a shame they didn't think about including it.

As for the splash damage, I'm kinda neutral about it. It didn't bother me but it obviously made the game even easier, a toggle would've been nice or make it easy mode-only.

While I LOVED the new cinematic cutscenes, it lacked some voice acting or more special effects.

Overall it's a great remake of a great game. Just a short, jolly, feels-good adventure that makes me smile every time I play this game. I miss this kind of wackiness and character designs in Mario games.

Sea of Stars is a serious contender to my GOTY 2023

First things first, I was a top backer for this game and have been waiting for this game for 3 years while being active on Sabotage’s discord. With that said, I’ll try to be as objective as possible.

Sea of Stars is a game that has reminded me why I love this medium so much and why some artistic expressions and deliveries can only be achieved by games. This game was like going back to the past to those times where I was a kid playing Illusion of Gaia, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger or Golden Sun for the first time. Why those games specifically? Because those are the games, I felt inspired Sabotage Studio in developing SoS.

The sprite work and atmosphere in SoS is sublime and rich, with very different faunas and ecosystems to find throughout the adventure. There are many secrets and treasure chests to find in good ol fashioned SNES RPG games, something I’ve been longing for a long time. These beautiful scenes are accompanied by an excellent soundtrack by the same composer as The Messenger + 10 amazing tracks by the legendary Mitsuda. It’s even more impressive when each area has a different version depending on if you are exploring during the day or night.
What I liked the most about Sea of Stars is the gameplay and Sabotage’s vision of fun. While this is a retro inspired RPG, it has many QoL features from modern games that just enhances de experience even more. There are items called relics which you can turn on or off depending on your playstyle. There are relics that heals you after each battle, relics that reduces the price of items in shops, or relics that boost your EXP gained, this is all optional. Having options is great.

Besides that, the battle system is just pure fun. The lock-break system was obviously inspired by Octopath Traveler’s Shield Points and weakness system and it is a battle system and just works. I’m grateful you couldn’t just press A to win and you had to strategize and optimize your turns or else the game would punish you with enemies dealing special attacks that dealt tons of damage.

I mentioned Golden Sun earlier, and the reason were the puzzles. While the puzzles in Sea of Stars are not mind-blowing o ultra creative, I appreciate the inclusion of them to make the dungeons and areas more fun to traverse. It’s refreshing to not having to just walk and fight enemies until the end.

Speaking of traversing, the use of verticality in this game is incredible. I love how everything interconnects and maximizes the use of the space of the screen instead of having dozens of areas or screens.


Some flaws and my gripes with the game

This has been said in a lot of reviews in outlets but yeah, the writing is not the best. While I think the story is good, my biggest problem are the characters. To be more specific, the two main characters Valere and Zale. It feels like they are just there. They are not silent protagonists but they may was well be, you could exchange the dialogue of Zale to Valere and vice versa and you wouldn’t notice any difference.
I also would’ve loved more interaction between the whole cast, the game at times just feels like a nonstop rush to the end with no time to breath and give the characters some development.

Another issue I had it had were the combos. I barely used them in normal battles, not because they are useless but because it takes too long to activate them. By the time you could use one the fight is almost over. They feel like they are exclusively for boss battles.

Lastly, I felt like the bosses are way too easy. There are a couple near the end of game that I felt had the best mechanics and were actually hard but most of them you just kill them with the same strat of building up combo points, break locks and release your best skills when boss is on “cooldown”.

That said, I absolutely LOVED my 40 hours with the game, and backing it was one of the best decisions I made three years ago. I firmly believe Sea of Stars is one of the best indie games of all time and a serious contender to my GOTY 2023.

Our first Ys game with the party system in the SEVEN engine which also laid the foundations of future remakes (Celceta) and future new games (Lacrimosa).

I think the first half of the game was better than the second half which felt a bit like padding and repetitive. Having to explore Altago AGAIN, even with shortcuts, was a massive pain and not fun. I think the idea of skills being tied to weapons is a good system overall but not a good system for Ys because of how fast you get new weapons plus add the synth and I ended up with a lot of unlearned skills.

I played on hard and it was a nice challenge until you get the Pentagram skill for Adol + Crimson Jewel and any sense of difficulty goes to the gutter. It's just that broken.

Even if I had a lot of issues with this game I enjoyed it for what it brought to the Ys franchise although I still prefer solo Adol games.