Sea of Stars is an amazing-looking and sounding title that has captured all you love from classic turn-based RPGs and improved upon it. I can’t recommend this game enough; this is how you modernise and pay tribute to a classic genre.
One of the best games I've played the last years. Reminded me of the old days when I played Pokémon in terms of how it looks and feels. It's worth it to fully play through it, as they did something magical after the first ending.
Sea of Stars has clearly been made by people with a deep and abiding love of JRPGs. That level of passion is hard to mimic, and the result is a heavily playable game with morish visuals, a cracking story and deeply considered level design. However, while it is very good, it isn’t quite perfect. Combat needed to be deeper (or at least escapable) and while the dynamism was a great touch, it wasn’t enough to carry it all the way through to the end.
It's a joy and a relief to realise that Sabotage hasn't merely mimicked classic '90s JRPG, but committed to understanding what makes them tick. Its nostalgia is neither gratuitous nor cynical, instead working disparate references together with original ideas into a coherent whole. While it's a little disappointing to discover that there's isn't great depth to the turn-based battles and other systems, the immense quality and detail in the pixel art, soundtrack, location design, characters and plot ensure that Sea of Stars remains a stunning achievement to the end.
Sea of Stars is a pitch-perfect nostalgic take on a JRPG, with beautiful visuals, a fun combat system, and a top-notch soundtrack. My only major criticism is that the story is a touch weak and disjointed, and the combat system falls off a bit toward the end. Sea of Stars hit its mark hard, and it's a damn impressive first effort from Sabotage Studios. If you've been looking for a simple, fun and lighthearted old-school RPG, look no further than Sea of Stars. It's not quite a new classic, but it doesn't need to be, either.
Sea of Stars takes formulas and gives them a nice fresh coat of paint. Even though the narrative won’t hold your attention, you’ll find a game that offers stunning visuals and sound design that accompanies a fun battle system with unique mechanics. Easy to pick up and play for everyone, old and new.
Sea of Stars starts strong with a tutorial that's way too long. The combat starts interesting and you start getting the hang of the sync abilities and whatnot and you can't wait to get more abilities... right? That's the thing,you play with the same abilities throughout almost all game (I played for about 12 hours before giving up in the isles chapter).
The OST is awesome and the pixel art is pretty great, but that's it really. Even the story was very stale.
TL;DR version: Not as good as Chrono Trigger. Play that instead.
Game is a mish-mash of systems from different JRPGs, but unlike those JRPGs, these systems serve no purpose in this game other than to just "be there." Just to say, "remember that JRPG you loved? We have that mechanic in this game yeahhhh." Music is not memorable like Chrono Trigger. Yasunori Mitsuda is in the credits, but he must have composed only like 1 track for the marketing. Writing and story is god awful. Little to no attention to detail on the lore and worldbuilding either.
The best thing I can say about this is the visual style, and that's what attracted me to it, but the more I play, the more disappointed I get. Puzzles are also average at best. Hit a lever, step on a switch, put the key in a hole; basic stuff. Nothing that will stimulate your IQ. Game is also woke, which is surprising for a JRPG, but it's a western developer we're talking about (Sabotage Studio is from Quebec Canada), so that's not completely off the table either. When you do a JRPG right, you can't be woke. Japan is a homogenous culture.
Also, it's not challenging in combat either. Pretty brain-dead. If a character dies, will resurrect for free with 50% HP. So even if you're asleep at the helm, you would likely still win.
Average game
the amount of glow-up reviews im seeing just boils my blood ; either by fake bot accounts or ppl shilling HARD for this game ; the combat is fun for the first hour and then its very repetitive soon after ; im like halfway into the game and each character still only has 2 abilities with a very limited mana pool so you can only cast basically once each battle , theres team attacks but you have to build up a meter to use them and usually the monsters are already long dead before you can even utilize them at all , basically for bosses its only useful for
I felt at times I was mashing X to speed up the wall of text I was all too accustomed to not wanting to read to progress the story forward , theres no option to unequip items and accessories and amulets are very missable with areas becoming non-acessible once you've cleared certain story points ; at times it really feels like a playstore android JRPG game behind a 31 $ price tag when those games are for free or very low cost
I really cant recommend with the limited content the game has , some ppl praise the combat system but really its very shallow and you'll get bored of it almost immediately , how does this draw inspiration from past games when this game has the look, the feel of something you can make out of RPG-MAKER on the Playstation? theres no sidequest, theres a couple of secrets sure but nothing too wow about it , npcs talk on and on and on to the point you just want to progress , the story was so forgettable or barely explained I honestly forgot halfway through what the end goal for the two characers was supposed to be and frankly its a narrative I hardly cared for ; its not worth 30$ for what it is with and that is a very very basic JRPG that doesn't even come close to the 90's JRPG its somewhere in the NES level of content of JRPG and even some NES JRPG's blow this game out the water in content , storetelling, and combat mechanics
Just finished the game, including all the post game content, true ending etc.
For the first half, I was definitely enjoying myself. Sure the writing is bad, the story is boring and the characters are.. yeah. But whatever - the game was making up for that in spades with it's charm, beautiful graphics and the combat still felt fresh and interesting to me. Traversing the world was wonderful, dungeons felt well crafted and I was excited for what would come next. The game promises you a lot in those first few hours.
By the end though, unfortunately I feel like this is a 5/10 game at most. What you experienced in the first few hours of gameplay is what you will experience for the next 20 something hours, and it is painfully tedious.
To break it down into points -
Exploration.
The game gives you this massive open world to explore, but all you can do is walk around. You aren't amply rewarded for going off the beaten path or backtracking when you have some new abilities to use. Everywhere is completely locked off and you are railroaded to do the main story for the most part. I wasted a good few hours exploring until I realised that it was best to just finish the story and just go back to get what I need for post-game content when everywhere is unlocked. There are no secrets to find or well hidden upgrades until the very end.
Dungeons.
As you progress through the game, you get more and more tools with the potential to make dungeons an interesting experience with varied, interesting puzzles. However, the puzzles seem to be made for people with a room-temperature IQ and end up mostly being variations of sliding some boxes across the floor repeated ad nauseum. Literally one of the "puzzles" about 70% through the game is a match the cards game with a whopping 3 pairs of cards. Massive wasted potential here.
Combat.
By far the worst offender. The combat by end game is mind numbingly boring. The main reason being that the game is just way too easy, the final boss is about as challenging as the first boss (so, not at all). You can just turn off your brain and just cast spells, melee attack to regain mana and heal throughout the entire game. Another issue is there is just not a lot of depth in the combat system. From about the 40% point onwards, you will be using the same strategy for the rest of the game. I think a big reason for this is that it relies solely on the typing + card interrupt system and nothing else. There are no status effects, no buffs, no unique gear choices or anything to bolster the base system so your experience at the very start of the game is going to be the exact same at the very end.
In conclusion, Sea of Stars feels like it took the surface details of other classics such as Chrono Trigger and Golden Sun giving you a familiar feeling, but completely misses what made those games actually good. It's a hollow, boring, beautiful shell of an RPG
SummarySea of Stars is a turn-based RPG inspired by the classics. A prequel story set in The Messenger's universe, it tells the story of two Children of the Solstice who will combine the powers of the sun and moon to perform Eclipse Magic, the only force capable of fending off the monstrous creations of the evil alchemist known as The Fleshmanc...