Sea of Stars Reviews

Story is quite good... but not to suprising. The game gives vibes from Super Nintendo, which I personally like. Battle feels sometimes quite repetitive, but it is still accaptable. In overall quite a nice game.

Roughly 15 hours in and Sea of Stars has quickly become one of my favorite games. Charming, adventurous, and a compelling story. I'd recommend giving this game a try if a JRPG/Turn Based game is up your alley or not.

Love this game, the turn based combat system is easy to learn and has plenty of extras which you can customise to make combat easier or harder for yourself. I don't usually enjoy combat oriented games, so Sea of Stars was a great experience for me. The world is incredibly stunning in it's design, and I love the companions you could pick up along the way. I personally don't enjoy the hidden combat locks, as it feels like I'm wasting turns in combat trying to deal with these locks, rather than just getting through the combat. It would be great if when buying ingredients from merchants, you could hover over the ingredient to see which recipes it's used in, so you can easily work out if you need to buy any more, without having to flick back and forth between tabs for every ingredient. Very very excited for the free DLC, I haven't unlocked the True Ending yet, but I'm hoping to have done this by the time the DLC comes out!

Sea of Stars boasts some of the most stunning pixel art I’ve ever seen, but I dropped it after about four hours because it didn’t really grab me. The mechanics felt underwhelming: fishing was too simple, exploration mostly boiled down to hopping across platforms to grab obvious treasures (likely meant to showcase the visuals, which might appeal to some), and the combat—though conceptually neat with locks and timing—was too easy and repetitive. Up to where I stopped, the story was fairly generic; not terrible, but not particularly gripping either. As for the music, which others have praised, it was hit or miss for me, with some high-pitched tones that felt uncomfortable through headphones. Visually, it’s absolutely gorgeous, but from a gameplay and narrative standpoint, it just wasn’t my thing—though that might be more about my lukewarm feelings toward JRPGs these days. I would’ve liked a more compelling story or more challenging decisions to keep me engaged.

If you start the game and like Garl, boy you're going to love this game. The main characters have no personality to speak of. The option to choose one or the other is tossed out when you play them both throughout the game anyways. I found myself uninterested in the story but tried to push on because the game seemed kind of fun. But I'm around 40% through the game and I just can't anymore. The game play is fine, but gets overly repetitive really fast. The visuals and sound design are top notch. The pixel graphics and turn based game play were why I wanted to play and love this game. But God damn the story sucks, it's just my 2 asshole "main" characters watching Garl do all the work. Fuck Garl, and this game.

致敬经典的复古RPG，剧情和人物对话都相对简单，整个故事并没有让人印象非常深刻（没有打通真结局），但是游玩的时候的确会让人有一种返璞归真的冒险的感觉。 前期的剧情略微慢热、拖沓，加上对话简单直白可能容易与预期产生落差，我自己就是刚发售的时候在Switch上玩了10个小时然后中断了… 主要优点是画面和音乐，复古像素风格的画面非常漂亮精致，配合背景音乐带来很强的氛围感。精美的画面和音乐配合上有趣、轻松、不故作严肃的故事剧情反而让人玩起来有种放松惬意的感觉，更让人享受游玩和冒险的过程。 非常适合掌机或者Steam Deck。

Awesome game. Reached the true ending after 33 hours, and I enjoyed it very much. Incredible visuals and sound design, fun combat, and a beautiful world and character design. The only 'flaw' I have with the game is that the story is not on par with the rest of the game, but if you can tolerate that, you will have an awesome time with the other parts of the game.

This game is fantastic. The music is good, the characters and pixel art are incredible, and it's a lovely nod to nostalgic games like Chrono Trigger. While the story seems simple enough, it ties in quite deeply (although subtly) with The Messenger. Worth every penny.

One of the rare games I've enjoyed playing from the beginning to the end. If you're wondering if this game is an RPG you'd like to play, I can guarantee that it'll be worth the money, sale or not. My second playthrough of this game will be with my friends, hopefully I can finish the game with them so I can review my thoughts on the co-op gameplay as well!

Sea of Stars is a very solid JRPG designed in a way to capture that nostalgic feeling of playing games such as Chrono Trigger for the first time as a kid. The game offer an extremely solid package of mechanics with some of the most beautiful sprite works I have seen in any game that is clearly inspired by 16-bits JRPGs. This game went as far as taking the best Indie Game from the Games Award in 2023. However, as solid as the game may be, it has a good amount of flaws within its system if you take a deeper look beyond the surface. To start off with, I truly do believe that Sea of Stars have probably the best 16-bit art style I have had the pleasure to enjoy of any games I have played as of writing. The colors are vibrant and the animations are simply a treat to enjoy. Anywhere you look from in game battles to traversing the overworld and even fishing, everything just looks so crisp and move so smoothly. This game is an absolute visual treat to all 16-bit graphic enjoyers. Every map design and enemy design are masterfully crafted, with creative designs that are very befitting to the area/ maps you play in. The soundtrack and sound design are also very solid, giving you that satisfying retro ping when you land a successful timed attack or pick up something from a chest and a soundtrack that is very befitting for a fantasy adventure. The combat is very solid, offering you a typical turn-based battle system with the option to time your attacks with a button press to do extra damage or deal extra hits, similar to systems you would find in a Mario and Luigi RPG game. The game also introduces a unique "lock" system that reminds me of Octopath Traveler where the enemy would periodically have "locks" that need to be broken by attacking them with abilities that are associated with the lock type. If you can break all the locks within a certain number of turns, you will completely stop the enemy from being able to use their attack, otherwise you'll simply reduce the damage they do. This mechanic make it where instead of trying to hit hard, you have to plan out your attacks and keep an eye on your resources instead of spending it all in case you run into an enemy that needs you to break all their locks within one turn. Now while the combat does sound very interesting on paper, the game unfortunately doesn't really do much with it afterward, which is the first crack I noticed in the game before I start seeing all the other cracks in other parts of the game. See, while you do get a decent size party of 6 different characters, they all only get 3 different skills max if you exclude their ultimate attacks that you unlock near the end of the game. Now I do want to say this is remedy by the fact you also get "combo" abilities where you spend combo points and then two of your characters will combine their abilities to form a new one and you have the ability to switch between characters while in battle freely, but even this feels underutilized. One of the core things that comes with this type of game is the excitement of unlocking new abilities or getting stronger, but the sense of progression is is completely halted when your characters pretty much unlocked their entire kit pretty early in the game. Even with the combo system, which is pretty much your regular ability but with an extra flair to it, the system starts to feel stale extremely fast, only to be temporarily engaging when you unlock a new companion. This fatal flaw make combat extremely dull as you pretty much seen everything you can do very early in the game. Even with the boss fights, which are all a visual treat, feels pretty much the same as all you do is chip away at their health while trying to stop them from taking their turn. The stale combat is made worse when you realize that there isn't really a point to the RPG system at all. Your progression come in forms of levels and item gears like your traditional RPG game. However, your stats mean very little in the game as you will be doing very similar damage regardless of where you dump your stats, with mana point being the only stat that gives you any real gameplay impact. The gear progression is also very weak, with arbitrary incremental number boost that just keeps you relevant to the current mobs you are fighting. The only real "progression" I can say is the relic system, which is Sea of Star's unique difficulty system. Throughout the game, you can gain relics each with very unique effects that can alter your gameplay such as being able to see enemy weakness, being able to automatically time your attacks, or stat boost/ reduction. That being said, the vast majority of it just serve as a QOL such as easier fishing or faster cooking rather than anything impactful that would give you any meaning feeling of progression. I also think by far the worst aspect of the game would be the storytelling and writing. While it is definitely serviceable to drive you from point A to point B of the game, a lot of the writing decision just takes me out of the game. There are a lot of plot point that get introduce throughout this game that just don't get flesh out much at all, making it feel like a checklist of cool ideas rather than feeling like a natural part of the world that is well thought out. But by far the worst offense this game has to offer is the childhood companion Garl. Garl is your trope of "Cinnamon Bun solves everything by being nice" dialed up to 11 at the determent of the main characters. Normally I don't mind the overly optimistic companion, but man it just don't make sense how Garl literally solves everything just by being nice. It is to the point where the game feels like he is the main character instead of the two Solstice Warrior that you play as. And speaking of the two Solstice Warriors, you play as Zale or Valare, the two last guardians of the world destined to defeat the big evils of the world. You would think a lot of their personality and story would revolve around that and the storyline about their order, but instead, it seem like all they care about is Garl. Like literally, every scene where they talk with a few exception is "Garl is so cool, haha Garl is the best, Garl would know what to do, Garl is everything". Like its fine you want to drive home the point that he means a lot to our MC, but the way it is executed makes it like their only point to exist is to glaze up Garl. Which is a shame because the game set up a lot of interesting characters and set pieces, if only they had a fraction of spotlight that Garl had. There are also a good amount of other aspect I didn't enjoy about the game such as the use of tools to progress, the minigames, the true ending being locked behind collecting 100% of these rainbow shell scattered throughout the game. But at the end, you can tell the developer really wanted to make a great JRPG that everyone can love and they did a great job at it. They even released updates to address some of the initial concerns that people raised about the game. At the end of the day, its still a very solid game and a solid love letter to the JRPG genre. As a whole, the game provide a solid gaming experience provided you don't go in focusing too much on the combat or the story.