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The production of it is excellent. Art is great, combat design was very good, music is good.
But the writing leaves a lot to be desired.
Like, if you could combine the writing of Undertale with the production of this game, you'd have a game that would rival the classics themselves.
As it was I really struggled to stay engaged with Sea when the dialogue felt like it was written by a Disney intern in their first week on the job.
The writing definitely feels very amateurish. Which I agree is a mismatch with the otherwise high quality nature of the game.
I like the overall themes though. It was serviceable enough for me.
The gameplay is fantastic and offers a lot of variety (especially as you grow your team and unlock more skills and combo attacks), and the art style and art direction, locations, and the soundtrack are beautiful. I had a lot of fun exploring, looking for treasure, talking to everyone, finding tons of secrets and side quests. The story is very much cliché and mostly an afterthought, but it's fine (not bad, not good, just fine) and the cast is cute.
Unfortunately, 2/3 into the game, the developers either depleted their budget, or they stopped giving a shit. The story feels super rushed in the last act, and the ending is downright insulting. Half the cast enters a portal at the end of the second act, and you never see or hear from them again. One of the main party members goes like "Oh my, this thing I just discovered changes everything, I need to study this more" but you never see them again until the very end, and they don't do anything, nor do they say why the thing they found was important or what did they study. A lot of things that were foreshadowed or hinted at, like the legendary sea slug or the Queen that was, are just random optional bosses scattered in the game's world with no purpose or backstory whatsoever. Most don't even have a dungeon attached to them. The true ending is a slap in the face.
I loved the game, but the last act and the ending really soured my experience with it.
That’s a good point about Resh’an. I kept expecting him to come back and be like “Sorry I left. This is still our best hope.”
Why do you say the true ending is a slap in the face?
I'd have to spoiler tag the entire message to be able to reply to that.
spoiler
For a multitude of reasons. First of all, the true ending is achieved by collecting random Shells around the world. Sure, you have a magical parrot telling you where the missing chests are, but in my case it would tell me that a chest was missing in the Flooded Graveyard, and I'd spend four hours straight going up and down the same map over, and over and over again, until I finally gave up and looked for an internet guide to tell me where the missing chest was. I'm a completionist, but I don't care about achievements: I like exploring maps and collecting stuff and finding secrets, but I hate random, pointless collectibles and I never care about them in the games I play. Having them tied to the true ending was a huge mistake IMO and ruined my experience.
Secondly, as I said in another comment of mine: I despise time travel. Always. It just doesn’t work, unless you put a lot of thought into it, and the Sea of Stars developers clearly didn’t even try. Garl's chapter was probably the most emotional moment of the game, but the true ending comes and says "Yeah, no, he's alive and well, and actually it never happened. B'st did those things, not Garl", which doesn't make any sense as B'st did not know Garl and would not be able to imitate him, nor do the same things he did.
The purpose of reviving Garl was for him to throw an apple at the bad guy to taunt him and have him choose to fight in place of his minion? Seriously, you go through the hassle of collecting all conches, and that's the only thing that differs from the normal ending. The rest plays out exactly the same. You defeat the Fleshmancer, and... Resha'an shows up, takes his bf into a portal with him, doesn't say a word to the party, and goes away. And everyone's happy. To say that I was underwhelmed is an euphemism.
I was expecting some new revelations, some closure, but all I got is a slightly different turn of events with a different boss fight and an equally disappointing ending. Meanwhile, dozens of questions remain unanswered. What was Resha'an researching? What the heck was the "night" inside of Zale, and why had he to confront it? Valere is able to fly just as well as he does, and has no night inside her at all. Why was Serai hiding her true identity from her crew? What happened to Brugaves, the Acolytes and the Dweller? (Yes, I know that they end up being boss fights in the Messenger, but I should NOT be required to play an entirely different game to have some closure to this storyline. That would be like Capcom asking their players to play Monster Hunter to know what happens to Ada in Resident Evil)
Did the true ending (and then the extremely true ending). The game is so full of love for video games that it's contagious for me and I really appreciated how much the game makers cared about it
Wait… there’s an extremely true ending?
I had a similar reaction!
Spending a couple extra hours wrapping up quests and collecting conches (on the recommendation of a friend) wound up being well worth it for me, the true ending felt much more satisfying.
For what it's worth, all the quests take somewhere around 20-40 minutes each, if I remember correctly. Even the collection quest wasn't too bad, thanks to the treasure finding parrot.
Yeah.. I’ll probably end up doing it eventually. It’s just really lame to get hyped for the final fight and be told “go do side quests for a few more hours and then come back.”
I liked the plot and story. There are plenty of unique/memorable moments. It gets off to a lethargic start, unfortunately, though. The first like five hours at least are quite dull, and I don’t blame anyone for dropping the game based on that. But it improves massively after the intro, and the story is what kept me going.
The writing and storytelling are not good. There’s way too much dialogue and it’s constantly changing tone. One second there’s a meta 4th-wall-breaking joke and the next second it’s serious or sad. It takes me out of the world and many moments lose impact because of this.
The characters are mixed. The two protagonists have zero personality, which is partly a symptom of them being entirely interchangeable. But most other characters have great backstory and some are quite interesting
The combat and gameplay did its job, but lacked depth. The weapons and armor were just simple stat changes, and the stats are pretty standard (hp, mp, phys atk/def, mag atk/def), so character progression was uninteresting. The magic/type locks in battle were sort of more tedious than fun, but I appreciate that it requires some thought and is something unique.
I like the world design and the verticality that gives some interest to running around the world. There are unlockable shortcuts so that you don’t have to repeat long sections again, and there are plenty of rewards to make exploration somewhat worthwhile.
The artwork is amazing. There’s a ton of unique detailed pixel art. Admittedly, I do think some animations are a little rough or are simplistic - like a static sprite bouncing up and down - but this is pretty minor.
I’m mixed on the music. It’s technically great, but I don’t really want to listen to the soundtrack again, honestly. One thing that’s impressive is the music changes seamlessly during night/day cycles so actually every song has like two renditions (or something) which is kind of crazy.
The ending is rushed, though I only really felt it’s the last area (the tower) that’s rushed. You get to the top and the final boss is one fight with space shooter mechanics (???) incorporated, and then the game ends right after. It’s too quick. That actually did motivate me to unlock the true ending, because I felt like there must be more. And unlocking the true ending didn’t take me all that long, but it does suck that it’s a collectathon.
Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, but wouldn’t play through it again. It’s like a 7/10 for me.
The combat felt really slow to me, but I continued for a while until the game soft locked by just putting the characters in a small, black room. Nothing I could find fixed that and there wasn't enough of a draw to really look for a fix. Might try again at some point but it was only so so for me overall.
Oh no, that sucks. If you generally like turn based combat I would give it another go. The first few hours are fairly boring but there are some very cool battles later in the game.
Oh, I thought that the conches were entirely a completionist thing, learning that they are required for the true ending puts a damper on my desire to finish this game... It was a fun game, but I got no desire to 100% it. Oh well, guess I'll just watch the true ending on YouTube instead.
I absolutely loved it. Looked forward to every session playing it. I wish it lasted a little bit longer before it forced you to collect everything to get a true ending which I haven't done yet. And the fact you have to collect everything is a bit of a bummer. Didn't really feel like going on a scavenger hunt. I enjoyed searching for that stuff while playing but didn't really want to do it with that being the only thing available to do now.
Anyone who says Sea of Stars is in the same echelon as "classic" JRPGs clearly didn't play all the way through SoS or has not played many classic JRPGs. SoS was an okay game for what it was but I honestly don't remember much about it a couple of months after finishing it, whereas games like Lunar and Persona will always be cherished gaming memories for me.