Welcome to the Sea of Nightmare
When I play a turn-based RPG, I expect an engaging story, great characters, and fun gameplay. With Sea of Stars winning indie game of the year, I was looking forward to playing, especially since the developers who made it were Sabotage Studios, the same folks who made The Messenger, a 2D platformer that I really enjoyed for its gameplay and humor. When I started to play Sea of Stars, I was actually hooked and found myself playing it more and more. Now that I have put a lot of time into the game, I have to ask myself, where do I start in describing things?
Pros and Cons
Pros
The puzzles are very creative
Animation is fantastic when going through the cutscenes
Soundtrack is very well done
Beautiful pixelated art style
Cons
The writing for the story falls flat, and character development suffers from it
Gameplay, while simple, gets repetitive later on in the game
The game’s mechanics are very simplified and never evolve
Story
The story starts out with Valere and Zale. two Solstice Warriors who have control over Eclipse Magic. This magic is the only magic that is capable of harming these monsters called Dwellers, who are created by the Fleshmancer, an alchemist with god-like powers. They are traveling around with their assistant Garl. Their mission is to meet Headmaster Moraine and two other Solistice Warriors to fight The Dweller of Woe.
That shall be all that I will talk about the story, there is more to it but I would be spoiling it if I told any more. This may make you think I have a lot of great things to say about the story but in truth, it’s the opposite. The major problem with the story is the writing, at first, it started off very strong but later down the line, the cracks started to show. If I could describe both Valere and Zale’s personalities, is this “we love Garl” that’s their entire personality and it’s not like Garl himself is really any better. He comes off as Mr. Perfect like everything goes his way and he is able to do anything without issue.
Even the characters that I myself tried to go out of my way and like, ended up not being that well thought out either. The only other character that I mildly liked, was Teaks, while she is with the party, she does not engage in combat and is pretty much left out of the story. This leaves an empty feeling when major events happen or something, like she is completely oblivious to it all. Although Teaks role in the party does get somewhere and turns into somewhat of a party member, her character development is left empty at the end. The twists also don’t really feel all that special too and I want to talk more about the story but I would of course, just be spoiling it.
I have played many RPGs and have witnessed amazing stories that I have praised and if a game like this has some bad writing, that’s not a good sign for things to come. Unfortunately, Sea of Stars continues to have a few more issues in it, that hold it back still.
Gameplay
Sea of Stars gameplay is very simple for an RPG, while that’s not a bad thing, it does have a few issues with it, although it does have some unique mechanics that I do want to talk about. Combat is of course the main focus of the game and you have a few attacks at your disposal that you can utilize. The turn order in which party members take their turns is not in any way predetermined, the player can choose the order they act in. So for example, you can have Zale act before Valere in the first round, then in the next have Valere act first.
Enemies attack completely differently, as they have timers that will go down when each party member takes a turn. You also have access to timed attacks and timed blocks, timed attacks will let you attack teice and a timed block will reduce the damage you take from the enemy's attacks. You can also boost your attacks with live mana by doing a non-boosted attack. You generate live mana by attacking enemies with your normal attacks but you can also generate some by hitting an enemy before battle.
There are also different types of damage in the game as well, there are a total of six different damage types, sword (which should be sharp) blunt, sun, moon, poison, and arcane. Each regular attack, skill, or combo will have one of these damage types. Enemies will be weak, resistant, or immune to each of the damage types. The only abilities that don’t have a type are healing abilities.
So now that I got the core mechanics (except for two but more on that later) out of the way, I can talk about the issues I have with combat. My main issue is that combat does not evolve in any meaningful way. You don’t learn a lot of moves and are forced to reuse the same attacks over and over again to take enemies out. Because of that, combat can get stale and I want to avoid fights but I can’t as I need to farm to make sure my characters level up.
Now Sea of Stars has a unique leveling-up system, instead of your party members leveling up individually, they level up as a group. While this idea is interesting, there is another issue that comes up, you don’t feel any growth in your party members as enemy attacks will still be doing a ton of damage, even when blocking.
Then there is the lock system that the game has in place for enemy attacks, when an enemy is about to cast a spell, they will have their turn order. Each enemy spell has a certain number of locks for you to break if you break all of the locks before the turn timer is up. That enemy will be unable to cast their spell and you can build up combo points for your special attacks. You can have a max of 3 combo points and every party member has at least a few they can use.
The issue with the lock system is that there will be times that you will be unable to deal damage to a certain type because you either don’t have the mana for it or you don’t have access to a certain damage type. Although this is where combat leads to my next issue, it gets very dull in the later parts of the game. To the point where I don’t feel like playing it anymore as it becomes a slog, the last ten or so hours of the game, are not leaving me very invested.
Garl is not only my least favorite character in the story but also my least favorite party member, his abilities don’t do much, except nourish, which is the fourth or fifth-best healing spell in the game. His abilities get outclassed by later ones, he is meant to be a tank but he does not offer much in terms of being a tank. This is also the only turn-based RPG game that I know of, that does not have stat increase/decrease abilities. Something that I think, should have been included.
The only good thing I will praise the gameplay for is the puzzles, while simple, I did find them creative.
Graphics and Performance
The pixel art style that the game has is very beautiful and colorful, I really loved how the developers made it, as the areas feel very special. The animation during the cutscenes are also very well done and something I loved seeing. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM, I had no issues while playing the game and it ran very well.
The soundtrack is also something I loved as well, some songs were not great but some of them were very well done and I loved the boss theme the game had.
Final Verdict
Sea of Stars was a game I had high hopes for but ended up being disappointed with what the game showed me. There is something to write and show here, the world looks fantastic but with the bad writing and dull combat, my interest can only be kept for some long. If the game was 15 hours or so, I may have given it a pass but Sea of Stars clocks in around 30-35 hours of gameplay. I am in the minority when it comes to the game, as many people do in fact love it, and I say, more power to them, I am glad that they love this game. I recommend picking this game up on sale if you are interested but I personally would recommend you play something else.