Last week, we took our first look at indie RPG Sea of Stars and its story, plot and characters. This week, it's time to move on to the more technical aspects of the game. SOS had some positives and some negatives when it came to story, but overall it was far more good than bad. But how did it feel technically?
First, I want to call out the graphics, because I feel like I don't do that enough when I talk about RPGs. I'm not usually a graphics-centric kind of reviewer, but SOS offers some truly spectacular pixel art. It's about as clean as you can possibly get and a clear example of using new technology to get the most out of a classic look. The world is spectacularly colorful and the color palette is about as unique as I have ever seen. That may be a weird thing to call out, but some of the colors and combinations of colors here are truly striking and help elevate the game. Your characters are expressive and full of life and the enemy attack animations are top notch. The dungeons look incredible, the towns look incredible, the bosses look incredible, everything just looks great. And everything is unique too, it's the kind of game that if I saw a single screenshot I could immediately say "that's from Sea of Stars" without thinking about it. The sound also helps, it's a really good to great RPG soundtrack, but the graphics and style are absolutely unlike anything else I have ever seen.
Now that that's out of the way though, we have to talk about the combat and exploration, which are probably the two biggest aspects of RPG gameplay. As you might expect, a game like SOS is going to bring to mind a lot of old-school RPGs. But for these two sections, there are two titles in particular that I saw with heavy handed influence here: Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger. We will start with the combat, which borrows heavily from the former. You start a battle with three characters, though you can swap at any time Final Fantasy X style. The first big mechanic here are timed hits, a correctly timed button press will add an extra hit to your physical attack or allow you to reduce damage from an incoming one, exactly like SMRPG. Each character has four special moves, most of which require some sort of unique action to increase damage. You charge Zale's sunball by holding the attack button, you can extend the duration of Valere's moonrang by bouncing it back and forth with timed attacks, stuff like that. Again, it's pretty much exactly like SMRPG. The game even uses small numbers, my characters topped out at like 25 MP and 200 HP and has the same dramatic level up screen with stat boosts that SMRPG has. Your characters can learn combo attacks, similar to CT, which can be performed by filling up the appropriate gauge. It has up to three levels and each attack expends one, two or three. All of these are two-character combos, I don't believe I ever saw a whole party one. These are very effective, as they only use the turn of the character actually initiating the combo and are relatively easy to charge with successful timed attacks and blocks.
SOS does have its share of original features though. Your characters regenerate MP gradually with regular attacks, so you have an incentive to use your special skills often. Characters that are KO'd will automatically revive after a few turns, though the number of turns goes up if they are knocked out multiple times. I really didn't like this feature, it made the game a little too easy and led to way too many instances where it was actually more beneficial to let your characters get hit than it should have. I did, however, really enjoy the other mechanics. First, hitting an enemy with a regular attack will cause them to drop orbs. Your characters can absorb these orbs, up to three at once, to charge their attacks and infuse their physical attacks with their respective element. This is critically important for breaking locks, which is the most critical aspect of combat in SOS and the one thing that keeps it from being overly simple to the point of it being a problem. Every so often, enemies will have icons pop up over their head, indicating they are about to unleash a powerful attacks. The icons will display some combination of elemental (sun, moon, arcane and poison) and physical (slashing or blunt) damage types and you must hit those enemies with those damage types in the number of turns alloted. Do it successfully and you will break their lock, causing their attack to fizzle and their turn to be skipped. Don't do it and you are probably going to take some serious damage. This is more prevalent in boss fights, but it's a cool feature no matter the enemey. It requires you to really strategize and think moves ahead, which I really like. There are times where you absolutely need to make sure you pull this off by any means necessary, use combo moves, swap in characters that are low on health, anything. Even if you can't successfully break the lock, you can reduce damage that an attack might do, so it's worth selling out to hit as many of the requirements as possible. Again, the combat would be a bit too simplistic if it weren't for this feature. At no point would I have ever called it bad, but the lock breaking pushes the combat from just passable to very good.
Simplicity isn't necessarily bad; in fact I think it's better in most cases than being overly complicated. However, Sea of Stars is simple to the point of feeling bare bones at points. Each of your characters only has four attacks, three of which they learn relatively quickly and an ultimate that everyone gets before the end of the game. In addition to limiting you in combat, it also makes gaining levels feel a little anticlimactic. All the numbers involved are small, HP values are in the 100's and MP in the 10's, which kind of threw me off a little bit. I don't necessarily think its a problem though. I do think some of the moves being underpowered is a problem, especially because there are so few of them. Not counting the ultimates, you have 18 total individual skills and about half of them are repeatedly useful. Among those, there were five that I used all the time: Valere's lunar shield and moonrang, Zale and Re'Shan's respective healing spells and Serai's disorient. That last one is especially critical as it resets your enemy's attack gauge, allowing you more time to break their locks. None of the enemies have overly complicated attack patterns and there aren't any "puzzle bosses" like you would see in other RPGs. I am okay with that, but I am kind of wish there were more bosses that asked you to do more than just attack them. The amount of combo moves makes up for this somewhat, but even those had limited uses. Part of the problem is that until you get Re'Shan a little more than halfway through the game, the only way to heal your entire party at once is the mending light skill, so you essentially need to save up your combo points for that. Again, it's very simple, but it's done well.
If the combat in SOS borrows heavily from Super Mario RPG, the exploration and dungeon crawling are almost identical to Chrono Trigger. I mean, the world map is the exact same as CT, like, the exact same. It looks like it was programmed the exact same way just with new assets. The map is kind of sparse, but at least its there. The game opens up relatively early, you get a boat about 10 to 15 hours in, but there really isn't that much to explore outside of where you are supposed to go. That being said, the dungeons and dungeon-adjacent locations are extremely well put together and fun, I don't think there was a single one that I just wanted to end. That's rare for a JRPG, even my 10's RPGs almost all have "that dungeon" that I dread playing every single time. But that's not the case here. Some of them are puzzle based, others have more focus on combat, but almost all of them are fun in their own way and I think it's cool that they vary quite a bit in length. All of them have cool, unique aesthetics that make SOS stand out amongst its peers and even big budget RPG titles. I also like the puzzles, I wish some were more challenging but it adds an element that a lot of games like this don't have. If I had one complaint, it would be that it's difficult to explore some of these places when you return to them. I really didn't want to bring it up again in this review, but Chained Echoes kind of spoiled me when it came to this stuff. Overall though, this is one of the strongest points of SOS and even though the world is a little smaller than I would have liked, what's there is well designed and fun to explore.
The good news is that SOS has plenty of side content, something I think is important in an RPG. The bad news is that a lot of this side content comes in some the form of collect-a-thons, to the point that you have to complete some of these collect-a-thons to unlock others. You have a town building sidequest, similar to what you would see in Breath of Fire II. But to complete it you have to find a substantial amount of the 60 hidden rainbow conches. You need to find about half the conches to fully complete the fishing quest, itself a sort of collect-a-thon where you have to catch every species of fish in the world. You have a sidequest around the minigame, called wheels, that is okay. It's no Triple Triad, but it's not entirely tedious and at times even fun. I don't like the randomness of it, but I still found it alright. The better sidequests feature additional dungeons and bosses, like freeing the Duke and fighting The Queen That Was. But for sidequests, the bosses they present aren't very difficult. SOS is a bit of an easy game overall, it's actually more difficult in the early game before you get set up and by the end you are so overpowered that even the "secret" bosses don't really pose much of a threat. Even the final boss, the real final boss, is more a war of attrition than it is difficult. Speaking of the "real" final boss, I should mention that SOS has multiple endings, though you have to get the first one before you can unlock the true one. I like the idea, but I don't really like the fact that you have to find all of the conches to get the true ending. Completing the other major side quests? Okay. But I don't like the fact that you have to do the collect-a-thon quest. I was more okay with them hiding a flimsy hammer behind the conches, which help unlock the super secret easter egg that the developers added.
Overall, I really liked Sea of Stars. Even if it ended up being bad, I am happy that we are in a gaming climate where a title like this can exist. It was only a few years ago that it felt like old-school JRPGs were all but dead. But that has proven to most certainly not be the case. Sea of Stars isn't the best game I've ever played by any means. I'm not big into RPGs being super difficult, but SOS is a little too easy for its own good. Its side content was a little too collection heavy and its combat is a little simple, but everything is done incredibly well. Does it ape Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger a little too much? Probably. But those games are all time classics for a reason. And for all of its borrowing, SOS does plenty to separate itself from those games. Sea of Stars was definitely worth a playthrough. I might even recomend this as a starter RPG for those that are looking to get their feet wet in the genre. More veteran players may not feel like they get much challenge, but they will most certainly find plenty to like.
8.25/10
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