It’s been a minute, but I promise I’m still playing games! And finishing them, no less! But while I’m trying to work through The Backlog, I’m gonna end up with a few side quests here and there. At this moment, it’s a group playthrough of Resident Evil Requiem with my girlfriend and her sisters, but also Pokemon Alpha Sapphire AND Pokemon Blue. You all know how it is.
At any rate, I’m fresh off of rolling credits on Sea of Stars for the first time!! And all in all… I get the hype. This game is wonderful. It’s beautiful and cheery but also emotional in the way that only RPGs of yore can be (and in tragic ways that greatly surprised me, to be honest). This is probably the biggest game that I’ve tried to capture my feelings on in a review, so I’ll try breaking it down by section.
SPOILERS AHEAD
First thing I wanted to point out: the Wheel of Time references in this game can’t just be coincidence, right? I mean, one of the main characters is named after the Horn of Valere for Pete’s sake! And the mentor character is named Moraine? Come on. That ain’t no accident. However, it does seem like the references die off after the first couple of hours, so maybe I’m drawing connections where there are none (unlikely).
Okay, for REAL first thing: the combat. I went on a journey with the fights in this game with a few distinct ups and downs. At first, I was enamored. The timed hits mechanic felt classic and helped me stay engaged in combat through the early game. Notably, early on I wasn’t working very hard to break enemy locks, so I kind of missed how they were intended to work I think. Towards the late early game, I felt combat getting a bit stale. The timed hit novelty had worn off, and it was just Valere (my chosen character), Zale, and Garl doing kind of the same thing over and over again. But by the time that Seraï joins the party, it all started to click once more. I was unlocking new special and combo moves, and things got a lot more tactical. I also started paying more attention to enemy locks and feeling like I was failing that mechanic because I was rarely breaking them all and actually preventing enemy attacks. Fast forward to the end of the game with all special, combo, and ultimate moves unlocked, I felt like I was really cooking! Mostly because I realized that there’s benefit to breaking any number of locks and that it isn’t all or nothing. I’m a fool. The systems combined with the beautiful animations made this into a game that was a joy to play. There are a few moves that I feel like I never got the timed hit timing down on, too, which kept things engaging up until basically the very end.
Related to combat: boss fights! When getting into an RPG like this as an adult, I always dread the prospect of having to grind for experience. I just don’t have that much time to spend doing that sort of thing in games much anymore. I was delighted to learn after a few hours of gameplay that generally speaking, your party will be appropriately leveled and almost every fight can be won just by understanding how to navigate it. Which isn’t say that there was no challenge by any means. Some of the optional bosses are absolutely brutal, and honestly I probably tried to beat Meduso like five times before I actually succeeded. That said, some of the others were… well, lackluster is too strong of a word, but I definitely expected more from a few different bosses. The last Dweller is one example I noted down. It just felt like some of these bosses died too quickly! Again, not completely without challenge, but just… whatever? Maybe just not as epic as I would’ve thought. I would even say the same thing about Elysan’darëlle who is supposed to be the final boss!! But more on that later, I suppose.
Now for: story and characters. I’m not gonna dig too deep into spoiler country here, but some spoilage is unavoidable. Almost all of the characters in this game are great, with pretty much everyone having a least a few memorable moments. The main exceptions are probably the player characters, Valere and Zale, and I can’t tell if that’s a function of the devs wanting them to feel somewhat like silent protagonists without actually being silent or if their personalities are just kind of absent. They’re both very I’m-young-but-tough-and-I-fight-for-my-friends without having much to differentiate them from one another, much less every other RPG protag you’ve ever seen.
However, their friendship with Garl very quickly became my focus. Garl is so relentlessly cheery that you really can’t help but love him. All he wants to do is go on an adventure with his friends, and when the stakes of said adventure become clear, he’s immediately prepared to give whatever it takes to save the world.
All of that is why when he was mortally wounded trying to protect his friends, I thought for sure the game would find a way out of actually letting him die. And to the credit of these wonderful writers and developers, they didn’t. Garl died and I was shocked. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in a video game. Of course, I’m not in ANY way saying I WANTED Garl to die! But I greatly respect the choice to let the story play out that way. Every time a powerful character told me that “hey, Garl’s a goner for real,” I guess I just figured “yeah, but we’re gonna find a way to save him with the power of Solstice Magic and friendship” and that just… didn’t happen. I won’t detail the whole sequence of Garl’s last hurrah because it’s really best experienced yourself, but suffice it to say that it was a beautiful sendoff and an incredibly memorable part of the story.
But Garl isn’t the only one I loved! I was enamored with the mystery of Captain Klee’shaë from the moment we met her merry band of pirates, and I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t realize that the good Captain and Seraï were the same person until the game basically spelled it out to me. And while her story wasn’t quite as emotional, I feel like the way she’s written does a great job of still conveying a deep sense of care and responsibility for her world in a way that I found very endearing. Also she’s an android?? Hard left turn setting-wise, and I was super here for it. A bit more on this later.
Resh’an is a character that I feel like we don’t get much of, so I didn’t get a ton of time to really get him. He had a few fun moments (his conversation with the Three Bird Dudes is particularly poignant), but I feel like he disappears from the party too quickly for me. Similarly, with B’st, I just didn’t get enough time with him. I didn’t gel with his abilities or anything either, so he was unfortunately usually on the bench in my playthrough. That said, every character has a moment where their abilities really get to shine, so no one was ever on the bench for that long.
As for the story itself, it feels pretty standard for a JRPG-style game. You start from humble beginnings (though in this one you are fated to play some part in saving the world) and end up basically killing God. For me, it’s the characters that make this game. Don’t get me wrong, the story was completely serviceable, but I honestly don’t have much to say about it. There weren’t too many crazy twists that blew my mind or anything. It was just fine. And that’s good!
As much as I love this game, I do have a few qualms with it. Firstly, I feel like the namesake Sea of Stars mechanic was underutilized. I understand that creating a ton of different worlds to explore would have caused the time to complete this game to balloon (one of the things I love about this game is its sub-30 hour run time if you’re really focused), but only getting to explore Seraï’s world felt a little disappointing since it felt like being able to traverse the Sea of Stars would open up a lot more. But I opened this review saying that I lack the time to spend putzing around in most video games these days, so I shouldn’t be complaining!
My second, and more intense, issue is one that I can actually see two sides to, and that’s how the game handles its “ending.” It became clear that I was coming up on the final battle. The game told me as much multiple times, both through NPC interactions and overtly. So I set aside the time to play, make my final save, and step into the boss room: “Cutscene! Wow! This is intense! Oh man, Elysan’darëlle! Of course we’d have to fight Erlina before getting to the Fleshmancer!! Oh wow, okay… she died kind of easily… but now onto the real thing! …wait, so we don’t fight the Fleshmancer? And now there’s a weird shmup section to defeat the World Eater? What is happening?”
Okay, the shmup section was cool. I can’t deny that I found it enjoyable. But the rest felt like kind of a major letdown. I’ve played a few different games that have different endings based on how the game is completed or which path is taken, so the concept isn’t foreign to me, but I guess I just felt that the main ending of this 30-hour game would feel a bit more like an actual ending.
And I respect what the devs are doing here! They are practically screaming at you to pick up your save and finish the things you’ve left undone. The last time I camped with my party, they all gave me side quests that they wanted to complete before we entered the final boss room. After the fight, you even get the cutscene with Elder Teaks (who is adorable, by the way) that closes with “The End?” I don’t actually take issue with how my playthrough ended on a philosophical level, and it certainly makes me want to go back and play more. I don’t want to come off as too harsh and say that I don’t feel that my time was respected at the end of this game, but I think I feel something adjacent to that. I was excited to have a game that I could really sink my teeth into like this and feel rewarded and fulfilled at the end of the journey. Instead, I get half of an ending that tells me to play some more and go back and do the things that were always pitched as entirely optional if I want that feeling of true accomplishment.
And obviously, your mileage may vary with that sentiment. Maybe you disagree with me completely! I don’t mean to disparage the people that worked on this game at all. I respect their creative decision, but I just find that the way the ending was handled doesn’t work for me as someone who is really trying to knock out a lot of the games that I should’ve finished a long time ago. Maybe I’m just frustrated because I know that I love this game and I’m absolutely going to happily go back and take some time that could be spent actually finishing another game to finish a game that I’ve already nominally finished!
But on that note, I think I want to close this out. Don’t get it twisted: this game is phenomenal and you should absolutely play it if you haven’t. I didn’t even touch on the soundtrack, which is one of my favorites in recent memory. I guess I would just caution you by saying that the game isn’t really as short as it might initially seem, and when something seems optional, maybe don’t take that as gospel. But I’m being grouchy! No more of that. I look forward to wrapping up my loose ends in this game at some point in the future as well as playing through the free DLC that the devs dropped a while back.
Thanks for reading!!