Sea of Stars is a turn-based RPG inspired by the classics. It tells the story of two Children of the Solstice who will combine the powers of the sun and moon to perform Eclipse Magic, the only force capable of fending off the monstrous creations of the evil alchemist known as The Fleshmancer. – Sabotage Studio
tl;dr
Great: Overworld movement, music, presentation
Yeh: RPG Battle system
Meh: Story
Dislike: Wheels
Field Movement
Overworld movement is for the most part fast and snappy. However, when retreading older areas, it can be a bit of a slog to go from one end to another. Shortcuts in the environment circumvent this a lot thankfully. The design allows you to jump off of high ledges or climb down ladders really fast, allowing for optimal movement, but perhaps a mid-to-late game collectible that increased run speed or additional shortcuts that are only available in the latter half of the game could’ve made backtracking a bit less of a hassle, though not entirely aggravating.
Another huge point towards the overworld are the dungeon designs. Because there’s a lot of overworld interaction, dungeons have a lot of good puzzles that are on par with 2D Zelda. As you acquire field abilities, puzzles become more complex, and similar types of puzzles get iteratively more difficult as the game goes on. This quite honestly might be the best part of Sea of Stars for me.
Combat
The main meat and potatoes is the turn-based combat. With inspiration from older titles like Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger, the game does a fairly good job of pinching certain mechanics without feeling like a copy-paste job.
Being as such, the combat is pretty straightforward, so if you’re looking for a nice ‘bread-and-butter’ type of game with no skill trees, class system, or much of anything else aside from your usual options for armor, weapons, and accessories, this will be right up your alley. On the flip side, of course, that would mean RPG enthusiasts that are looking for deep mechanics will only find it to be a bit higher than the aforementioned SMRPG.
Character goes down to 0 HP, and they’re out of battle for a few turns. If all 3 active members on the field are KO’d, you lose and have to restart the fight. Skills use MP, but using them will increase your combo meter, and every time that meter maxes out, you can use a special combo move that involve two of your party (more are acquired throughout the course of the game), up to a max of 3. These combos not only do a lot more damage, but also combine different element and attack types into a single attack that no single character alone can pull off. Fairly standard stuff.
Locks
However, the slight twist to this is that enemies will occasionally charge up for a move, and when that happens a bunch of symbols appear next to them called ’locks’, indicating what type of elemental magic or attack types (blunt vs cutting) need to be dealt to break them. If you successfully pull off a break, you stop the move entirely, although even taking out a few of those symbols will reduce the amount of damage dealt or the amount of HP an enemy will recover.
This isn’t too bad early game, but late and post-game bosses provide very challenging and interesting locks for players to break, requiring them to be very familiar with combos and swapping out party members a lot to prevent getting slogged by major haymakers or bosses healing massive amounts of HP.
There’s two other aspects of battle that haven’t been mentioned, but for the purposes of this review I don’t think they need much attention, but they do at least add a bit of flavor and variety to the overall flow of battle and feed into the other mechanics.
As far as your party goes, there’s six members in total, though they will come in and out of your team based on the events of the story. There’s also a good handful of fights that force a certain amount or configuration of characters and gimmick fights (in the good sense of the word ‘gimmick’) that keeps things interesting.
Relics
Difficulty can be modified by the player through the use of relics. These collectibles allow you to toggle on or off certain things like doubling HP, healing after every battle (for those who want to focus on the story or for inexperienced gamers). Others allow a much harder difficulty spike like increasing enemy defense, minimal healing, no using of items during combat, or increase to damage taken. There’s a lot you can do to fit the experience in how you want.
Combat Tweaks
There’s just two things in combat that could use some tweaking. First of all, attacks, skills, and combos have timed hits, but the problem is exactly when to time it as animations don’t exactly telegraph when to press the attack button again for extra damage. There is a relic you can acquire so that the game gives you a visual indicator of whether you did the timing correctly (I had it on for the whole game), but nothing as to what the timing is in the first place. There’s a handful of skills I never figured out the timing for.
Secondly, and this one can very well be a skill issue, though I’ve never lost a fight early game, but it felt like I was underleveled given how often at most one party member dies and how fights often leave my team with HP in the red–and these are normal mook fights, not bosses (and I never skipped the common mook fights save for backtracking). In fact, a lot of issues with the game seem to occur in the early game and gradually get cleared up by mid-to-late game.
Presentation
The music in Sea of Stars is very good. Most tracks are distinct and do the job of setting the mood and tone quite nicely. There’s a few songs I’ve since searched out on YouTube to listen to, most notably the normal and boss battle music, as well as a certain late-game track, which I suppose shows how much of an ear-worm the soundtrack can be at times. Composer Eric W. Brown and guest composer Yatsunori Mitsuda (of Chrono Trigger and Xeno series fame) do an amazing job, so players are definitely in for an aural treat.
Graphics-wise, the detailed sprite-work mixed with dynamic lighting makes the game feel like the natural evolution of older PS1 games. Environments really pop, and character/enemy designs are striking and memorable. This is especially noticeable in certain powerful attacks that really show off the rendering pipeline and creative energy, reminiscent of those dramatic Final Fantasy summon sequences. As with a lot of games in the isometric view, however, there’s a few times where objects or ledges can be hard to determine whether they’re high above the player or are in front of the player, though nothing that makes any of the puzzles obscure or painful to figure out.
Most cutscenes are rendered in-game, but there are certain instances where animated FMVs are played, usually to highlight a new location or pivotal story segments. These are perfectly serviceable for the most part, with some being very well done.
One small issue are the load times. It’s nowhere near as long as something like exiting shrines in Breath of the Wild, but because moving between areas triggers a load, those 3-6 seconds can add up. It’s also a bit jarring during tense cutscenes where the game has to load in a different area to show what’s going on, under-cutting some of the mood and momentum.
But, all in all, good stuff. The presentation makes the game feel like a world and not like programming objects placed on a canvas.
Story
Premise: The story takes place in some unspecified home world where we play as two warriors of the Solstice–Zale, born under the summer solstice and has solar magic, and Valere, born under the winter solstice and has lunar magic. The two are tasked to take out entities called dwellers, creatures made by the big bad–the Fleshmancer. While the Fleshmancer seems nigh untouchable, the dwellers he makes nevertheless must be fought lest they grow like a cancer and wreak havoc on the world.
And at least, that’s what you’re given when the game starts. There are inklings of things happening behind the scenes, and there’s a good amount of twists and turns that can keep the player engaged. While it’s not a spoiler that this is a prequel to Sabotage Studio’s previous game, The Messenger, the game thankfully doesn’t require you to have played it or have knowledge of events or characters from that game. Having not played it myself, there were only a few times that I felt the game devs were obviously trying to tie certain aspects in to their previous game and sometimes it can make certain plot points feel like they were dropped.
The problem, however, is the underlying ethos of the characters. It’s a medieval fantasy-style setting, again much like the classics it’s inspired from, but mere swords and magic are not sufficient in attaining the verisimilitude of the general era that the developers wanted to shoot for. Let me explain.
Sometimes characters talk as if they were written by modern Westerners; not necessarily the lingo, but their outlooks or their values have a certain modernist comportment that feels oddly anachronistic. I’m not looking for a one-to-one simulation of the medieval times in a fantasy game, but certain things like, and I’m going off of memory here, “Be who you are, don’t be afraid of what other people think about you, live the life you want to live” that happens in the early game strikes me as odd in a world where technologically, most characters still have to build and farm for their food and live in like-minded communities to survive; going off and doing “your own thing” sounds more like it belongs in a $1000 zoom meeting with a life guru. I don’t entirely fault the writing team though, but I also don’t want to steer this review into talking about the overall malaise of Western civilization.
Granted this doesn’t happen that often, but it is noticeable enough for those who are sensate to “setting-values dissonance” (for lack of a better phrase) that takes the world and its characters down just a notch.
On another note, the early game has weird pacing issues where you get a taste of the main game for a bit before getting sent to a playable flashback sequence. Thankfully there’s still gameplay and dungeon-diving, but perhaps some of the fat could be trimmed by just starting in the past to begin with.
There is also a fair bit of diversity in the cast in which the phrase “If you know, you know” is apropo here. Thankfully, there’s no tiresome dialogue about the usual ESG topics that would make your eyes glaze over. There is one particular character I didn’t care for, and that’s mostly due to her introduction going unnecessarily “meta” in talking about videogame tropes. Thankfully the dialogue is all textboxes so it can be skipped with ease, and beyond that point she eases off of it.
Wheels
There’s a somewhat long-running mini-game that spans a good portion of the game called “Wheels”. At first blush it comes across as Sea of Stars version of Joustus from Shovel Knight: King of Cards, but unlike Joustus, there really isn’t much in the way of strategy or fun. The premise is that you select two RPG-type figurines (Mage, Knight, Engineer, etc.) at the start. Once the game begins, you roll your wheel (think of a slot machine) and select whatever appears in five slots. If you don’t like the choices, you can roll again until they land on something you want (previously selected slots are frozen). You can do this up to 3 times and after that, you get bonuses for getting 3 or more of the same kind of icon.
The problem is that in the beginning, RNG can really make or break a session, and as you win more championship games, you get better “wheels” which makes getting multiples of a kind much easier. Pretty soon, the game shifts from being random-heavy to being ridiculously easy. What’s more, championship games also net you with different character figurines to choose from, but the Mage (which is one of your starters) is quite clearly the dominant strategy.
Finally, the game itself feels like a last minute inclusion or something meant to be grander but got cut down due to time constraints as there isn’t even a proper in-game tutorial. Once the ability to play Wheels is opened up, you get a notification that a new tutorial has been added in the “How to Play” area of the pause screen.
It’s better than nothing, but just dumping a bunch of text with some glib images didn’t exactly communicate things properly. On top of that, the final reward for beating every single champion…isn’t much of anything at all. Again, kind of a let down considering how much it pops up across the main game.
Despite my problems with the game, it was on the whole a fine experience. I recommend giving Sea of Stars a try. You can get this on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X. Good job Sabotage Studio!
4 out of 5 stars.