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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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.