izigame.me

I'm around ten hours into the game and decided to post a review with my thought so far. As background, Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all time, and I love traditional JRPG's. I loved The Messenger (until its halfway point), and I've been looking forward to Sea of Stars since it was announced.
Unfortunately, based on what I've seen of Sea of Stars, I cannot recommend this game. I'll break down my review into sections.
WRITING
Story: The story is very generic so far. There's nothing unique or interesting going on so far, although that could change after the ten hour mark. I'll be short here because there's not a lot to say.
Characters: Huge miss on the characters. They are all extremely bland, and the two leads fail to even be archetypes. They are completely interchangeable and have zero personality. Genuinely two of the least interesting characters I've ever seen in a game, and that really makes it hard to feel invested in the story. The third main party member, Garl, is a caricature with no depth. He is always infinitely brave and kind and positive. Even after he is maimed (happens in the first ten minutes of the game), he is still overwhelmingly positive and seems incapable of having a single doubt or negative emotion. I rooted for him at first but he became extremely annoying after I realized that he's just not realistic.
Dialog: Really bad. I don't know if there was some localization issue, but the dialog is riddled with obvious grammatical mistakes (there is a comma splice at least every fourth dialog box and probably more than that, not to mention the erroneous commas in other places). Even ignoring the errors, the dialog is just extremely bland throughout. There's nothing interesting. The only humor is lazy fourth-wall breaks (one side character in particular constantly makes jokes about being in a video game that don't really work and have already been done to death by indie games, notably in The Messenger). Characters just say what they mean all the time, and there is no cleverness in the dialog.
VISUALS
The game looks incredible. The pixel art is very well done and feels like an evolution of the 16-bit era classics. The game seamlessly blends pixel art with modern lighting effects. However, unfortunately the character portraits aren't great and feel very indie in a bad way. Thankfully there are several character portraits per character to depict different emotions (neutral, angry, surprised, etc.), but the drawing style doesn't work for me. And the character design is painfully generic.
There are also cartoon cutscenes sprinkled throughout the game, and I'm not personally a fan of the art style, although that's purely subjective.
MUSIC/SOUND
The music is really hit or miss for me. You probably know that the team got the legendary Yasunori Mistuda to compose a few tracks. However, a lot of the music either feels generic or doesn't match the game. There are some great tracks, but the music falls well short of JRPG classics.
The sound is very solid throughout, but this isn't really something that you notice while playing. No complaints here, which is what you want for sound design.
GAMEPLAY
Difficulty: Has been quite low so far, but I'm only ten hours in. I came close to dying once in a random battle that was far harder than any boss so far. Every boss has been extremely easy, and I'm not using any of the "easy mode" charms that you can enable. However, people who are new to JRPG's may struggle in some fights.
Combat: relatively simple. Each character only has four abilities, and you don't unlock them all right away, so the first 10+ hours of gameplay, each character will only have 2-3 abilities, which feels limited. There is some additional depth, including combo abilities, a boost mechanic, and character swapping, but it all doesn't amount to a satisfying puzzle-like experience that a game like Octopath Traveler does. Each boss and enemy has a relatively unique gimmick, but none have interacted with the mechanics in an interesting way. The combat isn't doing anything new and feels right at home in the forgettable indie JRPG landscape. If you like JRPG's, you'll enjoy the combat, but if you're looking for top-tier modern JRPG combat, this isn't your game.
Exploration: The exploration is okay so far. Everything has been relatively straightforward, but it's satisfying working your way through an easy puzzle to get to the boss. The pacing and length of the dungeons has been great, and moving around the map feels really good. There are also unlockable abilities you can use on during exploration that are gimmicks so far, but I'm hoping that the game does something interesting with them. Unfortunately, there are lots of chests hidden, and most of them have these rainbow conch shells, which are a collectible in the game. It's always so disappointing finding a clever route to a chest only to find a collectible that you can't use until you find some shop to spend them on. It felt a lot like finding Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. Overall this makes exploration a little less satisfying, but exploration in this game is still quite good.
Gear/progression: The gear is very generic so far (accessories that give +10 defense, weapons are slightly higher in attack power, etc.). Character progression is forgettable - there's a Super Mario RPG-like mechanic where you get to choose one stat bonus at level-up, but this doesn't really feel satisfying in practice. Leveling up appears to only give small stat bonuses, and there's not a significant sense of getting stronger as you level up.
UI/QOL
The UI is excellent. Menus are easy to navigate and extremely fast. Everything is laid out in a logical manner. The game has most QOL features that you could ask for, including easy mode options, frequent save points, warnings before points of no return, etc. There are some minor issues, such as unskippable cutscenes (although none of them are very long) and slow movement speed, particularly on the world map. But those are minor complaints and shouldn't impact anyone's enjoyment of the game.
MISCELLANEOUS
There are two main mini-games available: fishing and a game called Wheels. The fishing is extremely basic and doesn't really deserve an in-depth review. It's just not calming or satisfying or gratifying in the way that a lot of fishing mini-games are. It feels like the devs threw fishing in because they thought they had to, but it really doesn't add a lot here.
Wheels is their answer to mini-games like Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8. I've played a few matches, and while it's sufficiently deep to be interesting, it plays quite slow and relies heavily on RNG. Your mileage may vary here, but I didn't find Wheels to be a satisfying mini-game. After I won the first couple of matches, I doubt I'll keep playing them. Fortunately it appears to be entirely optional.
SUMMARY
Overall, this is so close to being a good game, but the writing is so bad that I simply can't recommend it. Hopefully they can at least fix the grammatical errors, but this game really needs an entirely new script with major rewrites. I will edit my review after I finish the game if the writing improves, but I really don't see how it can at this point.