Sea of Stars Review (orangepoindexter)
Edit: Review has gone over to Negative from Positive.
First the good stuff --
Plays like a lost Playstation 1 era turn based RPG. Something that Working Designs would've released on the console or on the Saturn, (although they would've fixed things that I outline below if they HAD brought it to the US).
Nice graphics, nice music. Some of the spell effects and boss monsters would make Square Soft during their peak 16bit era proud in particular.
The game though has a few issues...
Firstly... some of the areas seem WAY too large for what they should be.
To compare to an 16 bit rpg - imagine if you played Final Fantasy IV/(2 US) for the SNES and the Mist Cave area leading to the summoner village at the beginning of the game was like 10X longer then it was? It would screw with the pacing of keeping things moving, (so the player feels like they're progressing). This game seems to want to bog players down with each new map area you go to by making them as complicated and enemy riddled as possible to navigate. It shouldn't take me as long as it did to get through some of those areas near the beginning but the devs designed it that way and it gets tiresome seeing the same scenery. I kept saying: "Either give me a boss or an exit to another area already." navigating places like that Giant Teleporter place.
The world maps and environments + sprite work are lovely - why is the UI so damn stock? Was it a time constraint or you just didn't think it mattered? You go through such trouble everywhere else, you could add some visual flair to it at the very least!
Speaking of the enemies and combat -- your character sprites never change based on gear they use. I mean this is 2023, if you cannot change the armor or show accessories, can we at least make the weapons look different guys...?
Combat AT FIRST seems like it'll be cool. That is until you realize you barely get any spells or skills for your characters, and the ones you DO get (to me) feel like someone on the Dev team didn't like how strong they were and wanted to raise difficulty so they were nerfed into near uselessness and thus are practically worthless.
Every fight I've had through the first like 9 hours of the game against the regular enemies (who are time road blocks basically) has been the same thing over and over. Instead of combat being fun it feels like a slog and your characters are weaklings. You can dump all the stats in melee combat you want at level ups - you may hit for 3-6 extra damage if you're lucky, but those enemies will STILL feel very tanky. Same with spells. It's disheartening.
The game is super linear as well - and with no world map you feel like you're going from instanced area to instanced area (because that's what you are doing). Nothing feels connected - it's much more episodic, (at least through the parts I've managed to play through), then it is "interconnected world with a sweeping epic". Chrono Trigger I guess didn't have much urgency from the random NPC's in it's game world either, but it made up for that with great pacing (which obviously this game lacks badly because of the combat).
Besides combat, the other biggest sin to me is the writing.
Someone else in their review on here mentioned the Pirates and I can say I LOATHED their inclusion. Here we are supposed to be controlling these trained heroes, and yet the writers force us to require their help - and the help is supposed to be funny but it isn't. I can overlook that sort of thing, though.
However... the unskippable long-as-hell 4th wall breaking moment with one of the pirates angered me greatly and isn't something I can overlook. The person writing it probably thought they were the funniest person on the planet when they wrote it, but I'm here to tell you it makes you look lame as balls.
Resorting to that kind of storytelling to try and get across characters being "zany" or "comical" is embarrassing, especially if you want us to take your game's plot and characters seriously. Your team needed a level headed editor to keep this 10th grade garbage away from the script, gang.
TL;DR - Good music + graphics, but weak characters with lackluster writing and a sloggy combat system that never changes.