When it comes to games, I feel the worst thing they can be is boring. Sea of Stars manages this in spades. Allegedly taking inspiration from the classics, it provides a standard turn-based battle system with a twist in the form of Action Timings for attacking and blocking. While this is an excellent concept for making the often low effort chaff encounters interesting, it comes with a cost – you force the player to pay attention to those encounters.
I personally feel that the Mario RPGs should be the standard reference for such a system, Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga especially. While from the description, Paper Mario’s hammer attack forcing an extra several seconds for a simple hammer attack to play out might sound disastrous, matching the input for the action timing (holding your stick to the left, before releasing) to the actual attack (Mario holding his hammer back, preparing for a big swing) along with the strong visual and audio feedback results in it not just making up for the extra time taken but making it fun and enjoyable in and of itself.
By comparison, your reward in Sea of Stars is that your attack which might have done 16 damage now does 19, and has a slightly different animation and a small bit of sound. Or perhaps you timed your block, and took 4 less damage than you otherwise would have. Now, your spells do matter a bit more, and have a slightly more complex input. Zale’s fireball requires you to hold the A button for a couple seconds as the fireball grows larger, releasing right as it flashes yellow for the best timing. Or Valere’s moonerang, a boomerang that you volley back and forth between yourself and your enemies, which requires you to press A at the right time to send it back. After several hours of playing, however, these were still the only things I could do.
Going back to the Mario RPGs as an example, by the time I quit Sea of Stars out of sheer boredom, I would have had several Bros. Attacks – complex, multi-input team attacks – in Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. I might even have encountered that game’s extra layer on this mechanic by this point, where after using an attack enough times, the brothers come up with a variation on it which gives you the ability to do different inputs during the usual attack to create a more complicated but more rewarding move.
As far as the visual feedback comparison of the systems goes, there really isn’t one to be made – Valere’s moonerang that was previously mentioned simply uses her regular block animation to indicate that she is deflecting it back. This sounds like a small, nitpicky detail, but I feel that even a little animation of her swinging her staff at the projectile would have made a big difference in the feel of the move.
Action timing aside, Sea of Stars does have other complexities to its standard battle system. Enemies will visually indicate when they are about to perform a big attack by having a set of 2+ icons appear above them, each indicating a specific instance of a damage type that you can inflict to weaken the attack or outright stop them from acting, if you clear all of them. In some cases, if they have two of an icon, you can clear both in one action using a basic attack – if it’s a damage type that matches – or using Valere’s moonerang, in the case of moon icons. It’s another mechanical layer asking you to pay attention to the battles.
In practice, I found this semi-often would take the form of combat starting with an enemy immediately throwing up one of these attacks, and having an icon arrangement that I either could not disrupt due to lack of MP, or just flat out did not have enough turns to stop. Sometimes, in the case of some bomb-using enemies you encounter early on, multiple of them would be setup this way and would throw a barrage of attacks damaging my entire party and potentially knocking someone out with little I could do about it.
This brings me to the next wrinkle of the gameplay. When a character is knocked out, they fall down with stars circling around their head. Each round, one of the stars disappears, and when the last one is gone, the character gets back up with half HP. While this seems like a reasonable concession to the seemingly high enemy damage output in relation to characters’ HP, what it ultimately ends up making me feel is that defense isn’t worth that much investment and I should instead focus on doing as much damage as I possibly can.
That’s all I feel there is worth saying about the combat. The game does also include regularly placed fishing minigames you can do, which reward you with ingredients for the crafting system, which takes the form of cooking. Cooking is how you get your items for restoring health and MP. Combined with KO’s being meaningless for your party though, the items are not that useful, and you are limited to carrying 10 at a time, the rest if your cooking ingredients simply sitting in your inventory. As a read on the game, I also expect there is a dog you can pet at some point, to ensure it gets as much free advertising from the lowest common denominators on the internet as possible. However, I quit before seeing one.
While the mechanics are not just bad, but boring, this is still an RPG and there are no shortage of examples where an excellent story carries an otherwise mediocre game. Unfortunately, such is not the case with Sea of Stars. The plot as was laid out as far as I got is the standard heroic adventure to stop the great evil. Where other games might have a twist as to what this means for the heroes or some shady motivations of their seemingly benevolent guides, perhaps even a bit of foreshadowing prior, Sea of Stars has… essentially outright confirmations before you even get to see any of this plot.
You’ll get multiple cutscenes where the two heroes’ mentors mention people who have died doing what is being asked of the heroes, and how their main instructor seems perfectly fine just sacrificing heroes’ lives for the greater good. In a good RPG, such a reveal might show up 10 or so hours in, as the story is transitioning from its bright and cheerful early game to its more tense midgame. In Sea of Stars this all comes up in the first hour.
Worse than the plot though is the dialogue. At best, it’s acceptable. At its worst, it would be right at home in a mid to late 2000s RPG maker game made by a teenager. While not outright unreadable, it will have you rolling your eyes, or simmering with frustration at how no one talks like that. Overall, everything with the writing just feels like a first draft they never went back to iterate on, instead spending the majority of their time on the graphics.
Ah, the graphics. Very evidently the game’s biggest marketing appeal, they are technically well done, impressive to look at, and in some spots down right beautiful. Some areas are cluttered and over-detailed to be sure, but I can’t say anything other than that they’re good. Nice work here.
Overall though I think they’re a sign of what truly happened with this game. The majority of the work certainly feels like it went into the visuals, to the detriment of the rest of the game. Sea of Stars wears its classic RPG influences on its sleeve, with its attempts to recreate the striking imagery of the great 2D turn-based RPGs of yore...
But that’s stolen valor. Those games had more – much more to them. Even the first Final Fantasy game had more depth to its mechanics than what you will find in Sea of Stars. You won’t even find buffs or debuffs in this game – everything is either an attack or a heal. The decision making process begins and ends at attacking until you need to heal. That’s not an ode to the classics. It’s a sham, and a successful one – this game won several awards and if the number of reviews are anything to go by has sold incredibly well. I can only hope that if Sabotage Studio continues making games, they make one worth playing next.