Sea of Stars is simultaneously nostalgic and innovative | Review

WACO, Texas (KWTX) -

Available Aug. 29th - PS4/PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch and PC

Reviewed on PS5

Developed by Sabotage Studios

I have a question for you… do you remember turn based games? I do, I remember playing them for countless hours as a kid. Yes I’m old, I was a teenager in the late 90′s and early Oughts. I played so many wonderful turn based games with my friends. Games like Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and even though it isn’t a turn based game Zelda. We’d spend every available moment playing these games. That’s why I chose to review Sea of Stars and y’all it absolutely took me back to the more carefree days of my youth. This game comes from indie studio Sabotage and was created as a love letter to those amazing games of yester year. It was also crowdfunded which the fact that they had enough people back it to produce it is so great. Now I wasn’t a backer but that’s only because I didn’t know about it because there’s a pretty solid chance I would have pitched in to help bring this game to the masses. They even put an area in the game that is a crypt where you can go view some of the backers messages as a tribute to them. It does such a good job of capturing the spirit of those older games that I found myself waiting for loading screens and needless screens showing what junk I got for killing some super annoying ants. And they are annoying show them the clips of me getting killed by ants… do it.

Sea of Stars is beautifully rendered, the imaginative landscapes, gorgeous pixel art characters, and even the background images invoke a sense of wonder and scale. There’s so much detail everywhere you look. I’ve been rocking pics from my playthrough as by phone background since I started playing the game. There’s a few little things that drew my eye and ear. Things that they didn’t have to do like the light that each of your characters is highlighted with matching their elemental attributes. The way characters and landscapes are animated. A couple of times I even noticed either things in the background or enemies moving in time with the soundtrack. The soundtrack by the way is so great and they even got Yasunori Mitsuda to help compose the music. There’s no voice acting but they did a pretty cool thing with the audio design to help with that, namely the fact that all of the characters have different bubble sounds for their “voices” during dialogue adding to the feeling that you’re actually listening to a conversation.

The game starts you off as two kids that were born on the Solstice of a particular year. This means that they are destined to be Solstice Warriors. Imbued with eclipse magic which is the only thing that can defeat the minions of the Fleshmancer. The kids are raised in a small town which is below a temple that is devoted to the Solstice Warriors order where they train to fight and use magic. The story picks up when they are adolescents and have figured out their powers enough to get into trouble. The headmaster has to rescue you before taking you to begin your training. After several years of training you head out to prepare to take on a dweller. Along the way you meet more friends that become party members that fill out your roster and make you a cohesive fighting unit.

The combat is heads above many of its peers, as far a turn based combat goes. Initially I will say that I found the combat a little tedious mostly because it seemed that in order to do a decent amount of damage you kind of had to throw away attacks to generate orbs of power. These orbs allow an individual party member to imbue their attack with their elemental power. Over time I came to terms with this system and actually really enjoy it. The reason why it in the beginning seemed annoying is due to the way the locks system works. It forces you to generate these orbs in order to do a specific combination of attacks to stop an enemy from being able to cast a high level spell or attack. Like the ants when they call more ants to the battle. WHERE DID THAT BUG SPRAY GO(fire ball attack)… I hate the ants. They are the more annoying of the two enemies that I ran into that can actually generate more enemies in a given battle. All of this causes you to really stop and think about what your next move is. Do you attack and maybe kill the enemy or do you play it safer and cast a healing spell or use a healing item. Do you use an attack spell that does a decent amount of damage but also takes out multiple portions of the locks that an enemy may have up. As you pull off attacks and spells your combo meter will fill, these combos require at least two characters to pull off and they usually have an elemental aspect to them as well as a physical attack to aid you in taking out those locks. Skills such as spells and attacks other than just the base ones require MP and luckily there are two ways to gain it, three if you count sleeping. One is using items that refill your MP the other way is through doing regular attacks. I found this really nice as it just means you just keep attacking to generate orbs but also regenerate you MP and build you combo meter up. While attacking a perfectly time press of X gains you an extra hit in your attack giving it a boost to damage. This works for almost all attacks and skills including combos. See it’s all coming together. Also I know we’ve talked about it being turn based but it’s worth stating that it isn’t old school turn based where my whole team gets to attack then it’s the enemy’s turn. No, each enemy has it’s on turn counter and once it clicks over to 0 they attack. Healing is done is done in a similar way to generating MP you can use items, skills, or sleeping. It is interesting though that rather potions or items that give you health and/or MP you use food. You can either buy the food or craft it at a campfire, one dish may give you a certain amount of health or MP while another may revive a KO’d character. Later on you get better recipes and some will heal the entire party or provide both HP and MP. Or just give you more of either. When a teammate is KO’d you can use an item to revive them or you can just wait for them to revive on their own. When they are downed there are stars that circle over their body and as turns pass they disappear before they eventually revive at half health. Obviously if your whole team is KO’d you lose the battle and start over from the most recent checkpoint or save point. Also this game is pretty nice in this aspect because the most recent save point is usually pretty close to wherever you died and you aren’t having to traverse large swaths of the dungeon or area to get to where you died.

So most of the items you find in this game service the cooking of food and you can’t collect too much of it. There will always be tomatoes or mushrooms or whatever you can pick up to be able to cook at the next campfire. There seems to be no upper limit to the amount of ingredients you can hold in your bag so I just picked up everything. This also leads to talking about the fishing minigame and while I do appreciate a good fishing game this one is ok… Something about it leaves a little to be desired but both types of fish filets you get are required for cooking many different foods. So I just cleared out a couple of the ponds early in the game and then just caught a few here and there to add to my reserves. The other things you pick up are jewels and ore that can be sold for money, equipment, weapons, armor, etc., and a few other different collectables.

Sabotage studios has delivered a fantastic classic RPG experience and I only had a few complaints as I finish the game. One being that there is no option to escape. So once you’re in a battle you have to see it to it’s conclusion. While I get that because there are no random encounters the enemies would just be standing there when you get out of the battle I feel like you could have thrown a smoke grenade or something and gotten away. This leads to just feeling like every fight it required and can make certain parts of the game a little bit of a slog. The other thing is the lack of any real side quests, sure there are little fetch quests you can do typically in the same town you’re already in but other than finding collectables to trade in for items, there aren’t really any. These things don’t really detract from the overall game but could have been a nice addition especially as you’re given access to most of the world pretty early in the game. Now for the rating I will say that there was a couple of things that happened that prevent me from giving it a higher score but only slightly. This game was such a joy to play from beginning to end and other than the few things I listed above is such a standout production for Sabotage I give Sea of Stars a 9 out of 10. Go pick this game up it’s worth it whether you pay the $34.99 or get it on Gamepass or Playstation Plus.

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