Sea of Stars attempts to be a spiritual successor to several classic RPGs, drawing mechanics and inspiration from multiple games at once. In the end, though, I found that many mechanics were half-implemented, at odds with one another, or in a state where it seemed like the developers didn't know what they wanted to do with the mechanics.
[h2]Timed Hits[/h2]
Let's start with the timed hit system. This is a mechanic most famously utilized by Super Mario RPG and some of the Paper Mario games. It seems simple on its face: press a button at the right time to do more damage, take less damage, etc. But for this mechanic to feel good, battle has to be consistent. The Mario games nail this, but Sea of Stars doesn't. The Mario games use the common JRPG battle system of bringing the player into an instanced battle screen, allowing every battle to achieve maximum consistency: consistent sprite facing directions, consistent spacing between player and enemy, etc. Sea of Stars has a Chrono Trigger-esc overworld battle system, so every battle has a different layout.
As an example, some early enemies have a party-wide attack where rocks fall from the ceiling and you have to block three separate times, one on each character. In one room your characters are lined up horizontally, making the attack consistent to block. In another room, your characters are aligned mostly vertically. With your characters aligned vertically, not only do you have reduced time to prepare to block with your characters closer to the top of the screen, but because your characters are lined up, the animation of the attacks overlap each other on screen, making it hard to even tell the attacks apart.
[h2]Casting Locks[/h2]
The idea that you need to hit an enemy with a specific set of attacks to fizzle their cast is a very interesting one. Whenever an enemy goes to cast something, the player has X turns to break Y locks to prevent the spell cast. By default in Adventure, the enemy also takes 60% reduced damage while casting (We'll ignore how completely backwards it is that the enemy is LESS vulnerable while casting). In practice, the game simply doesn't give the player the tools necessary to deal with the locks most of the time.
The player has a number of resources, many of which may or may not be available:
- Characters
- Mana
- Live Mana
- Available Characters
- Combo Points
Lets use the situation in the How To Play section as an example with my current party's capabilities: an enemy is casting for 2 turns and has a Moon lock, a Blunt lock, and a Sharp lock. There are a few ways my characters can deal with this:
1. Valere uses a Live Mana charge and Solstice Strike with Zale to hit all three locks.
2. Valere uses a Live Mana charge to hit Moon + Blunt, then Zale hits Sharp.
3. Valere uses magic to hit Moon, then Zale uses the Solstice Strike combo to hit Blunt + Sharp.
Valere is required for all three options. If she happens to be unavailable, the lock is literally impossible. Feels bad man. If I have both a Live Mana charge and a Combo Point available, only Valere is required. If not, Zale also has to be available, otherwise the lock is impossible. Feels bad man. If both characters are available, I need either Live Mana or Mana + Combo Point. If I don't have one of those combinations available, the lock is impossible. Feels bad man.
Even though that's nearly the easiest possible situation, there's still a lot of potential for that lock to be impossible to break. Got 2+ monsters casting simultaneously, a cast that only lasts 1 turn, and/or a cast with hidden locks? You simply can't deal with this unless you get SUPER lucky. Sure, you can break some of the locks to potentially reduce incoming damage (if it's even a damaging spell). Sure, you can still attack to do 40% of the damage you would normally deal. Feels bad man either way.
Oh, and a big shout out to skills that reveal locks. With most casts taking two turns, do you really think I have the time to spend one of them simply revealing the locks? I need every possible turn just to have the slightest chance at breaking the locks. It's absolutely insane that the developer put this into the game. An actual WTF moment. Imagine if Hurl would BREAK a random lock instead! Hurl would then be a strategically useful skill.
[h2]Relics[/h2]
At the beginning of the game, relics are pitched as a way to tweak the game's difficulty, making it harder or easier than the default way (read: the way the developers intended). It's important for me to receive the intended experience, so I chose Adventure difficulty that explicitly said it was the default experience and then left the relics alone.
But then things got weird: I started finding relics for sale in shops and receiving relics as rewards for accomplishing feats. So what, are relics supposed to be for difficulty tweaks or are they supposed to be abilities that your characters earn on their journey? Which ones of these relics, if activated, will cause the game to diverge from the "default experience"? And don't say that tweaking the game to my liking is the default experience. Clearly the developers had something in mind if they literally brand one of the difficulty settings as the default experience. Sea of Stars isn't a sandbox game. In fact, JRPGs are practically the opposite. If I wanted a sandbox experience, I'd fire up Palworld or whatever.
Edit: Apparently the relics that are intended for the difficulty you chose will be enabled by default when you acquire them. This sure seems like information that should have been explicitly conveyed to the player in-game and not something I needed to discover through a wiki. And I still have to buy all the relics because the game doesn't tell you which ones are or aren't for your difficulty setting before purchasing them. Or, you know, I could wiki that too.
[hr][/hr]
I'm trying to see the game through, but I'm honestly having a hard time motivating myself to continue. The story hasn't been particularly engaging either (yet?). It would probably be a much better use of my limited free time to go play SMRPG randomizer (which is getting a HUGE update soon) or learn Jets of Time (Chrono Trigger randomizer) if I want the experience this game is trying to offer me.
