I think it's a very charming game. The main two protagonists are kind of "silent protagonist" types. They have some personality, but they're fairly subdued in nature, I'm assuming as a way for the player to fill in the blanks on their own. I've never been a huge fan of this, but it's not a dealbreaker.
The soundtrack and world and general aesthetic of the game is really well done. Even the bosses look amazing in bossfights Combat is fun without being either too deep or too shallow. If you're going into this game thinking that you're going to be buffing your group out the ass, debuffing the boss, using status ailments, etc. that's not going to happen. And to be honest, i was actually pretty glad; it was a bit of a break from the typical JRPG "spend the first 30 minutes preparing your party then 5 minutes doing burst damage, then another 30 minutes...." way of turn based combat. The bossfights here will often have a correct way/strategy to tackle them, but if you die, it's not going to be after a 2 hour spell spam session. The game tends to respect your time w.r.t bossfights, which i appreciated, at least on normal difficulty which is the game mode I'm playing.
Story-wise, I believe I'm in the beginning of Act 3 now if I'm not mistaken, so about ~75% of the way through I want to say? At the very least, I'm more than halfway through Act 2, so around 60-75% of the way through. Will update my review once I'm finished with the game, but so far the story has been really enjoyable. It definitely had a slow start to it, but I think it was necessary in order to get all the characters in the party established. It's easy to see the story's been well thought out, and so far has been really entertaining.
The lore building of the world in Sea of Stars is impeccably done. I like that they give you the option of listening to the stories of the legends from Teaks (side character) if you want and it can help make sense of some conversations (like you'll have an idea beforehand what to expect or what people are talking about in a few rare instances) which really makes you feel like a part of the world.
Minigames wise, I'm not a huge fan of them. The fishing one is really bad, and I didn't particularly like Wheels either. But, I stopped trying to 100% every game i played a verrrryyy long time ago (thanks for teaching me that lesson, Yakuza 5), so skipping those minigames and never looking back was not a huge problem to me.
One thing I might find incredibly disappointing in this game if it turns out to be true and relevant is a 'True Ending'. I find that having alternate endings is an incredibly cowardly way to end your story. If you want to tell a story, stick to your story. Don't ♥♥♥♥♥ out in the end and say "oh no, actually if you want, here's what really happened!". Either way, if it's too much of a pain in the ass or I need to look at a guide to get the true ending, I'll probably just youtube it, and my rating of this game will go down from a 9/10 to a 7/10. Still worth playing, either way.
Update: Yeah, it's one of those trash "you must do these specific sidequests and oh also collect these 60 freaking collectibles that are hidden all over the world before you can see the true ending that we deemed people with lives unworthy of seeing." - 6.5/10 final score. Completely flubbed the way a game should be ended. Instead of locking people out of an actual ending unless they spend more hours on your game doing ♥♥♥♥ they dont like, you should just provide an ending that anyone dropping over 20 hours on your game would find satisfactory.
