Sea of Stars: Sunset Edition

Absolute cinema, you can play with the CO-OP online is amazing Synch. I wish there were more games like this master piece.

nice

Abstract 100%'d the game so you know I gave it a shot. I enjoyed the beginning of the game well enough, but the combat eventually became repetitive, with little depth being added during progression. I liked being able to switch party members without taking up a turn. The story starts out with mention of the Fleshmancer and I had to kind of roll my eyes at the antagonist being called that but still gave it a shot. The story reminds me of the disappointment I felt playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 after the first one and seeing how much the story was dumbed down. Not that I played the prequel. Anyway, it takes about an hour to get to the gameplay with reading time (and for the intrepid achievement hunter taking the path of least resistance for the only achievement that you can't get on one save file, about 5 minutes to skip through it to the relevant part). Visuals The visuals are great, I love the style, yadda yadda. It really is great, but not without criticism. I think the biggest let down of the visual department is when [spoiler]you make the giant bread (yes really). The crop yield from the Hydralion scale, the scale of a thought to be extinct mythical creature that still existed in the nightmare realm, is wayy too small it grows like 50 tiles of wheat, less than the screen. Reshan just puts the wind Zephyr thing in his stupid flask. The terraforming of the volcano is minimal. If they were gonna do something so silly they should have really gone full send on it (which I will mention again later). The loaf is at best the size of a roll to the Sleeper. The volcano should have entirely transformed to look like an oven, the bread should have been closer to the size of the island than the size of the Sleeper's head. Really exaggerate it to make it so that Garl's "last" act doesn't look so disappointing[/spoiler]. "Platforming" I had been recommended the game due to alleged similarities with Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga which I adore for the combined platforming and JRPG elements, and the story is pretty silly. The platforming in Sea of Stars is just the appearance of platforming to draw out play time. When you approach a ledge you press the auto-platform button and then the characters do the platforming. Or sometimes they jump off the ledge and make you climb the ladder up it another time by, again, pressing the auto-platform button. Combat & Combat Pacing It is more similar to Super Mario RPG however, but with way less moves. In SMRPG every new weapon comes with new attacks and timings and every character gets 4 to 6 spells over the course of the game, in this game every character gets 3 skills and 1 ultimate skill. This of course means way less attack variety. The most effective attacks to use for the entire games are the attacks that can be continued indefinitely with good timing, of which I think there are 2. Additionally, because of the way elements work it is possible and even common for enemies to have locks you can't break in the time given. This is especially frustrating in the arena battle against 4 enemies when you can't switch party members. A previous patch of the game I didn't play had a better version of a skill to prevent this, Disorient, which would delay a timer by two turns, but this was nerfed to one turn. Unfortunately, I think a lot of balance was built around the idea that you could switch in this party member to be able to delay and break any combination of locks, but it had to be nerfed because it let you literally stun lock anyone, including the ultimate final boss, so that enemies couldn't even attack. The final party member to join has terrible pacing with the unlocks and really devalued the process of unlocking all the previous for me. This party member join you and literally already has all the skills AND combos with all the other characters unlocked. So you're telling me that childhood best friends who knew each other for years took a big chunk of the adventure and scroll collectibles to figure out how to combine their powers, but this random guy [spoiler]from another world[/spoiler] already knows how to without scrolls? Third Act But that just brings me to my next point, the act where the final party member joins has terrible pacing. The story itself isn't great the whole time, but this whole section of the story feels like it was a Kickstarter stretch goal that they were obliged to fulfill and they just put the least amount of effort into it to check the boxes. The [spoiler]three bird bosses[/spoiler] feel like they were top tier donation OCs and the one guy [spoiler]you free[/spoiler] feels like an OC too. They very well may actually be as far as I'm aware. But [spoiler]Serai's world[/spoiler] is so empty. Maybe its "supposed to be" for "story reasons" because it was devastated, but it's not very fun and the main characters barely react to this massive change of scenery and remnants of marvels they've never once seen the likes of. The aesthetic here isn't bad and the shift is handled decently well in that regard with some minor visual changes to the battle UI being a nice touch, but this whole area seems like it didn't need to exist. Also fairly certain Garl is the lead devs self-insert character. Garl is annoying and it doesn't get better. Suspension of Disbelief It is kind of funny though that [spoiler]every party member is basically immortal or becomes so. The solstice warriors become the gods and live for 100s of years, Serai and her people are said to be unable to die because they're cyborgs, Reshan is literally immortal, and if B'st is not exaggerating then his insurmountable will or whatever makes him immortal too. The Gold Pelican invite being locked behind the southern island lake makes very little sense too[/spoiler]. Maybe the story could have been saved if it hadn't tried for a serious story, but instead something silly. There are a lot of serious important areas with wack puzzle junk that isn't given any story explanation and doesn't seem to make sense to exist there. Especially since some of it doesn't even really serve as much of a door lock to keep out the unworthy or whatever, more just to delay entry. I would have appreciated literally any explanation for the weird puzzle s**t. Even one passing comment or a note on one sign saying its cultural, something. There's no reason you even need the [spoiler]mistral bracelet[/spoiler] when you are running around with like 6 people who could just push heavy blocks with teamwork. Of course if that were the case then like 75% of the puzzles would fall apart since they rely on block sliding all the way to the end instead of one block at a time. DLC It's free, yippee. It invents flaws for the solstice warriors that it pretends are present in the main story to give them some personal struggle/ development, but it didn't hit the mark. I did not like the circus aesthetic of the DLC nor did I think the music was as good. Combat still has the annoying thing where you can't possibly hope to remove all locks, esp. w/o Seria and since Valere needs live mana to do her element on her standard hit but Zale doesn't for his. I also really hated the really artificial feeling difficulty increase thing they tried to do with the DLC, because it coincides with all your moves changing, so it is really frustrating to try and learn all the new timings with enemies that hit harder. In fact the DLC and base game would have benefit from a training area where you can practice attacks for free against a dummy that doesn't get defeated or something because I basically avoided one of the two aforementioned most powerful attacks for half the game because I didn't get the timing and I could just use Moonerang instead and I already knew it. Results Somehow I still enjoyed the game well enough to pull through because I am an achievement junkie. I really hated parts of it and felt a lot of it was mid, but I don't feel like the time was completely wasted. Barely recommend 5.5/10

Great gameplay mechanics (especially with a “tunable” style of difficulty) and an even better story. My wife and I couldn’t put it down after we started; perfect for couch co-op.

Very fun turn based RPG.

5

weno