Sea of Stars

Release: 2023

Developer/Publisher: Sabotage Games

Gameplay Stats: 49 hours, 42/42 achievements

The next game from the developers behind The Messenger! Is this game as good as that one??

Aesthetics: They stuck with 16 bit graphics here for the most part. Not limited to the actual SNES/Genesis limits though so everything looks great. I'm not really sure what else to say here, they did a fantastic job with all of the pixel art. Everything looks bright and colorful while also communicating all relevant info. Each area even has a distinct color pallet/theme to it so I suspect I could pick an area from a screenshot. The music is also really great top to bottom. I think they might've leaned a little too hard into the themes they developed in The Messenger, but it kind of makes sense.

Plot: Very mild spoilers! This game is a prequel to The Messenger. It's been a while since I played The Messenger, so I can't really say how much is directly carried over from one game to the other, but you visit some of the same locations and the musical theming reminds you of it. Even some of the enemies are the same! I was really excited and showed my wife when I got to the relevant areas and figured out the games were related. The plot that is more central to this game though is pretty good. I don't know that I was super surprised by any of the turns/twists but I don't think I was supposed to be. I wanted to know what happened to the characters and especially wanted more of Garl, the warrior chef. I will say that the solstice warriors felt interchangeable and I think that was a missed opportunity. Their skills have a pretty distinct flavor to them so it would've been cool to see those characteristics in their personalities as well. The previous generation of solstice warriors are pretty similar to the current generation too which felt like another missed opportunity. There are some time travel shenanigans in the game so I was hoping the different generations were actually the same characters or something (although they are gender swapped).

Gameplay: So this game plays a LOT like Chrono Trigger. But with Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario timings. And Octopath Traveler locks! Where the enemies are impacts who gets hit by which special moves. You have moves that can move enemies around to bunch them up to improve who will get hit by AoE special attacks. When enemies are using special attacks of their own they have different elemental locks that you can break to interrupt their attack and make them lose a turn. I haven't played Octopath Traveler so I'm not sure if that works the same in that game, but it definitely made each round of combat feel like a puzzle. I enjoyed the heck out of it! I thought that the bosses were a bit easy once you got access to the skills that delay your opponent's turns, I was routinely not letting bosses act for 2 rounds at a time. Bosses do hit really hard though, so that may have been intended from the developers.

Overall this game was really good. I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway. It might lean a little hard into nostalgia, but that SNES era nostalgia is right up my alley. The graphics, music, and gameplay were all outstanding. I think the plot could have been a bit stronger, but it was very charming overall. I'd recommend this to anyone that was interested.