It amazes me that throughout most of the retro indie game boom of the 2010s, we hardly saw any developer step out of the platformer comfort zone. But it was small and uneventful whenever it did happen, then games like Octopath Traveler came out to say, “RPGs were a thing during the 16-bit era too,” which was a big success. I bring this up because recently, I took a look at Sea of Stars, which dropped on everything and, in a rare move, was released on both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus and will now be the game that everyone played before the “big boys” come out in September since the game was released at the tail end of August. Sea of Stars is what happens when you let a bunch of fans create their own version of Chrono Trigger & Final Fantasy VI and take in all the gameplay updates that have developed in the past 30 years, and it somewhat annoys me that this was released when it did because after finishing the game it shot straight into my top 10 for the year.
Sea of Stars takes place in the same in-game universe that the developer’s (Sabotage Studio) previous game, The Messager, takes place in; I should note I have not played this yet but have heard good things about it. In Sea of Stars, you play as one of two magic users; one uses fire, the other water. They have been trained at a magic school for a large majority of their lives, being told that they will be the next big magic users to help save the world, even though the whole schoolboard of students is just the two of them. This was the first of many moments that I realized it has taken a book out of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars, meaning taking tropes that we have expected with the genre and throwing it on its head in such a way that it will either work or fall flat on its face. Here it works, and it was able to keep my attention during the 25 hours it took me to roll credits on this game.
The art style is a mix of hand-drawn pixel art pushed through an SNES emulator shader. I mean that with the highest praise because I feel like this is what an SNES game would look like if they had the tech back in the 90s. Every character animation, whether it be a battle gesture or during a cutscene, added so much to their character that I started to notice after I got hooked on the story and quit spam pressing the skip button.
Now I have mentioned the story quite a lot so far, and I would love to go into more detail; however, I don’t like to spoil things for other people. So, I’ll say this, the amount of enjoyment you will get out of the story will strongly depend on how familiar you are to the tropes of the 90s JRPG, you know, getting a group of heroes who, in the end, defeat God with the power of friendship. A trope that we still see work its way into modern games as recently as Final Fantasy 16.
As for the gameplay, it felt like a mix between Chrono Trigger’s group-based attacks mixed together with Paper Mario. What I mean by that is you can combine your party members to do combo attacks on an enemy, and if you time your button presses on either ends of the attack, you will either deal more damage or receive less damage. That and sticking with its 90s roots, the ultimate attacks that you can deal after building up your combo meter, have some of the best animation in the whole game, and unlike the 90s JRPG, I wasn’t bored after watching it for the 50th time.
So, in the end, can I recommend Sea of Stars? Yes, I can. But only when you have some spare time between all the big releases; I say it like that because once this game grabs you, it will keep its hook on you until the very end. There were many moments throughout that it brought me nearly to tears, and even though a game doing that is not as impressive as it was back when Walking Dead Season 1 came out ten years ago, it still impresses me when I get so invested into a game that it plays with my emotions like that. So, in terms of the best RPG of the year, this one might be the underdog when it comes time for awards at the year’s end.
Score: 9 out of 10
Reviewed on Xbox Series X