Sea of Stars | Review


1 min read

This is a brutally honest review of Sea of Stars. Despite the hype and being excited for the demo, I’m rating this game 3/5.

First, I’ll start with what I enjoyed.

  • Beautiful graphics. Vibrant yet soft colors. Unique and adorable characters. Witty and quirky humor with some puns thrown in for good measure. A great example of this is a pirate captain who is literally called Captain Klee’Shae.
  • Wholesome yet the element of danger and death is very present.
  • All settings have their own theme while truly remaining cozy all throughout.
  • Detail to be found everywhere, including the map.
  • The game is as easy or as challenging as you want to make it.
  • Plenty of lore to be found, both in the main story and the Traveling Historian whose job solely revolves around telling stories. The lore is all connected to the story, including the isolated stories you encounter.
  • Puzzles aren’t tedious and obnoxious but they still present a fun challenge to resolve.
  • Cutscenes are brief but really add to the indepth of the game when introducing a new important character or city.

Next, the cons..

  • I found combat to be tedious. While it was fun at first, lock-breaking, dodging (which doesn’t reduce a lot of damage and needs player intervention) and timed turns quickly became a nightmare. I don’t mind turn-based combat but in Sea of Stars, it doesn’t feel fair. Instead of all three of your characters getting a turn, only one gets a turn before the enemy attacks (all four or five of them at times ) and most of them have AOE. By the time your third character gets a turn, you are either healing or using an Ultimate and hoping it‘s lethal. This can really drag battles unnecessarily.
  • Enemies scale with the character’s level which means no one-shot kill. This makes exploring past areas a chore. I avoided going back to an area unless I absolutely had to.
  • The writing is okay. Not the best. Not the worst. What I truly hated about the game was Garl overshadowing the main characters, the minor characters, anyone having some sort of moment, etc. Everything seemed to revolve around Garl to the point where it became an annoyance. He would also interrupt and pick things for the player.