I've been waiting for this game with bated breath ever since the first trailer, and upon learning that Yasunori Mitsuda himself, one of my favourite musicians of all time, wrote some music for it, and then playing the demo of it during the recent Steam's demo exhibition, my hype for the game steadily progressed. Needless to say, once again I'm reminded that one should count their chickens when they hatch.

Sea of Stars is one of the most mediocre games I've ever played. It's not bad, I dont regret the time I've spent playing it, but it just doesn't have much to offer beside nostalgia for the better games I've played through many times and absolutely stunning visuals.

This is the one positive thing I can say about the game without any "but"s - it looks fantastic. There's an insane amount of effort put into presentation of basically everything, even the minute things: every food item has its own sprite, every island you can visit has its own unique resting site that you might not even see if you don't make it a habit to rest on the overworld map, almost every location follows the day/night cycle, the title screen changes depending on your progress through the game, there's maybe about a dozen animated cutscenes (I think they kind of clash with the otherwise pixelart aesthetic, I've had the same problem with Chrono Trigger's PS1 rerelease, but they do still look really nice), all characters have alternate spritework just for one scene you might miss, all weapons have their own sprites, et cetera. The visual design of every location is great, they're all memorable and distinctive, and everything in them fits together nicely. The characters and enemies alike are all very well animated.

The combat is good initially... but it stops introducing new elements very quickly and ends up stagnating. If you've played the demo, you've seen most of how the combat goes - it's turn based and you control three characters, who have a basic attack (if you press the action button when the animation suggests so, you get an extra hit in), a couple of skills that use mana which regenerates with basic attacks, an ability to infuse the basic attack with magic generated by hitting enemies without the infusion, and food items which regenerate health or mana or both and have a total limit of 10 at a time. There is a combo meter that fills in through using skills and breaking enemies stance, and you can use it to make a pair of characters execute a special skill. About 10 hours later or so you also get to swap your characters mid-battle which is a free action, and the characters gradually get their ultimate skills, which use a yet another separate meter and have their own long flashy animations a la Limit Breaks or summons in Final Fantasy games. When enemies attack, you can time the blocks and take reduced damage.

This might sound like a lot to take in, but getting a grasp of it doesn't take long, and after than the combat is mostly static. The combat livens up a bit when you get to swap the characters around, but that novelty wears off pretty quickly as well.

A lot of skills end up strictly inferior and since they use the same resource, there's rarely any reason to deviate from the ones that work best. As an example, the fourth party member has the ability to delay opponent's turn, and it ends up dominating every other ability they have. The third party member has a very strong healing ability, and it dominates the rest all the same.
The combo meter fills up too slowly to use in most circumstances outside of the boss battles, and for the most of the game it's dominated by a single ability - a party-wide heal. This happens with the ultimate meter as well - the fifth party member simultaneously deals damage to all enemies, delays their turn and heals the entire party. No one else's ultimate has nearly as much utility.

The story operates completely on mcguffins and prophecies. No one can make a step without being bound to do so by Fate, which is used extensively to handwave away the impossible knowledge the characters suddenly obtain about what to do next and the lack of motivation to do so. Very few characters in this story actually want something from life, and when they do, they end up doing things so colossally stupid it becomes, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious.
Plot sort of starts in the middle and ends in the middle as well, there's very little progression to be felt throughout the game.

I feel there's only one party member with a distinct personality, the rest are kind of bland and uncharacterized. There are occasional comic reliefs which work decently well and don't become annoying by overstaying their welcome. The villains are all caricaturely evil, most of them in a cartoonish way, and some in the complete disregard for morals way. The background characters come and go without leaving much of an impression.

The world, despite extensive lore dumps, feels extremely artificial and tailor-made for the adventures the party is having. The progression through the world feels artificial as well - as I've played the game, I quickly learned that there's no sidetracking to be had, for almost the entire game there's been only one unexplored location available, which I had to traverse to get to or to otherwise unlock the new singular unexplored location. The game opens up a bit right at the end, but only just a bit - the best of it's efforts on that front will lead the player to about 3 screens or so of the optional area and a rematch against the boss the player had already fought, the other lead to 1 screen worth of a rudimentary puzzle, another boss rematch, or a short series of battles.
This, to me, was the probably the most disappointing bit - JRPGs typically excel at gradually widening the scope of themselves and allowing the player more and more leeway in what they can do as they get access to more and more optional locations bit by bit. In most JRPGs, getting a ship represents the moment of the game opening up for real. In Sea of Stars, it means nothing except that the player can now traverse ocean to get to the next singular unexplored area currently available to them.

Gameplay progression systems also happen to be boring.
Leveling up provides benefits so minute I don't understand why the devs didnt simply tie level ups to boss battles only, while making them more substantial at the same time. The game limits grinding severely either way - the amount of experience points needed for the next level scales very fast, as does the experience defeating enemies provide as you go through the game. It's therefore very hard to over- or undergrind which is good, but, again, I don't see why they designed a problem they needed a solution for when a game in Chrono series that they're so clearly paying homage to already completely sidestepped the whole issue two and a half decades ago. The skills/combos are already tied to story progression and collectible scrolls anyways.
The weapons and armor dont have anything to them except numbers, no special effects or anything (with one singular exception of a set of weapons that deals higher damage to undead), so they end up being disposed of as soon as the player finds a weapon/a piece of armor with better stats. The accessories are a bit better, but still like a half of them are just stat bonuses. Some of them are pretty transformative, though, and one is outright game-breaking.

As the story goes, the player gets access to a few knick-knacks that allow them to get into places they couldn't before, and this brings me to the secondmost sore spot in the game for me - collectibles being tied to the true ending.
I don't mind it in principle, what I do mind is the lack of quality of life features typically associated with such endeavors. Backtracking is very painful in this game, especially early on. What's even more painful is the lack of any sort of list for what you're missing in which location. There is a parrot that screams the random articles of the remaining collectibles in the area at you, but it's random, it's one at a time, and it takes forever to ask it again, and it includes in its tally the abysmal minigame that replaces the sort-of-traditional-for-JRPG-genre collectible cards minigame, which I wouldn't want to inflict on my worst enemy and which will be absent from this review lest I descend into words not lightly used in the civilized society. Collecting all the Rainbow Conches was not a very entertaining experience.

The soundtrack has some nice pieces, but overall it left kind of an amateurish impression on me. In a lot of songs the lead melody feels way too loud compared to the rest of the instrumentation, and a lot of songs suffer from the kind of uncanny sound you get by placing the same exact note with the same exact velocity using the same exact primitive instrument that has only one sample tied to it per note or maybe a deterministic synth generating the sound. The instruments themselves are often pretty obnoxious (especially the marches song, that one had me turn the music off until i got through the area). Nevertheless, I like the day/night cycle also cycling through two variations of the same song, and some songs having the dynamic stopping point, pretty neat.

I find myself running out of steam writing this review not unlike how the game itself seemingly ran out of steam and just sort of ended. I don't know if I can recommend this game to someone. Like I said at the beginning, I don't regret my time with the game, but I also don't see any particular reason why I would want someone to experience it.
It's a very okay game.

The bottom line is that Sea of Stars is an ultimately mediocre title that manages to cobble together its form by stealing things from a dozen other, older, better titles. Each thing it steals is implemented worse than the game it steals from, but still good enough to not be bad. The act of playing the game is fine. It's Fine. It is the ultimate definition of Mid. Mid of Stars.

To list all this game's faults on a lower level than "wow it looks pretty" would to be sit here all day, but I can't help but go over some of the biggest issues I had during my time with it.

The first and foremost is the writing and plot--the plot by itself is pretty standard, just your basic "go kill the demon king" storyline when you get down to it, but its building off lore from a game pretty notorious for having nonsense lore(The Messenger) so it ends up being nonsense here as well--none of the worldbuilding details or twists really ever land because you never get the sense that this world is anything more than levels in a video game. There's like maybe five actual towns in the game, for gods sake. This is compounded by the character writing that manages to be completely uninteresting at best, and positively dreadful at worst. The worst of it is a major side-character in act 1 that speaks exclusively in video game references, who basically ruins every scene she is in and kill what little pathos there can be in this game. Once she steps aside, it gets a little better and I'd even say act 2 cooks for a short time, but then they do the very bold decision to put the only two characters with any sort of internality on a bus until literally the final boss door. Its frustrating. That's not to speak of the other issue with the game not respecting itself, every scene that gets a little tropey immediately gets a Marvel quip to kill any tension and remind you you're seeing scenes played out in a dozen older games with way more self-respect. It sucks.

Then, there's the game pacing. As mentioned, the game has I think six actual "towns" in it, and you only visit each of them at a single point in your journey which means you consistently go 4+ dungeons at a time without any "downtime" where you can sidequest, play minigames, talk to npcs etc. They completely missed the memo on the "vibes" of a jrpg in spite of aping these games so hard--those points where you're just sort of idly walking around town are important and this game just doesn't have any of that. This is compounded by what I'd call location issues--backtracking even after you get to the end of the game with all movement options is painful, consistently involving traversing old dungeons or going through two-three extra screens to get to where you need to go, so the game actively disincentivizes you from trying to do anything besides progress the main quest.

The actual gameplay is split into two--puzzle dungeons generously described as "Crosscode but worse" and combat described as "Mario RPG but worse", double-hampered by piss-easy difficulty. Like, this game has 8 different accessibility options but I struggle to find how anyone would need them when the game difficulty is toggled so low.

Which sucks, because the one place the game excels in is the economy/item management, you have a very limited inventory that heavily incentivizes consumable usage, and also the gold is a really tight resource that you have to manage. In theory, this is great and adds an attrition factor the long dungeon dives mentioned earlier--in practice, the difficulty tuning being so low means you never interact with those systems because you can easily go through the game never using consumables which means you can sell all the crafting supplies for a surplus of money.

Even the OST manages to not really be striking, like its perfectly serviceable but I never really found myself humming a tune or getting hyped by a song. Its just, rpg music. You could replace it with the rpgmaker default soundpack and I think the experience would have been exactly the same.

And yet, in spite of all this, I still finished the game including the true ending that demands like 95% completion because it was juuuust that not bad enough that I could sunk cost fallacy my way through it.

The final thing I'd leave you with that speaks to the shoddy nature of the game is the opening--after the framing device, the game opens with our new heroes going off to their first mission. You fight exactly one tutorial battle vs a goblin, then it forces you into a flashback where you see their backstory. This last an hour and leads up to exactly the beginning of the game. Why did they have the flashback? Why would you not just start the game from the backstory sequence? Its the sort of thing literally any editor would notice and rectify immediately.

Truly, the Mid of Stars.

I don't like to go hard on games like this, but as someone who is ostensibly the exact target audience for this(ex-tumblr lesbian jrpg fanatic), its awful and basically the exact opposite of what to make a faux-jrpg as.

To start, lets get the combat out of the way. Its a mix of Paper Mario and Battle Network, except somehow lamer and significantly slower than either of them. Even trash encounters take 3-5 minutes because you spend an inordinate amount of time walking up to hit the guy only for them to jump away immediately. Combined with the generally low combat numbers and high HP pools of enemies, in addition to the action button combat making it so you can't speed up combat its just a miserable slog. By the halfway point of the game, I just turned on the "instant win all combat" button, except that STILL makes you wait until the protagonist's turn in-combat to activate so you're still sitting there 30 seconds each fight waiting. That alone killed any momentum in the game for me.

Next, the world. You'd think a Magic School would be a slam-dunk setting for a jrpg--lots of fun themes and tropes you can choose from, quirky npcs to encounter, etc etc. Ikenfell does a very bold move here and makes the entire map a dungeon. Besides one tavern at the start of the game(and ceases to be relevant 10% of the way in), there is no real "towns" or calm places. You walk into the school courtyard, which is a dungeon, which leads you to the dorms, which are a dungeon, which leads you to the botany labs, which are a dungeon, and so on. There is functionally no "downtime" from the combat portion of the game, you are just shuttled from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon. There also aren't really any npcs to deal with, no sidequests to handle, nothing of the sort. Just large dungeons bereft of anything interesting or exciting. This game is honestly a masterclass in how not to pace your game, the constant slog of enemy encounter after encounter just removes any tention or interest the game could have.

But surely, I thought, this game should be heartfelt. Perhaps to someone younger, it might be, but I could not connect with any of these characters. The most interesting one is the hot-blooded lightning lesbian, in part because she does something besides mope around the entire game. The writers focused so much on either the grander Plot stuff or the traumas the various characters have that any sense of comradery or fun is lost. And like, you can make characters who just mope around all the time--I recently played Tales of Berseria, where the main character is a deeply traumatized young woman who spends 80% of the game with coping with that trauma, but there she's surrounded by people who don't take things as seriously and the game isn't afraid to clown on her from time to time. The plot itself is also generally whatever, its basically just a collect the macguffin plot to lead you from place to place. It doesn't even really use the setting in any interesting way.

An odd note as well is that there's three vocal themes in the game, all of which belong to later-game party members who's function is just not plot-critical. Which, its fine, I love hip hop and am a huge sucker for vocal themes but its a weird choice. None of the main characters, just these three weirdos. It feels like a bit of a waste of dosh, but like sure why not.

What actually gets me is one of the songs has a lot of references to real life figures like Martin Luther or Bob Ross, and it took me out so much. Like, the game pretty expressly does not take place on Earth so..???? Petty concern, for sure, but its actually funnily enough the thing that stuck with me the most.

All in all, a waste of talent and time by all involved. I feel bad because every lesbian-themed western indie jrpg seems to disappoint(even Christine Love's Get in the Car didn't hit the marks it should have), and I don't want this to be the case because, well, thats me.

But that's the world we live in. Its a pity.

“The better your… Dandori… the more important… you are…”

The original Pikmin game is a novel experience like no other. If you were to ask one of its fans to describe the gameplay to you, you will be met with a different answer each time. It was the inception of a new genre of game that despite its critical acclaim has inspired few contemporaries, certainly due to the rather modest return on investment the series has made over its lifetime. You see in this world (which is one and the same as in Pikmin) there is an objective evaluation upon which your work’s value can be judged and deemed beautiful. The more efficient you are in obtaining these metrics the better the work is. This concept and its romanticization as I have come to understand it is referred to as ‘Dandori’. Pikmin despite its promise as a unique, fun, and compelling gameplay experience had failed to draw in sufficient mainstream appeal. Experimentation on the game’s format in its iterative sequels also performed mildly. As efficient use of time can be equated to money, the ever-increasing pursuit of greater attainment of Dandori becomes self-evident and demands for these inefficiencies to be expunged.

“Your Dandori…needs work.”

Pikmin 4, for good or ill seeks to do exactly this. The concept of Dandori is the focal point of the game, both in its design philosophies as well as its narrative. Pikmin 1 and 2, tells a tale of success and perseverance. How the brave space captain Olimar, whose work-ethic was peerless, was able to overcome trials and tribulations to save both himself and the company he worked for. Pikmin 4 completely dispels this preconception. It is both a meta retrospection and a reboot. Instead, in both our reality and in Pikmin’s, a different turn of events transpired. Olimar, and metaphorically the Pikmin series itself, did not escape past the stratosphere of PNF-404. He was close to success, but failed, doomed to become just another part of the abandoned wilderness, but perhaps with just a bit more acumen and acclimation towards Dandori principles he could be saved.

“Those who do not embrace Dandori cannot survive this planet… But if they grow the leaves… they will thrive”

Pikmin 4 wants to succeed. It is engineered to succeed. To do this it wants ‘you’ to succeed. Like the player carefully manages their Pikmin, the game seeks to manage the player. It does this through several ways. It limits your options, guiding you towards efficiency (having more than three Pikmin at a time is almost never optimal) and it provides you the means to easily accomplish your tasks. Most prominently of which is Oatchi, an entity that will both point you to your objectives as well as accomplish them for you. There is almost no obstacle that Oatchi cannot handle alone, but then what becomes the purpose of the Pikmin then? Therein lies the beauty that is this game. You see Dandori and its pursuit is never forced upon you. It is tantalized, endorsed, and romanticized but your adherence to its principles is voluntary. You can beat this game and all its challenges as efficiently or inefficiently as you wish. Dandori challenges, of which there is specific threshold requirement to complete, can be entirely skipped and ignored. You use the Pikmin because you want to be efficient. You want to be efficient to save time. You want to save time because it is made to feel satisfying to do so. What do you do with the saved time? Further pursue mastery of Dandori. It is a malady and madness. Which the game itself acknowledges.

“Go home!”

Not everyone has fallen for this spell. Dandori is ‘almost’ presented as NOT being inherently beautiful and meaningful. Pikmin or Captain lives and wellbeing are not factored into its evaluation. Olimar and his obsession at being an exemplary worker is not unquestionably a good thing. It is shown to take a strain upon his life and the time he would spend with his family. It is unfathomable to directly challenge the idealization of Dandori as it is not just foundational for Pikmin 4 but the culture that produced it in the first place. Yet intentional or not, Pikmin 4’s endgame is its own critic.

I recommend this game to anyone who is already a Pikmin fan, particularly for those who enjoyed Pikmin 2. While the wilderness has already been tamed four entries in, I am sure there is plenty for you to enjoy, even if the game is back heavy with the challenges. If you are foreign to the series whether you will enjoy this game depends on how much you are willing to engage with Dandori. If you are sick of hearing the term’s prominence in this review, you will not survive the game itself.

(If a game inspired me to write something about it, it gets 5 stars regardless of all other factors. Like Dandori this metric is only as real as you let it become)