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Natsume: You should kill yourself NOW.
Van Zieks: You should kill yourself NOW.
Naruhodo: I NEED cock Sholmes
Tobias Gregson : You should kill yourself NOW.
Tatsugoro Kusabi: You should kill yourself NOW.
Can I borrow 50,000 yen
I Am Dead
2020
I am dead is one of the most underrated game i've ever played. I never hear anyone talk about it which is very disappointing because I loved this game. Its a super relaxing and charming time even though it is pretty short. I love the art style and the characters and the whole vibe is just awesome. Great game highly recommend to check it out. 8/10.
Reviewing every game i've fully completed #44
Reviewing every game i've fully completed #44
Rayman 3
2003
It alright!
Honestly the story about the making of the game is more interesting than the game itself. Originally being made as a GBA version of Rayman 2, they instead shoehorned in some Rayman 3 stuff (like the bare minimum) so they could tie it into 3’s console release.
And since it plays more like Rayman 1, it DOES kinda feel like a melting pot of the first three Rayman games, which is interesting.
The story is an absolute mess. Like, Globox swallows a black Lum, that makes sense, but Razorbeard and the robo pirates are back?? What
But other than that? It’s a solid 2D platformer. Not always super interesting, but it works, looks alright, sounds alright, it’s fun enough! Gameplay mixes it up every now and then with minigames, kinda a standard GBA 2D platformer. But it does it well enough, and I always have a great time with my boy Rayman.
Honestly the story about the making of the game is more interesting than the game itself. Originally being made as a GBA version of Rayman 2, they instead shoehorned in some Rayman 3 stuff (like the bare minimum) so they could tie it into 3’s console release.
And since it plays more like Rayman 1, it DOES kinda feel like a melting pot of the first three Rayman games, which is interesting.
The story is an absolute mess. Like, Globox swallows a black Lum, that makes sense, but Razorbeard and the robo pirates are back?? What
But other than that? It’s a solid 2D platformer. Not always super interesting, but it works, looks alright, sounds alright, it’s fun enough! Gameplay mixes it up every now and then with minigames, kinda a standard GBA 2D platformer. But it does it well enough, and I always have a great time with my boy Rayman.
I Am Dead
2020
Charming two hour game dealing with the existential terror of death and how ultimately we're all forgotten.
Dokapon Kingdom
2007
in this game "I'm gonna send you to Brazil" is a genuine threat that you can make and act out
this was a reasonably enjoyable metroidvania, if a bit forgettable and unpolished, but the prelude fight to the actual final boss was so miserably slow and unsatisfying because the opening to attack just would NOT trigger that I lost all interest and watched the ending on youtube.
I've never seen a modern 3D rpg replicate so perfectly the vibes of, like, random mid-tier Game Boy rpgs like Robopon or Legend of The River King. From the extremely abstracted, yet somehow small and isolated, environments, to the wordy yet breezy and somewhat hollow structure of the game itself, which mainly exists just to prop up the excellent monster battler mechanics. All those are vibes that I thought were lost to time, and seeing them resurface here put a nostalgic smile on my face.
To be fair, this stuff can either be good or bad depending on your tastes. It can maybe come off as cheap in what's supposed to be a "modern 3d game for grown ups". But, like, it is definitely a very Distinct vibe, and you gotta at least respect it for that.
I didn't really want to stick with it for 40 hours. Which is also true of a lot of those mid-tier game boy rpgs it reminds me of. But what I've played I enjoyed thoroughly. Which is also true of a lot of those mid-tier game boy rpgs it reminds me of.
To be fair, this stuff can either be good or bad depending on your tastes. It can maybe come off as cheap in what's supposed to be a "modern 3d game for grown ups". But, like, it is definitely a very Distinct vibe, and you gotta at least respect it for that.
I didn't really want to stick with it for 40 hours. Which is also true of a lot of those mid-tier game boy rpgs it reminds me of. But what I've played I enjoyed thoroughly. Which is also true of a lot of those mid-tier game boy rpgs it reminds me of.
Tonic Trouble
1999
I had heard pretty bad things about Tonic Trouble through the years. When a friend of mine started playing through it, I figured I should give it a go as well.
And… yeah, it’s not GOOD, but I mean, I guess there’s way worse.
Controls are clunky, the camera is pretty good awful, there’s some obtuse level and puzzle designs here and there. Flying takes a LOT of getting used to. I adapted to it eventually, but it took a bit. Boy, I really wish that pogo stick move was more interesting.
But hey, it looks nice! Lots of charm in the character designs and world. So it wasn’t a miserable time. Just a not very good one.
But hey, it would pave the way for Rayman 2, a much better game, so hey! It wasn’t all bad!
And… yeah, it’s not GOOD, but I mean, I guess there’s way worse.
Controls are clunky, the camera is pretty good awful, there’s some obtuse level and puzzle designs here and there. Flying takes a LOT of getting used to. I adapted to it eventually, but it took a bit. Boy, I really wish that pogo stick move was more interesting.
But hey, it looks nice! Lots of charm in the character designs and world. So it wasn’t a miserable time. Just a not very good one.
But hey, it would pave the way for Rayman 2, a much better game, so hey! It wasn’t all bad!
Humanity
2023
This game is a difficult ask for $30, if you are subscribed to a PS Plus Extra feel free to try it out. It starts out amazing, but later mechanics can be very frustrating and too trial-and-error. The game is lacking a lot of QoL features, and the soundtrack is super hit or miss too.
Mechanics
The big advertised aspects that made me try the game, leading infinite streams of people through fun puzzle platforming challenges in real-time, get sidelined in later chapters, and I didn't find a lot of the new stuff as enjoyable. There's far less platforming, which was my favorite aspect of the game.
The game starts out with puzzles, but later on, it often turns into trial-and-error when combat starts to be involved. Sometimes, enemy movements even happen during the middle of the stage, and there's not enough warning when it happens. Other times, it feels like RNG whether or not you win a combat, and some missions are extremely unforgiving, making you fail the level or lose access to Goldies if you lose even one human.
In many levels, time is stopped while you place commands, then you start time and see if it works out. These stages become more tedious than hard when enemies are involved. Instead of discovering the solution to a tricky puzzle, you're retrying over and over, adjusting your commands tile by tile until you find the exact setting that either avoids or defeats the enemy, and then reaches the exit.
In some time stop stages, you can position some humans before starting time. However, these starting positions of humans are not saved, so you have to re-do them each time you retry.
Goldies
Goldies start out as bonus humans that you have to safely guide to the exit without letting them fall. This mechanic starts out super fun, and you're often sending something so valuable flying through the sky and hoping they make it. Some of them are very challenging to collect and bring to the exit, especially in real-time, and it was great fun in early chapters.
But later on, Goldies become required to unlock the exit to complete many stages, defeating the purpose. It's not bonus anymore. Some required story stages only have 1 Goldy, and you must get it to clear the stage.
Some later stages have extremely trivial Goldies, directly on your path or right next to it. I've even found one that was placed a couple tiles in front of the exit. It was just... free.
Other Problems
You can see how the enemy humans will move. They have arrows and stuff just like the ones you place, but in black. However, you cannot see these arrows unless time is moving. You need to start time, and then you must enter free camera mode. Otherwise, you can't see the enemy arrows. I went through the entire game not realizing that this information was available because of this issue.
During time stop stages, the start button is a physical location you have to run to. When you retry, you get teleported back to the starting position and then have to walk back to where your error was, fix your error... and then walk back to the start button. This should've been streamlined somehow.
Soundtrack is very hit or miss, and the music selector is bugged; when you retry a stage, the music resets back to default.
Some combat or physics RNG can cause you to randomly win or fail a stage without changing anything. If a Goldy enters an intersection between two streams of humans, it might get diverted into the other path. It might not. It's random which way it goes, and I've had to restart stages until I get the desired outcome.
HUMANITY is not a bad game, but it's just very rough around the edges.
Mechanics
The big advertised aspects that made me try the game, leading infinite streams of people through fun puzzle platforming challenges in real-time, get sidelined in later chapters, and I didn't find a lot of the new stuff as enjoyable. There's far less platforming, which was my favorite aspect of the game.
The game starts out with puzzles, but later on, it often turns into trial-and-error when combat starts to be involved. Sometimes, enemy movements even happen during the middle of the stage, and there's not enough warning when it happens. Other times, it feels like RNG whether or not you win a combat, and some missions are extremely unforgiving, making you fail the level or lose access to Goldies if you lose even one human.
In many levels, time is stopped while you place commands, then you start time and see if it works out. These stages become more tedious than hard when enemies are involved. Instead of discovering the solution to a tricky puzzle, you're retrying over and over, adjusting your commands tile by tile until you find the exact setting that either avoids or defeats the enemy, and then reaches the exit.
In some time stop stages, you can position some humans before starting time. However, these starting positions of humans are not saved, so you have to re-do them each time you retry.
Goldies
Goldies start out as bonus humans that you have to safely guide to the exit without letting them fall. This mechanic starts out super fun, and you're often sending something so valuable flying through the sky and hoping they make it. Some of them are very challenging to collect and bring to the exit, especially in real-time, and it was great fun in early chapters.
But later on, Goldies become required to unlock the exit to complete many stages, defeating the purpose. It's not bonus anymore. Some required story stages only have 1 Goldy, and you must get it to clear the stage.
Some later stages have extremely trivial Goldies, directly on your path or right next to it. I've even found one that was placed a couple tiles in front of the exit. It was just... free.
Other Problems
You can see how the enemy humans will move. They have arrows and stuff just like the ones you place, but in black. However, you cannot see these arrows unless time is moving. You need to start time, and then you must enter free camera mode. Otherwise, you can't see the enemy arrows. I went through the entire game not realizing that this information was available because of this issue.
During time stop stages, the start button is a physical location you have to run to. When you retry, you get teleported back to the starting position and then have to walk back to where your error was, fix your error... and then walk back to the start button. This should've been streamlined somehow.
Soundtrack is very hit or miss, and the music selector is bugged; when you retry a stage, the music resets back to default.
Some combat or physics RNG can cause you to randomly win or fail a stage without changing anything. If a Goldy enters an intersection between two streams of humans, it might get diverted into the other path. It might not. It's random which way it goes, and I've had to restart stages until I get the desired outcome.
HUMANITY is not a bad game, but it's just very rough around the edges.
Sea of Stars
2023
This review contains spoilers
I am not immune to propaganda. Show me a trailer for an indie JRPG featuring scripted encounters on the field maps, dual techs, and guest tracks by Yasunori Mitsuda, and I'll go "oh, a Chrono Trigger inspired indie JRPG, I sure hope they actually learned the right lessons from the classics" and drop $30 to see if they did.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)
I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.
I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.
You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.
Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.
Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.
The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.
Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.
I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.
Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".
Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!
It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.
Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.
Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.
No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.
Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.
Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!
Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!
You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.
Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?
The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.
Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.
Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.
Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.
This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.
Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.
The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.
If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.
An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.
In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.
It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.
In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.
But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!
How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.
I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.
But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.
Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)
I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.
I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.
You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.
Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.
Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.
The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.
Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.
I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.
Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".
Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!
It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.
Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.
Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.
No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.
Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.
Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!
Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!
You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.
Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?
The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.
Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.
Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.
Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.
This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.
Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.
The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.
If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.
An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.
In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.
It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.
In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.
But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!
How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.
I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.
But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.
Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.
Humanity
2023
I would like to score this game higher, but I can't think of a lot of other games that have outstayed their welcome this much. Humanity is a brilliant study of the evolution of humankind from a thought to a society, and it is very impressive in how it ropes together the themes of what makes us human with the designs of the puzzles.
Unfortunately, and I'm not exaggerating, this 15-hour game is 10 hours too long. I get it. You don't have to hammer in the same point 13 times before letting us move on to the next stage of humanity; Just two or three would have sufficed. I am exhausted and tired and wish to never look at this game again. At the same time it was extremely thought-provoking, and the readiness of the hint system is a must for people like me who are very stupid. I would also like to clarify there is no way I would have made it more than 2 or 3 hours into this game without the hints . It feels absolutely impossible at times.
I actually think if this was about a third of the length it is it might be on par with Portal - however I don't know that I fully recommend this game. It is truly genius in its design and the ending had me almost tearing up as humans were finally created, but also more than half the puzzles in this game could have easily been scrapped without changing a single thing about the quality or narrative. So a reluctant hurrah for this one, and let's move on.
Unfortunately, and I'm not exaggerating, this 15-hour game is 10 hours too long. I get it. You don't have to hammer in the same point 13 times before letting us move on to the next stage of humanity; Just two or three would have sufficed. I am exhausted and tired and wish to never look at this game again. At the same time it was extremely thought-provoking, and the readiness of the hint system is a must for people like me who are very stupid. I would also like to clarify there is no way I would have made it more than 2 or 3 hours into this game without the hints . It feels absolutely impossible at times.
I actually think if this was about a third of the length it is it might be on par with Portal - however I don't know that I fully recommend this game. It is truly genius in its design and the ending had me almost tearing up as humans were finally created, but also more than half the puzzles in this game could have easily been scrapped without changing a single thing about the quality or narrative. So a reluctant hurrah for this one, and let's move on.
It’s a solid little Wario Ware clone with SpongeBob characters! Really like the different art styles they do the the different games, really helps give it a unique touch. Think my favorite is the PUNK ROCK one.
Not like an AMAZING game, and I didn’t feel the need to keep playing to 100%, but I played and enjoyed most of it.
Fun!
Not like an AMAZING game, and I didn’t feel the need to keep playing to 100%, but I played and enjoyed most of it.
Fun!
Chicken Police
2020
Is it weird that I feel like a game that traffics in supermodel bodies with animal heads should have been ... weirder?
Furry noir? More like noir thank you. (I'll see myself out.)
Furry noir? More like noir thank you. (I'll see myself out.)
You know what? I've long outgrown the intended demographic for this game, but for what it is, I'm VERY impressed. Charming world and characters, gorgeous game, from the backgrounds to the character designs to the animations, and a great reggae soundtrack.
Was I ever stumped? No. Was the adventure over in an hour? Yes. I know I'm a 35 year old man playing a game made for the tiniest babies. But ya know what? It's a game with a lot of heart and effort put into it. Real good fish.
Was I ever stumped? No. Was the adventure over in an hour? Yes. I know I'm a 35 year old man playing a game made for the tiniest babies. But ya know what? It's a game with a lot of heart and effort put into it. Real good fish.
Sonic Generations
2011
they put a checkpoint 10 seconds away from the goal post cuz the level design was ripped 1:1 from a level where the goal post is a boss fight instead. they just didnt bother to change it.
this game is an experience.
this game is an experience.