This review contains spoilers
I wish I'd wandered away from this game 10-15 hours earlier so I could remember it fondly and think about circling back and beating it someday. All I'm left with now is how frustrated I am. The story falls apart the longer the game goes on, and the combat isn't complex enough to stay compelling for the duration of a "true ending" playthrough. That's especially true because the true ending requires beating a series of additional bosses, and completing those sidequests in quick succession along with the game's final bosses really strips bare how little variety there is from fight to fight. (I'm pretty sure the Elder Mist's automatic counter was the only thing in the entire game that made me think about my approach beyond "break locks and manage healing.")
I was really disappointed to find out after the fact that so many of the elements that felt out of place or incomplete to me are actually threads connecting Sea of Stars to The Messenger. I would have just played that first if they'd been upfront about how heavily intertwined the stories are instead of calling Sea of Stars self-contained. Love to close on a shot of a giant bowl and think "what the hell is that" only to find out from the internet that it's a reference to a different game.
This is minor but I think it's a good example of an undeniable pattern in this game where I wish they'd reworked small elements or tightened things up - why on earth do you cash in conches in Docarri? It's like they just thought "water + conches" with no consideration for how it would affect gameplay. First, you can be thirty conches deep before you even know what they're for, which means that finding them quickly stops feeling like any kind of reward. Second, cashing in conches after the first batch is a nightmare. Why do I have to make a special trip to Watcher Island and go through Jungle Path TWICE every time I want to trade in more? Just put it in Brisk! You go there early, you return there plenty of times for story reasons, and it's quick to access directly from the world map!
Similar to that, the game unnecessarily wasted my time in a lot of ways that might have been small on their own, but caused mounting frustration over time. The coded tablet in Moraine's office just being a list of Discord handles...the absolute nightmare of trying to backtrack any time before the very end of the game...forcing the player into the "lesser" ending even if all sidequests are complete and all conches are collected, when there's no story reason why the true ending couldn't be the first (and only) ending you encounter.
Garl's death and later return could have been handled so much better. With Wraith Island in the mix it was just one too many "Garl in mortal peril" stories, and while the story leading up to his death is a standout, it also went on long enough that I started thinking "if they're dedicating this much time to Garl dying, it's really going to feel like a copout if they manage to cure him or bring him back later." So of course...they did bring him back. Which is fine! I love Garl! But the balance, like so much in this game, just wasn't right, and that's exacerbated by the pointlessness of gating his resurrection behind the first roll of the credits.
There's a good stretch of this game that's really fun even if it's not transcendent, but I wish the whole thing came together more compellingly than it does.
I was really disappointed to find out after the fact that so many of the elements that felt out of place or incomplete to me are actually threads connecting Sea of Stars to The Messenger. I would have just played that first if they'd been upfront about how heavily intertwined the stories are instead of calling Sea of Stars self-contained. Love to close on a shot of a giant bowl and think "what the hell is that" only to find out from the internet that it's a reference to a different game.
This is minor but I think it's a good example of an undeniable pattern in this game where I wish they'd reworked small elements or tightened things up - why on earth do you cash in conches in Docarri? It's like they just thought "water + conches" with no consideration for how it would affect gameplay. First, you can be thirty conches deep before you even know what they're for, which means that finding them quickly stops feeling like any kind of reward. Second, cashing in conches after the first batch is a nightmare. Why do I have to make a special trip to Watcher Island and go through Jungle Path TWICE every time I want to trade in more? Just put it in Brisk! You go there early, you return there plenty of times for story reasons, and it's quick to access directly from the world map!
Similar to that, the game unnecessarily wasted my time in a lot of ways that might have been small on their own, but caused mounting frustration over time. The coded tablet in Moraine's office just being a list of Discord handles...the absolute nightmare of trying to backtrack any time before the very end of the game...forcing the player into the "lesser" ending even if all sidequests are complete and all conches are collected, when there's no story reason why the true ending couldn't be the first (and only) ending you encounter.
Garl's death and later return could have been handled so much better. With Wraith Island in the mix it was just one too many "Garl in mortal peril" stories, and while the story leading up to his death is a standout, it also went on long enough that I started thinking "if they're dedicating this much time to Garl dying, it's really going to feel like a copout if they manage to cure him or bring him back later." So of course...they did bring him back. Which is fine! I love Garl! But the balance, like so much in this game, just wasn't right, and that's exacerbated by the pointlessness of gating his resurrection behind the first roll of the credits.
There's a good stretch of this game that's really fun even if it's not transcendent, but I wish the whole thing came together more compellingly than it does.