When you get over the fact that you can’t argue with the NPCs and it’s mostly a game of stats, this is a great experimental indie RPG. Time loops and amnesia are all tired tropes, but the story cuts straight to the chase and recontextualizes them into an addicting gameplay loop which kept me hooked all the way through. What shines in Gnosia is the excellent presentation; the unique character designs and haunting music contributes to an almost surreal atmosphere that will be hard to ever forget.

It’s too obtuse for its own good (I basically felt forced to use a guide by the end). Be warned this game requires a lot of patience from the player.

i do enjoy experimentation in games. i swear i do! but i think having us follow eight different characters around was a bit more than the writers and the devs could handle.

as a result, every character's route feels more like a rushed summary, than an actual story that you can get emotional about. hikari's story is really very tragic! temenos's story could have been a great murder mystery! but we move around so fast, constantly swapping between characters, that it's difficult to get attached to anyone. the pacing is off, too. it's bad.

another thing: why are these characters all following each other? i mean, really. osvald was imprisoned for murdering his wife and child. one of his actions is mugging strangers. so why would relatively normal people like agnea or partitio even believe a thing he says? the group dynamics are so bland! bland, bland, bland! they accept each other without a single thought. they all come from different backgrounds, so why would they choose to travel together? fight for each other?

i think a game like dragon age origin does this better. these people all have a good reason for travelling together, but most of them can't stand each other. which is fun! i love seeing people bicker and argue just because they're petty! a manga i enjoy (dungeon meshi) does fun group dynamics really well, too. i like it when characters are weirded out by each other! it's even better if they don't bother to hide their discomfort!

all in all, my thoughts are: this is game is a mess, with some fun ideas. i would recommend it to others! the music is beautiful, the gameplay is fun, and if you're lucky, you might like one or two characters. but in the future, i hope the devs ignore the title OCTOPATH and let us follow... maybe four or five characters in total, with stronger, better written stories. that is my hope for octopath traveler 3.

I do not understand the acclaim this game has received like at all: the writing is 4th grade level at best, the dialogue itself is so dull it gave me a migraine within the first hour, and the plot feels like a bunch of aimless tropes that they couldn't be bothered to flesh out enough to allow for even a little bit of narrative parity between character motivations and the events unfolding (though maybe they expect you to have played The Messenger to understand certain aspects of the game's worldbuilding? idk). The main characters are basically nothing, Garl's whole schtick is annoying and forced, and pretty much every interaction feels like it was written for a Nick Jr. show or something.

The combat is serviceable, and I had fun with the boss fights at least. It isn't enough to say that it's merely inspired by Super Mario RPG; it IS Super Mario RPG, but with a bit of Mario & Luigi mixed in (like literally, from the start the boy has Geno Blast and the girl has the Mario & Luigi koopa shell). Unfortunately the numbers are all so fucked up that even if you're defending every enemy attack perfectly, you end up needing to heal constantly. Not to mention the hapless addition of tedious mechanics like live mana, which kinda just feel like an attempt to say they're totally not copying Mario RPG wholesale while adding virtually nothing of note of their own to the mix. Which is fine, I suppose, but the end result is something much less compelling than any Mario RPG I've ever played.

Really though, don't let the gorgeous pixel art fool you; under the hood Sea of Stars is a grey, formless sludge of an RPG that attempts to limply replicate games like Chrono Trigger and even non-video game media like Avatar: the Last Airbender, without really understanding what made those pieces of media work so well in the first place. I truly wanted to give this game a fair shake and at least appreciate it for what it is, but at only a few hours in, I'm already at the point of not being able to figure out a reason to keep going. There are so many more interesting games out there, especially within the RPG genre itself, that I could be getting an actual meaningful experience from instead.

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As much as I love Digimon (and the idea of a VN about it!), this simply ain't it. I got up to part 3, which is many hours in, and next to NOTHING has happened. Small things do happen, but it somehow treats everything with meticulous tedium.

Long story short, it's slow. It's TOO slow, like, molasses going uphill-slow. After all this time, none of the characters are interesting. There's affinity with your friends, but it doesn't feel like it matters. Exploration segments are just pure padding.
The combat is Fire Emblem, which COULD be fun, but turns out it's extremely simple, and more importantly, also slow as heck. (Even with 3x speed)

I'm a bit sad I couldn't like this, because a Digimon VN with dark twists sounds amazing on paper. But it's simply not fun or engaging at all.

on the hunt for one, just one good digimon game and this is not it. this game is slooooooow. slow when it comes to story progression, slow when it comes to battling. hell even trying to change locations will add hours to your run time since loading another 2D screen with cardboard cutouts in front of it is apparently too much to ask for.

giving a point for the acclaimed 'dark twists' in the narrative because when shit goes down it doesnt shy away from going through with it, but by all means it is not worth the damage you inflict on your thumb by skipping forward.

I hate disgaea. The dungeon crawling in this game is super rewarding and fun, be it the hand-crafted levels or the mad rush of the procedural ones, it does a good mix and keeping you on your toes and getting into the flow state. It's a shame its also a disgaea game with its like ten pointless character progression systems and generally useless way of making you have 40 dudes to do those 10 systems on. That part is not fun. The lack of QOL with the battle system also increases this, to the very end of the day I had no idea what was actually going on in most battles because there was no way to tell what was going on, or what the enemy was doing when they did action X or Y. One late-game grinding enemy would sometimes cast the same spell and instakill some of my dudes, and sometimes do nothing, and it wasn't because the spell was rng I think. Just baffling design.

Otherwise, its a very exciting story that falters only slighty in tone and writing juuust at the end. I don't even hate the way it took the ending or post-ending stuff, I like the thought of it. Just executed a bit poorly. What stuck out to me the most was the sort of quiet emotionalism of the writing. The game is really good at drawing feelings out of you in its scenes, it recognizes that people are often irrational horrible people but also sometimes...maybe not, in a good way.

It's also not afraid to take on heavy topics, but with a light enough flair to not feel lurid or casualizing. Watching Nachiroux deal with her very real teenage problems like loving her mom but also hating to be around her due to reasons she struggles to say aloud, or how she's trying to relate to another girl who has so many of her own issues that she struggles to communicate her thoughts is wonderful and all too real. Eureka is no slouch either, she has her own big ball of Issues that her airheaded optimism only just barely conceal from going out of control. It's hard not to love them as you watch them go through the labyrinthine plot so much larger and also smaller than the both of them. I felt it stumbled just a little at the finish mark, where it really felt like the writer's ambition got the best of them juuust a little, but not enough to meaningfully take away from.

Altogether, probably Nippon Ichi's best game, but that's damning it with faint praise because what is there of Galleria is very good, and the things I don't like about it are more the things you get with the studio.

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.