I've played a lot of Civilization in my life. Like, A LOT a lot. So much that I didn't play much of Civ 6 when it came out due to sheer Civilization exhaustion. But then it came. The hankering. The need to passively observe Gandhi eviscerating country after country in his quest for dominance as I watch on the sidelines and offer him endless sheep and uranium for prolonged peace. After finally playing a campaign of Civ 6, I'm happy to report that it is, indeed, another Civ game.

That means you know exactly what you're getting and what you're getting is the video game equivalent of pizza, pulled pork, chicken wings, spare ribs and BBQ brisket coming together to make an ultimate food baby. In short, it slaps. There's very few changes outside of storms that make you waste 7 turns fixing your 80 turtle farms, the addition of a districts mechanic and giant Pacific Rim death robots that Scotland will randomly set on you for unjustly nuking Birmingham (it's a shithole guys, I'm doing us a favour).

But listen. Sean Bean does the voice-over now. SEAN BEAN. And if that isn't a game-changing innovation, then I don't know what is.

+ Captures the “magic” and lore of the books and films brilliantly
+ Beginning hours were intriguing and fun
+ Room of Requirement was a great change of pace at first
+ Riding the broom is great

- Combat soon grows stale
- Weak story with uninteresting characters
- Boring world activities not worth doing
- Unrewarding gear system with pointless upgrades and constant bombardment of new stuff

Sea of Stars is almost a perfect game, and I mean that in the worst way possible. The presentation of the game is fantastic; it might have the best pixel art I've ever seen. The music is superb and many of its songs have become regulars in my playlist. The gameplay is excellent and challenges itself to solve common pitfalls of JRPGs, like players hoarding their resources. The combat itself is like a blend of Chrono Trigger x Mario & Luigi, and I mean that in a really good way. Overworld traversal is surprisingly fun too with the equipment Sea of Stars gives you combined with great level design.

If any of what I just said is what you care about most for a game, you can stop reading the review now. Sea of Stars will be an amazing experience for you and I highly recommend it. For me, though? It had one of the most disappointing stories I've ever seen and turned what could have been one of my all time favorites into just another "pretty good" game.

I don't like making reviews filled with spoilers, since I feel it defeats the purpose of a review. It's difficult for me to give my full thoughts on the game without spoiling the entire story, so I will instead give a list of what I didn't like about the story while staying as vague as possible.

-The character writing is some of the worst I've seen in a JRPG, especially for the protagonists Valere and Zale. I honestly struggled to remember their names for the first few hours of the game because their characters are such nothing pieces and they never go anywhere interesting.

-The main antagonist of the game is a brilliant idea that's, in my opinion, executed horribly. There's many ways they could have showed the villain's impact on the world, or explored relationships the villain has with other characters more, but Sea of Stars just doesn't do anything with it.

-The "normal" ending was so horribly unsatisfying that I honestly don't know why they bothered putting it in the game, let alone making seeing it a requirement to get the "true" ending. The true ending is honestly worse in some aspects, but is at least better gameplay wise.

-The writing as a whole is pretty bad. From my understanding, Sea of Stars did not have a professional writer and it unfortunately shows. Really badly. In the English translation at least, grammar issues are common and characters often don't speak in a natural way. While the meaning of what they say is still clear, it makes the game feel a lot more unpolished than it should be.

-I'm aware this game is a prequel to The Messenger, but I haven't played it so I'm unaware of how its story is supposed to connect to that game. However, there are several major characters in the story whose arcs are literally left hanging and we never hear from them again even though their plotlines aren't resolved, so as a standalone story, Sea of Stars fails miserably in terms of dealing with loose ends. At least an acknowledgement of what happened to them would have been appreciated.


The story of a game tends to be what I remember the most about the game. I loved playing Sea of Stars, but I fear its really bad story will make my opinion of the game only get lower with time. If it even had a passable story or half-decent character writing I would have been comfortable giving the game a 10/10. The other aspects of the game really are that great, but I struggle to find anything redeemable about the story. For that, I'll have to limit it to an 8/10 at the absolute highest.

3 months later edit: Yeah it was just as I feared. The story/writing soured my opinion on the game as a whole and I'm almost actively disliking it now.

There’s absolutely a lot to love about this game. It’s super super charming, the battles and characters are super fun. And the story is a a solid Mario rpg story.

However I just don’t think it reaches the highs as other Mario rpgs. Might be that I’m not a tactics fan but I diddnt have as much as I hoped. By the end I was speedruinning the story to start a different game. But I don’t really thinks that it’s the games fault because it hardly does anything bad.

The only nitpicks I do have is that some zones can have some ugly pop in and in battles the enemy’s turns take longer then I hope for. But that’s only just little nitpicks. It barely brings it down a point.

I had nostalgia for WoW from days spent playing as a kid, but the memories I made playing this version are far more dear to me.

I think that is at least partly because vanilla has so many things that make it unique that I just prefer:
- weird talent trees, especially the druid’s balance tree (omen of clarity supremacy)
- “endgame” starts before max level
- leveling/questing isn’t guaranteed to be a cakewalk
- classes have things that they alone can do (warlocks can summon players, druids can battle-rez)