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.

Sea of Stars was my most anticipated game of this year, winning that spot over big releases such as Pikmin 4 and Armored Core 6. Sabotage Studio’s previous game, The Messenger, was a game that took me by surprise with its fun gameplay, engrossing world, fun writing, and amazing soundtrack. It was a game that surprised me with new twists and turns, and I got so much more out of that game than I had initially expected. Perhaps there’s something to be said about how much my positive experience with the game was due to how I wasn’t expecting anything in particular when I booted it up for the first time. Going into Sea of Stars, I had high hopes and expectations due to my experience with The Messenger, but unfortunately these expectations were not met, and I spent much of my playthrough desperately chasing the highs that I felt playing their previous game.

Admittedly, if asked, I would probably say that I don’t typically enjoy JRPGs as a genre, but the more I’ve come to understand the games that I like the more I realize that I don’t actually have any inherent issues with JRPGs. I’ve played and enjoyed many different JRPGs for many different reasons. Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door had wonderfully creative chapters and the badge system in those games opened options for interesting build options that I could really sink my teeth into. Earthbound and Mother 3 have comparatively lackluster combat but the worlds and stories they explore were thoroughly engaging. I even recently played through Lisa, with its creative setting and combat design that forces the player to adapt to extreme circumstances. In just about every JRPG I’ve enjoyed I can point out at least one aspect of it that it excels at, whether its combat, exploration, story, or even something completely different. Sea of Stars fails for me because all aspects of the game range from mediocre to just plain bad (with maybe one exception I’ll get to later). It tries too hard to be good at everything and as a result it wallows in mediocrity.

Puzzles:
While puzzles are certainly a more minor aspect to JRPGs than perhaps combat or story, puzzle solving represents a somewhat significant portion of the gameplay of Sea of Stars, and yet it feels like no effort was put into making any of the puzzles interesting to solve. There’s not a lot of detail I can go into about these puzzles because the majority of the puzzles the game presents are just non-puzzles. The core issue with most of the “puzzles” in this game is that they never have incorrect solutions. When the game presents you with a problem to solve you never have to use your brain to solve it, you just do whatever seems most obvious, interact with whatever objects are closest, and so on until the problem has solved itself. The first thing you try in any room will usually lead you to the solution since there’s never a second thing to try that would be incorrect. No reasoning is ever required to find the correct solution from a series of options since those options just don’t exist in the first place. I find a locked door, there’s a lever a little ways to the left, and another one a little ways to the right, with no enemies or obstacles in my way. I walk into a room, interact with the first object I see, then the next object that opens up as a result of the first interaction, and so on. I hesitate to even call most of these puzzles, they function more as mindless filler between story beats and combat.

I struggle to even remember the specific types of puzzles the game offers, because they are grossly underutilized and never increase in complexity as the game progresses. The time-of-day puzzle at the start of the game where you have to reason out that you need to activate the longer series of lights first? That's the amount of complexity you’ll be experiencing for the rest of the game, oftentimes with no changes whatsoever. Too many of the time-of-day light puzzles are functionally identical. Just light up the longer line before the shorter time, repeated over and over and over again. Traditional push-block puzzles are in this game, but none of them take more than two seconds of thought to solve. There's light beam puzzles in this game that show up maybe 5 times and never come with any twists or interesting mechanics, just rotate mirrors until the light hits the receiver.

Perhaps the saddest part is that the developers actually demonstrate competency in puzzle design in specific limited sections of the game. There are various puzzle shrines scattered throughout the world, about 10 of them, and while I wouldn’t consider any of the puzzles inside of them to be particularly challenging (with at least one that I can remember being completely braindead), most of them contain interesting ideas. There’s one where a 3 by 3 pushblock grid determines the placement of floating platforms that grant access to specific parts of the puzzle. While the puzzle itself isn’t particularly challenging, there’s an interesting idea that’s executed well, and the same can be said for most of these shrines. It’s a shame that full access to most of these shrines is locked until the main game is nearly complete, and functions as optional side content. It’s too little too late; the types of puzzles seen in these shrines should have been introduced early to mid game, and expanded on as the game progressed. As it stands right now, the fact that the only satisfactory puzzle content in the game is optional only serves as a painful reminder of what could’ve been.

Exploration:
Exploration was easily the thing this game succeeded the most at and was what I alluded to earlier in this review, however many of the strengths that the exploration has to offer are often not utilized well enough, or come with unforeseen negative caveats.

Let’s take the traversal mechanics for instance. The player can interact with ledges and walls to jump across gaps, scale up walls, or dive into bodies of water. There’s a lot of expressiveness in how the character can interact with the environment, and levels are designed with impressive verticality. An area you find pretty early on, the Port Town of Brisk, is filled with tons of goodies to find strewn across rooftops and hidden in the ocean. You have to climb up on said rooftops, balance across ropes, and take secret routes into homes in order to properly pick this place clean. It was one of the most memorable and fun parts of the game for me, but unfortunately this type of exploration is the exception rather than the rule. For the majority of the game, the verticality and traversal mechanics aren’t used to create similarly fun, open-ended jungle gyms.

In any given JRPG, there’s space and downtime between the main components making up the gameplay loop. A hallway connecting a puzzle room to a room with an enemy encounter, or one connecting a central atrium to the boss’s lair. It’s not something you think about when playing any other JRPG but it’s certainly something the game designers have to consider. Valuable downtime helps with pacing, areas need to be visually interesting enough to not be boring to simply walk through, or adding a hallway here or there simply makes the area you’re exploring feel more realistic. The reason that I’m pointing this out is that Sea of Stars seems to put a great deal more effort than its peers to make these sections feel more interesting. Sure, there are normal hallways to walk down, but there are also walls to climb across, you need to jump from one ledge to another before carefully balancing your way towards the next platform. This sounds cool when I’m writing it out, and it is cool the first couple of times, but it quickly gets annoying. What was once a non-issue in other games is now a feature that slows down the time between combat encounters and story beats for the sake of a novelty that wears off quickly. The first time my character balanced across a plank of wood to reach the other side of a roof I thought it was interesting, but the fifth time it happened I couldn’t help but be annoyed at how slow my character was moving as a result of the plank of wood. It’s like these levels were designed by someone who thought that the best parts of the Uncharted series were the linear climbing sequences.

Level design doesn’t just fail on a micro level within liminal sections, however. In many dungeons the layout of rooms fails on a macro level. Almost every major dungeon in the game follows the same formula of having a central area with a campfire and savepoint. This central area branches off into two or three sections that often need to be completed in a certain order to properly progress. Once all sections have been completed, the game allows you to progress further, and you get to experience your next boss/story moment/new area. This style of dungeon gets tiring to see over and over, but even if we ignore the lack of creativity on display here, this style of dungeon highlights another flaw with the game. In most JRPGs (and most games in general), there is some form of full heal, oftentimes this is a hotel that the player can stay in for a gold price. In Sea of Stars, the inns have no price attached, and there is no cost or disincentive associated with resting at a campfire. This means that when exploring a dungeon, after any enemy encounter where HP or MP is expended, it is optimal to backtrack and rest at the campfire before proceeding onwards. While this is something I might avoid since I’d find it annoying to do, the branching path level design means doing so is hardly an inconvenience. If anything, entering basic combat without full MP to bulldoze enemies is often more inconvenient than backtracking a few steps and filling back up for free. Resource management is completely broken due to this, and I spent the entire game hardly using any consumables. While this issue isn’t solely caused by this style of level design, it certainly plays a significant part in it.

Combat:
Turn-based combat is something that is hard to get right. Too many JRPGs are designed too simplistically; strategy in bad JRPGs often devolves into just spamming high-power special moves while occasionally taking a turn to heal. In order for turn-based combat to be interesting, there needs to be some level of strategic depth, either inside or outside of combat, but preferably both. Paper Mario, while simplistic and action command reliant while in combat, has many interesting decisions to be made outside of combat, decisions that can help the player steamroll through basic fights. Choosing which of the three stats to level up holds a surprising amount of weight since choosing one means forgoing the others, and the badge system from those games means there’s a lot of experimentation that can be done with different builds. An RPG like Omori injects strategic depth in-combat via the concept of rock-paper-scissors style type weaknesses also serving as status effects that can be inflicted on both allies and enemies. While the player might gravitate towards certain macro strategies, the player still has options and choices to be made on the fly to adapt to the unique circumstances of any given fight. My issue with Sea of Stars is that it fails to provide any meaningful strategy.

I’ll begin by briefly discussing strategy outside of combat. Due to the implementation of action commands and the lock system I believe that the developers never really intended for strategy outside of combat to be the focus, so it's less that they tried and failed to make macro strategy interesting and more that they didn’t really try. The only strategic options the player is offered outside of combat are bonus stats during a level up and ring slots. Ring slots are a tried and true system that I don’t have much to comment on, however the variety of rings leaves much to be desired. Too many rings are simple stat sticks, and there just aren’t enough of them for there to be any interesting decision making. Some rings are even straight upgrades compared to other rings. The game provides a unique type of ring slot that provides a bonus to the entire party regardless of who’s wearing it, but there are so few of these in the game that you aren’t making any decisions about what rings to have so much as you are making a decision on a ring or two to omit.

As for the bonus stats that the player can choose from when leveling up, these types of systems don’t really work for me when they come with some mechanic that disincentivizes actively focusing on a specific stat, which Sea of Stars does. I’m not 100% sure how the system exactly works, but I do know that when selecting a stat to boost, the next time you level up that stat won’t be available, so you can only really upgrade that stat every other level up. There also seems to be some sort of hard cap on how many times you can boost any individual stat judging by how the number of stats I could choose to boost from lowered from 4 to 3 by the time I was in the late game. It's annoying that the game pretends to give the player options to focus their characters on certain stats but then yanks those options away, rendering them meaningless..

Shifting the discussion to strategy within combat, let’s start with the lock system. Anytime an enemy decides to use a special move it is telegraphed to the player as a series of locks that, if not broken in time, will lead the enemy to use the special move. This system is actually pretty interesting in the early game. While many field encounter locks are trivial to break, bosses can throw some complex patterns at you. These complex patterns often require use of special moves, combo moves, live mana, and any combination of those. Figuring out what you need to do and learning that it's optimal to keep some amount of combo points/live mana available at any given point is a pretty fun early game moment. Unfortunately, much like many other aspects of this game, this concept isn’t evolved or made more complex over the course of the game, and hurts the game more than it helps.

The fatal flaw with the lock system is that once the player is past the point where they understand the best methods to break locks, the lock system wrenches away interesting decision making from the player. This flaw is practically in the name: combat devolves into a simple lock and key system. The player no longer has to make a decision on what move would be best for any given situation, they are instead assigned the simple task of finding the keys for the locks that the game provides. Perhaps it would’ve worked better if breaking locks had some sort of trade-off, some opportunity cost that the player needs to take into consideration whenever they make the decision to break locks, but in its current state there’s just no reason not to try to break every lock every time. Even if you’re incapable of fully breaking the lock, it's the easiest way to build up combo points and it reduces the power of the special attack being cast. While at first it appears that the lock system is a system that increases strategy in combat, the lock system ultimately represents the game asking the player for a specific series of moves, taking away interesting decision making from the player, which by extension takes away interesting strategic choices.

Another problem with the combat is just how homogenous the individual characters are from a gameplay standpoint. At the start of the game it sort of feels like the characters feel distinct, Zale and Valere are our main character DPS dealers while Garl functions more like a tanky support. In the early game there’s a little overlap (Zale and Valere are pretty interchangeable DPS-wise, both Zale can heal just as well as Garl), but at this point roles feel relatively separate. Unfortunately, this does not remain the case, combat roles overlap so heavily that characters are almost indistinguishable other than the types of damage they are capable of dealing. All of them have AoE options, all of them deal relatively similar damage under normal circumstances, all of them take relatively similar damage, and almost every character has some form of healing. There’s a lack of meaningfully unique mechanics tied to one character, one of the only examples being Serai’s ability to delay enemy attacks. Every character is a jack of all trades, which is a bizarre choice considering that class distinction is a key aspect of many JRPGs that just isn’t present here. It ultimately makes me question the developer's intent behind this decision (assuming this was intent and not just incompetence). The only explanation I can come up with is that the developers realized that every variety of team compositions needs to function as a result of sections where team compositions are limited and due to the nature of the lock system often requiring specific combinations of characters to break certain patterns. Regardless of whatever developer intentions there may have been, this style of character design takes away a lot of potentially interesting decision making from the combat system.

There’s a similar lack of variety in the individual skills available to characters. Each character only has access to three special moves and an ultimate, a pitifully small number of options when considering that those three special moves are the only ones you’ll be using for the entire 30-hour runtime of the game. Unlocking new options is always very rewarding in other RPGs, you level up past a certain threshold and get a cool new move to mess with in combat. In Sea of Stars, gaining new abilities comes at a snail’s pace, and most of the time the new ability you gain is a combo move that you can only realistically use during boss fights. Not that you’ll ever throw the combo move out for fun during a boss fight, since the lock system incentivizes banking combo points for niche cases where one is required to break a lock. It’s also worth mentioning that while there are a significant number of combo moves, there’s a lot of functional overlap where the only difference is the type of damage being dealt by the move. The same can also be said about both normal skills and ultimate abilities. This lack of variety in skills is simply another example of a baffling design choice that I can only reconcile in my head as a misguided method of limiting the number of “keys” available to the player since having too many would make breaking locks trivial.

The result of the lock system and lack of variety in combat options means that every combat encounter boringly plays out the same way. Every fight in the game devolves into the first phase of Ganon from Ocarina of Time, just spam your ping pong moonerang at every enemy and boss until they die, occasionally healing when you take too much damage and occasionally breaking locks whenever they pop up. The combat system just boils down to rote RPG number shouting where occasionally the game will display a series of moves it wants you to do, which you then do. The action command minigames get boring very quickly as they often feel like they take too long and often lack variety, and ultimate animations similarly get repetitive and boring. Fights start feeling slow by the fifth hour of the game, and combat doesn’t get any less boring even by the 20th or 30th hour.

Story:
There are various aspects of the story that bothered me, ranging from core issues to personal nitpicks. It’s honestly hard to know where to even begin, but I suppose I’ll start by saying that while I’ve tried to keep the rest of the review relatively spoiler-free, in this section I’ll be going over specific story sections of the game that didn’t work for me, up to and including the true ending.

The problems I had with the introduction of the story might be the best place to start with. The sequence is structured very strangely, starting with Zale and Valere exploring and scaling a mountain, fighting off some enemies. While seemingly simple, I found myself enjoying the fact that Sea of Stars had wasted no time getting me into the core gameplay. Unfortunately for me, this quick introduction turned out to be misleading, as our protagonists quickly go into flashback mode to start the actual introduction, which is just about as boring as they get. The most bizarre aspect of the intro that rubbed me the wrong way is the fact that the flashback recounts literally every major event in the characters' lives up to the point we just played where they’re scaling the mountain. The normal purpose of a flashback is to inform/remind the audience of some key event that took place in the past that holds some relevance to the current situation, and while this is partially true for the flashback at the start of the game, the fact that it fills in the entirety of the backstory of the main characters just makes me wonder why it was a flashback in the first place. The way I see it, the flashback in the intro would be narratively equivalent to simply starting the game off with the characters as kids and going through the story chronologically. It leads me to wonder why the game even bothered to structure it as a flashback since the only thing that the flashback sequence did was annoy me by taking me away from the gameplay in favor of a boring introduction. It feels like the developers were aware that their introduction was drawn-out and boring, but rather than put effort into crafting a more effective introductory sequence they just decided to splice in a gameplay segment at the very beginning to placate players. It’s funny then, that this decision had the exact opposite effect on me.

There’s also the weirdness surrounding Zale and Valere’s relationship with Garl. The introductory sequence includes a section where the three of them, as kids, wander off into a dangerous area, and as a result, Garl loses an eye. Immediately after this moment, Zale and Valere are separated from Garl to start their training as Solstice Warriors, and they don’t interact with each other for years. The game even makes a point of mentioning that Garl isn’t present for the send-off ceremony for Zale and Valere. To me, this all felt like a setup for a story about reforging bonds with childhood friends that you haven’t spoken to in years. Cut back to the present day, and Garl jumps out of the bush that our protagonists are camping next to, and they’re all buddy-buddy like nothing ever happened. The most baffling part of this moment isn’t even the fact that Garl just so happens to be in the bush that Zale and Valere were camping next to. The game is a fantastical RPG with a lighthearted tone and fun characters, obviously some moments are going to willingly sacrifice realism for the sake of a fun gag or a wholesome moment, the game would be worse off without these sorts of moments. The problem with this one in particular is that it feels like it throws away a lot of genuinely intriguing and seemingly intentional setup. It’s natural to assume that the relationship between two people that haven’t seen each other since kids isn’t going to be the same, and the game even goes out of its way to imply this. Garl getting injured as a result of their shenanigans holds no narrative weight here, and it almost feels like the game forgot that it happened. The real reason that the game showed this moment to us doesn’t occur until much later in the story, and even then it damages this introductory moment much more than it supports that later moment. You could argue that perhaps my expectations and predictions as to where the story was going to go is the reason why this moment didn’t work for me, but in my opinion, that’s exactly the problem with the story in Sea of Stars; a good story rewards the audience for paying attention and thinking about the situations it presents, but Sea of Stars often punished me for putting thought into its story.

Annoying introductory sequence aside, one aspect of the story where this rang true in particular was the game’s incessant use of blatant foreshadowing, all too often contextualized as prophecies. One funny example of this is when the Elder Mist gives Valere her prophecy: “When the time comes, you will be the one to create paths on water”. Not only did this one feel comically videogame-y compared to Zale’s prophecy about “confronting the darkness within him”, but Valere also seems very confused about the meaning of this prophecy. “He said I might be able to ‘create paths on water.’ What does that even mean?” she asks. Not only does the prophecy lack any subtlety or intrigue, but the game feels the need to have its characters pretend like the meaning of it is cryptic and indiscernible. I don’t even really know what to say about this moment, it feels so blatantly stupid that part of me is suspicious that it was some self-aware joke that didn’t land, but judging by the tone of that scene in particular I doubt that was the case. Spoiler alert, later in the game two islands need to be connected with a bridge that Valere makes out of water. Valere conveniently awakens this power at this moment so that the plot can progress, and then the ability to make bridges out of water is never acknowledged again. The only reason the game felt it necessary to prophesize this moment was to explain why Valere is randomly able to awaken this ability at such a convenient time. Prophesying your future plot conveniences doesn’t make them any less convenient. It’s a bandage fix for lazy storytelling that just failed to land for me.

As comical as I found Valere’s prophecy, ultimately it was thinking about Zale’s prophecy that did the most damage to the story for me. In the same conversation where the two protagonists are discussing the cryptic nature of Valere’s prophecy, Zale mentions that he believes that the “night inside of him” refers to the thought of losing a loved one. He comes to this conclusion due to how he felt when Garl got mind-controlled by the Dweller on the island they were staying on. He mentions how he felt the power but couldn’t actualize it, and at this point it became all too clear to me where the plot was headed. Garl was now marked for death by the game, and it was just a matter of waiting for when it would happen. When the moment finally came I couldn’t experience it as the huge emotional moment that the game wanted it to be, at best I could only appreciate what the game was trying to do, but the foreshadowing to this moment ultimately meant that this key moment in the story failed to have any impact on me. It’s what I was talking about when I said that Sea of Stars punished me for putting thought into its story. Maybe there’s an alternate reality where I skimmed over this foreshadowing and found myself surprised that the game was willing to kill off one of its main characters, but unfortunately I’ll never get to experience that.

The real tragedy is the fact that such moments of foreshadowing even affected my opinion of my story as much as they did. Foreshadowing is conventionally considered a good thing in most stories, but in Sea of Stars it works to its detriment since the only thing that the story of Sea of Stars has to offer are its twists. I recently watched Uncut Gems, a movie which succeeds on many different fronts but one point I’d like to make in particular is just how invested I was with the protagonist despite the fact that I had correctly predicted their fate. In that movie, the further along the plot progresses and the tension rises, the more and more obvious it becomes that there’s really only one way it can properly end, and yet when the climax of the film finally reaches its breaking point it still feels wonderfully impactful and cathartic. The fact that I knew what would happen to the protagonist at the end of the movie didn’t change my enjoyment of the film whatsoever. All of this being my convoluted way of saying that the journey matters more than the destination, and that ultimately the fact that I saw many of the twists in Sea of Stars coming shouldn’t have affected my experience as much as it did. It speaks to how little substance the story has outside of the shock value found in specific moments designed to wow the audience. Viewed through this lens, my complaints about story moments being predictable are relatively petty, but then we’re left with the question of why the journey taken through certain key moments is so ineffective.

I think it comes down to the simple fact that it feels like the story was written solely for the sake of specific key moments at the cost of all else, the writers would put the cart before the horse by coming up with a twist before determining how the story would lead up to the twist. One obvious example of this is one of the first major ones the story throws at you: Erlina and Brugave’s betrayal. At this point in the game I think most players will realize that some sort of incident has to happen here to prevent it from prematurely ending, but what they went for here just makes no sense. While I can somewhat understand the motivation of the two of them not wanting their destinies to be predetermined and their resentment of their status as Solstice Warriors, the conclusion they come to as a result of this makes so little sense that I doubt I even really have to explain it in much depth. They dislike their responsibility to deal with The Fleshmancer and the Dwellers so they join the side of the people wreaking havoc and evil upon the world? The game even goes out of its way to try to explain their motivations better but it makes even less sense. There’s a flashback to Erlina and Brugaves as young Solstice Warriors, highlighting a key moment in their life when all their Solstice Warrior peers and mentors leave Mooncradle to fight a powerful Dweller, and all of them are slain except for Moraine. The way it’s written makes it seem like a hero origin story, where seeing their loved ones fall to the great evil strengthens their motivation to fight against it, but instead it’s framed as the justification for why they join the great evil. I get why they’d accept the offer that the Fleshmancer acolytes gave them but I don’t understand why approaching them in the first place made more sense than just running off or just ignoring their duty. It just doesn’t make sense, I think it’s maybe kind of implied that Erlina was always evil and Brugaves was being dragged around by her, but if that was the case they could’ve made it more clear. It’s such a baffling story choice that highlights the developers' goals with the storytelling. Having this betrayal moment was more important to them than writing realistic character motivations, and this misguided prioritization does nothing but hurt my perception of the characters and the world. How am I supposed to take anything in this story seriously?

Not to mention, the betrayal is initially introduced as a fake-out twist where it looks like Serai is trying to stop Brugaves from obliterating the core of the Dweller that was just defeated. Again, it feels like the storytellers just wanted to put in a fake-out twist for shock value without considering the story implications. Serai stopping Brugaves at this moment implies that somehow Serai found out that Erlina and Brugaves were planning on betraying the Solstice Warriors (it’s never explained how she knew), and for some reason she didn’t warn Zale and Valere during their time together while looking for and defeating the Botanical Horror? Am I supposed to believe that in the space of time between Serai leaving the party and when she comes back in later to stop Brugaves she somehow found out about the betrayal? How could she have found out if Erlina and Brugaves were with the rest of the gang nearly the whole time? I know I sound nitpicky here, but I’m highlighting this since it’s yet another example of imbalanced priorities in the storytelling. The writers didn’t put thought into the implications of the fake-out twist, and again, it makes the story harder to take seriously.

A good chunk of the issue I take with this story also comes from how boring I found most of the characters. While there are a lot of fun personalities within the cast of this game there’s just too little depth in the story's main characters for me to care about any of them. I doubt anyone would argue against the fact that Zale and Valere are completely boring blank slates, which was likely due to the developers deciding to make their dialogue interchangeable depending on who the player decided to lead their party with. While I kind of thought Garl was kind of cool at the start, the more I played, and especially after I realized that he would die, I started to become really annoyed at how much the game was insisting on how nice of a person he was. The game just can’t help but constantly remind the player that Garl is a nice person that everyone likes, and there was a point where I started to get annoyed by it. His cheery attitude isn’t even an interesting contrast to a bleak world (even post-Dweller apocalypse), everyone in this world is kind and polite and hopeful, so much so that even in a haunted depressed town the residents are only indifferent towards you at worst. He’s a kind soul in a world completely inhabited by kind souls that typically occupy similar idyllic RPG settings, and so the writers must make him distinct by cranking up his kindness to 11. There’s a point where Garl stops feeling like a character and starts feeling more like a caricature, and this is a big reason why his death scene had no impact on me. The game is so desperate to make you like Garl so that his death scene feels impactful, but for me, it just looped back around to pure indifference, even resentment, towards him. The writer’s intent with this character was just so transparent I could never see him as a character, just as some sacrificial lamb to be killed off for story impact.

The thing is, Garl’s death scene is genuinely written in a very creative and interesting way. Just before Garl is hit with the shot that will eventually kill him, Resh’an freezes time and has a conversation with Aephorul. It’s a pretty effective moment that revels in its dramatic irony and fleshes out the interesting and complex relationship between Resh’an and Aephorul, and it even manages to fit in a fun tie-in with The Messenger without it feeling forced. It’s a shame that this moment felt retroactively ruined for me when it's later revealed that this was all set up for the writers to bring Garl back to life for the true ending of the game. This moment failed for me not only because I didn’t care that much for Garl, but also because it represents the storytelling not having the balls to live with the consequences of its decisions. The game wants to have its cake and eat it too; it wants you to feel sad when Garl is killed off, but it doesn’t want Garl to be permanently removed from the story. Do the storytellers not understand that character deaths are impactful due to the knowledge that they can’t magically be revived? That death without permanent consequence holds no weight? It’s not like he even does anything once he comes back, he just fulfills his wish to eat at the Golden Pelican and then convinces Aephorul to fight the main cast by being rude to him. The already weak story changes from one about characters overcoming their grief for the greater good to one about a bunch of kids using the power of friendship to kill a god. It’s amazing how the writers managed to make their poorly written story even more boring and generic.

Admittedly, the relationship between Resh’an and Aephorul is something I found to be genuinely interesting, but unfortunately it isn’t developed that fully and leads to another issue that drained me of the last bit of investment I had in the plot of the game. The thing is, the story isn’t actually about Zale and Valere versus The Fleshmancer, this conflict is microscopic compared to the one that is revealed later as a conflict between Resh’an and Aephorul that spans several timelines and dimensions. As a result of learning about this bigger conflict in the world, suddenly the conflict between the protagonists and The Fleshmancer within their own world feels small and petty in comparison. It became impossible to be invested in anything but Resh’an and Aephorul’s conflict, but this aspect of the story just isn’t developed enough in comparison to Zale and Valere’s comparatively small conflict. Before the end of the game, Resh’an just straight up leaves the party as a result of a new revelation about Aephorul he makes, since he needs to “return to the archives and run more models.” You’d think he’d come back at some point with his new learnings and revelations, but he doesn’t show up again until the end of the game, where in both endings he comes back just to leave with Aephorul. It’s such a bizarre choice, like the writers just got tired of writing dialogue for him and arbitrarily took him out of the story for some reason, despite this aspect of the story being the most interesting part for me. Nothing about his character arc ends in any conclusive matter, it’s just plain disappointing.

Weirdly enough, this problem of characters just kind of exiting the story for seemingly no real reason didn’t just apply to Resh’an. The way they handled Elder Moraine felt similar, like they just got tired of writing his character and so just demoted him to NPC status. The four Fleshmancer acolytes that were the main source of conflict in the first half of the game also just kind of disappear, they’re all presumably still at large by the time the credits roll. It’s bizarre, to say the least, and I honestly can’t think of any good reason for these characters to have their stories so abruptly and unceremoniously cut off.

Pivoting back around to the ending of the game, it’s saddening how anticlimactic both endings felt for me. In both endings, the protagonists fight and defeat a big evil being, which prompts Resh’an to come back and leave with Aephorul, and then Zale and Valere ascend to Guardian Gods and kill a World Eater in a jarring shift to shoot-em-up gameplay. I think a lot of the lack of impact of this ending is a result of the knowledge of the larger-scale conflict between Aephorul and Resh’an. After you defeat the great evil, even though Aephorul is not dead, the game congratulates you and rolls the credits. Even in the true ending when you actually fight and defeat Aephorul, Resh’an just takes him away and the audience is left wondering what’s changed as a result of his defeat since the World Eater still comes and everything else plays out the same way, except Garl is now alive. I think the lack of impact could’ve been mitigated had the game better explained the implications of the Solstice Warriors ascending to Guardian Gods, since what the ascension entails is kept very vague. If the ascension was perhaps better explained to have a notably tangible positive effect on the world and other worlds, I could remain satisfied with the ending resulting in them ascending, but from the way it looks they just kind of shoot off into space, kill one World Eater, then just fly around for the rest of time. As a result of the unclear implications of ascending to Guardian Gods the ending doesn’t represent a great victory for the heroes, it’s just yet another thing the game said would happen that’s currently happening. For all I know, multitudes of other worlds are currently being ravaged by Aephorul as a result of the fact that he never truly dies. It lacks both narrative and emotional impact, and unfortunately, it fails to stick the landing in any satisfactory way.

Overall:
You might argue that many of the points I brought up as criticisms are petty and nitpicky, and I would have to agree. No individual complaint I had about the game was the smoking gun revealing why I didn’t have a good time with it, but my problem with Sea of Stars ultimately lies in the fact that there’s not a single aspect of the game that lived up to any sort of standards, the game is less than the sum of its mediocre parts. No amount of pretty pixel art, decent music, or cool “wow” moments in the game will fix the fact that there’s just nothing noteworthy about the gameplay and story. It’s style over substance, and it failed to capture the magic that I felt when playing through The Messenger. While fans of JRPGs may find a lot more fun in this game than I did, unfortunately, Sea of Stars is just one of those JRPGs that makes me think I hate JRPGs. It always hurts a little when a game that I want to love turns out to be a disappointment.

Misc:
Here’s a list of nitpicks that felt difficult to naturally fit into the review. The review is already way too long but I’m choosing to include these for the sake of being thorough. The depth of my disappointment with this game just needs to be expressed on this website.
- The game splices in short animated cutscenes in moments it deems important. While these cutscenes are very well made, the art style sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the pixel graphics, and these cutscenes are often too brief for their existence to feel justified. You’ll quickly cut to a 2-second cutscene of Brugaves and Erlina waving at the main characters before cutting back to the pixel art graphics. It always felt jarring and out of place, not to mention that the important moments that the game chooses to show always feel arbitrary. There were many moments when I wondered why there was a cutscene to introduce it and many other moments where it felt like the kind of scene that would justify a cutscene that just didn’t happen. It’s a lot of effort put into something that I think made the game worse off.
- Exploring the world there are lots of subtle animations and lighting that make it feel more alive, but ironically enough the humans in this game are the least lively part of the game. While some of them wander around, too many NPCs are just placed in the center of the building they occupy, staring at their door, waiting for the player to interact with them. Not to mention, talking to all the NPCs in a town reveals them to be part of some hivemind with how often their separate dialogues are just rewordings of the same statement.
- With only a few exceptions most enemy weaknesses and resistances to certain types of damage felt like they didn’t follow any conventional wisdom (that I could discern, maybe I’m just dumb). Discovering enemy type weaknesses is often a matter of trial and error, but even after learning enemy weaknesses I’d often simply forget just because there’s no discernable logic behind them in the first place.
- The one notable exception to the above problem is that Fleshmancer enemies are always weak to solar and lunar damage. Even though these enemies should be the most intimidating ones in the game, this simple fact means that many encounters with them will be dealt with in one turn through the use of moonerang or Zale’s flame dash whatever move. Their strong resistance to everything else also led to a funny moment where I used Vespertine cannons on a Dweller, which I believe has the longest animation of the ultimates, and it would deal only 10 damage. This wasn’t a one-off thing either, it happened a few times throughout my playthrough since there’s a decent chunk of time when Vespertine cannons is the only ultimate move available to use.
- I briefly touched on it in the combat section but I’d just like to emphasize that there’s just way too many healing options between all the party members. Zale can heal, Valere can group heal, Garl can heal, Resh’an can heal, B’st can heal, there’s a combo move that will full heal, and Resh’an’s ultimate full heals. It’s so excessive, there is almost never any risk of dying, even in late-game fights where bosses have moves that just set your HP to 1.
- The Wheels minigame is 10 times more fun than normal combat.
- The moment when Serai grabs the Vial of Time off of Resh’an and throws it at the Dweller of Strife annoys me. The implications of Resh’an being involved in the conflict were clearly explained but Serai makes this dumb decision regardless and it directly leads to Garl’s death. Resh’an doesn’t even really make any physical effort to stop her. It’s not awful, I guess, I can kind of understand why Serai would do it, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
- There’s the whole cutscene/sequence with the funeral whatnot after Garl dies for real, and it felt a bit tone-deaf for the sequence to end with a pop-up textbox accompanied by a jingle telling us that the main characters have now learned their ultimate abilities. It felt kind of emphasized by the fact that the jingle causes the somber music to completely cut out before it fades back in.
- It feels like the game often forgets that you have two party members who have demonstrated that they can create instant warp portals to other locations. Apart from the fact that the whole “portal ninja” concept for Serai feels underutilized in her kit (there’s just so much creative potential that just isn’t tapped into with her concept), it feels like there should’ve been some explanation as to why we can’t use Serai or Resh’an’s portals to fast travel or unlock new shortcuts around the overworld. It feels like too obvious of a solution for the game not to acknowledge it in some form.
- Serai has the big reveal when she turns out to be a cyborg, but I can’t think of any reasonable explanation as to why she had to keep this information from the others. You’d think that informing them about her situation would help her achieve her goals but she just kind of tags along with the gang, never mentioning needing help until the protagonist's journey just so happens to take them to her world. I guess she somehow knew that they would eventually end up in her world? How'd she even travel between worlds to begin with? Did I miss something in the story explaining this?
- The revival of the Dweller of Strife felt like it was supposed to be a big turning point in the story, this was the being that killed off every Solstice Warrior except for Brugaves, Erlina, and Moraine. We even see Brisk being destroyed by meteors, but a few cutscenes later everything is fine with the world. Even Brisk goes back to normal pretty quickly. The world just isn’t altered in any meaningful way and there is no sense of urgency in progressing the main quest.
- The giant golem being named “Y’eet”, the existence of “Jirard the Constructionist”, and various other weird jokes were intentionally put in the game by the devs to kill me on the spot for saying bad things about their game.
- Lots of games have obligatory Kickstarter rooms, having them is not inherently a problem. The game going out of its way to force you to enter the Kickstarter room is a problem however since it tricks the player into thinking there’s something worthwhile to discover. All the build-up to entering the crypt for the first time builds up intrigue that turns into disappointment when it is discovered that the crypt is just Kickstarter messages.
- There’s probably something to be said about how I spent almost every spare hour I had post-launch playing this game despite how many issues I had with it. I suppose in lots of ways the game was “good enough” to play, but I think part of me was powering through out of pure spite.

After playing this one I went back to my score on Pikmin 1 and raised it from a 7/10 to an 8/10. Looking back on it, the annoyances I had with the controls and the AI in that game feel very minor in comparison to everything that it does right. Many of the issues present in Pikmin 4 honestly helped me to better appreciate just how little the original game got wrong in comparison.

The funny thing is, despite the issues I have with Pikmin 4 I'd still consider it to be my second favorite in the franchise (though this may admittedly be recency bias). The core gameplay loop is still as fun as its always been, and the game boasts much more content than any of the previous three games. It reincorporates and improves upon ideas from Pikmin 2 in particular, removing a lot of the aspects of Pikmin 2 that made that game annoying.

My biggest gripe with Pikmin 4 is that it butchers atmosphere and mood like none of the games have ever done. While 2 and 3 never quite reached the heights of 1 in my opinion, the atmosphere in those games works well for each respective game. Pikmin 2 leaned into more comedic elements which works well for that game, and Pikmin 3 had a unique blend of 1's seriousness and 2's humor. I couldn't really tell you what's going on in Pikmin 4 however. The best way I can describe it is that Pikmin 4 feels less like a Pikmin game and more like a Nintendo game; it felt less like I was exploring an alien planet, and more like I was playing a video game. It felt nearly impossible to get immersed in the world of Pikmin 4 in the same way I did in the previous games.

You can feel the Nintendo-ification of Pikmin 4 from the very start of the game, with its overly long tutorial that goes for way too long. And while the previous games also had decently long tutorial sections, at least in those two it felt like you were actually playing a game since you gain access to pikmin pretty much immediately. In Pikmin 4, after the initial section with Olimar, too much time is spent in the tutorial listening to boring characters talk while you learn all the intricacies of controlling your new pet partner Oatchi instead of playing with pikmin. Funnily enough, this emphasis on Oatchi in the tutorial feels like unintentional foreshadowing to how combat plays out in the rest of the game.

Those boring characters don't stop talking once the tutorial is done however, and the way they force themselves into the game right up to the very end contributes a lot to how wrong the atmosphere is in this game compared to the others. All of your rescue crew feels the need to comment on everything you do throughout the game with annoying pop-up reminders to use your survey drone and not-so-subtle suggestions to use their new rewind time feature whenever more than 3 pikmin die in a fight. In Pikmin 2 the tutorial messages that come up throughout the game are very infrequent compared to 4. The Hocotate ship would only interrupt you once the first time something unique happens and never again. It also helps that the Hocotate ship is intentionally written to be a bit of a snarky asshole, so being annoyed by the ship feels like the intended emotional response the developers were going for, while still being able to provide tutorial information. In Pikmin 3, the pop up messages are much more infrequent and are less egregious due to how the characters talking are actually present in the situations they are talking about. To me, that is the key difference that makes Pikmin 4's characters so insufferable. They constantly backseat you with information that you already know without ever actually being present in the gameplay, with the keyword being backseating. It feels like playing with a little sibling sitting with you that comments on every little thing you should be doing instead, like when a Twitch streamer gets annoyed at their chat for complaining about the way they're playing their game. The annoyingly talkative cast of the game is only emphasized by the fact that our protagonist is of the silent variety. There's no back and forth between our character and the other characters, no relationship, no personality; when Russ reminds you to use the night radar to track creatures for the sixth time in a row, it's made all the more annoying and condescending since he's talking to you, the player, and not the character you are controlling.

My annoyances with the characters are indicative of a larger issue that affects both Pikmin 4 and Nintendo games as a whole. It's obvious that the only reason the characters talk the way they do is for the kids. I'm sure that everyone who has played and enjoyed Nintendo games is aware of the trend of modern Nintendo games being needlessly handholdy and baby-proofed. Pikmin 4 is no exception to this trend. There's the aforementioned tutorialization of the entire game via the NPCs, the addition of purchasable single-use items to make combat easier, the awkward auto-lock on, how the game stops you from throwing more than the minimum number of pikmin to carry something, how Oatchi's rush trivializes all combat encounters. All of these examples only serve to emphasize this idea of excessive accessibility. I understand that Nintendo is trying to appeal to a broader audience with these changes but that doesn't make me any less disappointed and annoyed by these changes.

Anyway, since I've kind of gone over my main point/issue with Pikmin 4, here's some scattered thoughts/criticisms/praises organized similarly to my other Pikmin reviews:
- The dandori challenges/battles being integrated into the overworld were interesting. These gamemodes were relegated to side content in previous games but they added a lot (mission mode in Pikmin 3 in particular raised my opinion of that game quite a bit actually). As fun as they are, they felt a bit out of place and broke immersion for me.
- Related to the above, there's a weird disconnect between the lack of any time limit and the game's insistence on the importance of dandori. I don't consider the lack of time limit to be a massive issue in Pikmin 2 because I see it as a shift from strategy to combat/exploration, but now Pikmin 4 is insisting that strategy is a big deal in the game when the lack of a time limit suggests otherwise. The only times when dandori actually matters are during the dandori challenges/battles, and Olimar's tale (which I found to be very fun).
- While combat was boringly easy throughout, there were some surprisingly difficult and fun dandori challenges. Nothing vastly crazier than some of the harder missions in Pikmin 3 but overall the dandori challenges themselves were fun and well designed.
- The night missions always felt so one dimensional, they're kinda neat the first couple of times but they lack the depth to be consistently enjoyable. Every single night mission played out the exact same way: throw glow pikmin and piles of star bits, station your captain and dog next to lumiknolls, and hold X to win. They always felt like an obligatory interruption to the main game that I actually wanted to play.
- Lots of new mechanics in this game feel so videogamey in a way I don't like, my immersion is constantly broken by reminders that I am playing a capital V video game. Was anyone asking for sidequests in Pikmin? Why are upgrades bought with currency? Bosses dropping unique upgrades in Pikmin 2 was a lot of fun in that game because you always had something to look forward to at the end of a cave (even if the upgrade wasn't the craziest thing). Even the main goals are tied to quests that play a fanfare and check a box whenever you complete them.
- Caves were cool in Pikmin 2 because they were gauntlet-style endurance tests where if you lose pikmin, you can't just sprout more of them. In Pikmin 4, abandoning a cave doesn't forfeit treasures gained during the expedition, and when you return to a cave you can select any previously explored sublevel to immediately go to, which kinda makes what caves mechanically interesting in Pikmin 2 kinda moot. I guess the only reason for caves to exist now is to provide the player with smaller-scale challenges and areas to explore sequentially.
- In the previous point I suggest that caves mechanically don't add anything to the game since you can now theoretically just leave and come back with more pikmin if you lose any. However due to the rewind feature you would never actually do that if you lost a lot of pikmin.
- In the previous point I suggest that if you lost a lot of pikmin you could use the rewind feature. However, Oatchi dumbs down combat to the point where its unlikely you'll ever lose enough pikmin to feel the need to use the feature.
- From what I can tell caves are no longer randomized. I don't think randomization added that much intrigue to the caves in Pikmin 2, so the lack of randomization means that some caves have some unique puzzles that span the entire subfloor rather than puzzles just being localized in a single room like in 2.
- However lack of randomization didn't really add a lot either. Half the cave layouts feel like they were generated by a computer regardless, and only a few puzzles in the caves actually felt particularly interesting. Similarly to Pikmin 2, the longer I spent playing the caves the more boring they got since there were less and less unique enemies and concepts they could introduce to me.
- I'm not a professional game designer by any means, but the more I think about it the more I like the idea of making it so that Oatchi can't go in caves. Obviously the design of some sublevels would have to be modified, but it would make caves and the enemy/boss encounters inside of them feel more unique, and dangerous.
- Oatchi is pretty cool conceptually. He acts as an additional captain enabling more dandori options and multitasking with the additional gimmick that he can also help pikmin out with tasks. The only major flaw with him is just that he can carry any number of pikmin on his back, which just kills the risk/reward dynamic of bringing a large group of pikmin to a combat encounter. With Oatchi, it's all reward, no risk.
- Having all the pikmin types available was kinda cool but so many of them feel so underutilized that it feels like they did it more as a fanservice thing than anything else.
- They did the lineup trumpet kinda dirty with how late in the game is shows up. It kinda felt like another fanservice addition that wasn't actually thought out. The charge whistle is so overpowered that the lineup whistle is made irrelevant far far before you can unlock it.
- The idler's alert is crazy. It's dumb for all the reasons that the "Assemble All" command in 3 deluxe is dumb (which also returns in the form of a purchasable upgrade). I felt that all the dandori challenges I underperformed on was due to me not abusing it enough.
- Kinda related, it feels like dandori challenges/battles maybe should have had a set amount of upgrades that would always be the same, since many upgrades make the challenges objectively easier, meaning that winning/losing is affected by factors other than dandori.
- The first time I saw a giant yellow wollywog in the trailer I thought it was pretty funny, and then it was the final boss of a cave and I was like "huh, really?". And then more and more "new" enemies were just normal enemies that got scaled up, and I just got more annoyed the more it happened. Sure, some of them had slightly different movesets but it just felt so lazy. How many of the new enemies added are actually new, and how many are slight variants on old enemies?
- Am I the only one who feels like pikmin AI got worse from 3 to 4? There are a few caves where the game wants you to drop down from a higher ledge to a lower one while dismounted from Oatchi, and I swear every time this happened at least five pikmin would just jump into the void for fun and die.
- Winged pikmin also definitely got more stupid and refuse to take obvious shortcuts through the air. In any use case where they weren't strictly required I would prefer to use white pikmin to quickly transport objects.
- When throwing pikmin onto an object to get them to pick it up there were so many cases when one pikmin couldn't quite run to the exact pixel the game wanted (due to the object being too close to a wall/enemy corpse) and thus the pikmin would eventually refuse to help pick the object up. This wasn't an issue in older games since you could throw more pikmin than required onto an object to subvert this issue, while this game just really really hates whenever you try to do that. Just felt really janky considering this is the newest entry in the series.
- The game hands out ultra-spicy spray like candy. I had like 33 spare by the time I got to the final boss, and pretty much never had my pikmin farm burgeoning spiderworts. Just got them naturally from eggs and popping frozen enemy pinatas.
- Final boss was simultaneously cool and disappointing at the same time. For what I thought was cool, it was one of the only interesting fights in the entire game since it felt like one of the only ones designed with the existence of Oatchi in mind. So many difficult bosses returned from previous games just to be trivialized by all 100 of your pikmin being bundled up on this dog rather than trailing behind you. This one was a nice change of pace, and felt much less cheesable than some of the final bosses in the previous games.
- On the other hand, it thematically felt very lame. Since the "gimmick" of Pikmin 4 is that there's a dog, the final boss must be a dog but evil I guess. I had a lot of high expectations due to the way things were being set up at the start. The introduction section with Olimar and the pikmin behaving abnormally when entering the house honestly filled me with a lot of intrigue. I was wondering what kind of cool, otherworldly force of nature we were dealing with in this game, perhaps akin to the wraiths/the smoky progg from the previous games. When the answer is revealed, turns out it was just some gold salamander miniboss that the player likely has already fought in the same area, and I felt a little let down as I thought the answer would be related to the final boss. I maybe hyped myself up a bit too much but I couldn't help but be disappointed by the final boss just being a big scary dog. Perhaps I wouldn't have felt this way if this game had introduced it's own unique otherworldly creature like the other games (Smoky Progg, Water Wraith, Plasm Wraith).
- On the other other hand Groovy Long Legs is maybe the best boss in any video game ever.

Anyways I've already written a lot already. This game is massive so there's definitely some stuff I forgot to mention that I wanted to talk about but whatever. Despite all of my criticisms I enjoyed the game a lot, the core gameplay loop is so unique and fun that all the complaints I have are pretty petty in comparison. With that being said I can't say I necessarily agree with all the 10/10, 5 star reviews I'm seeing here. 10 years from now, when Pikmin 5 is about to release, I feel like people are going to shit on this one the same way people were shitting on Pikmin 3 just before the launch of 4. I can't help but feel that fans would've been happy with anything that wasn't Hey Pikmin, and all the high ratings really deny the fact that there was a lot of room for improvement in this game. At the end of the day I really loved this game, but everything I loved about it was stuff borrowed from previous entries in the series, while almost everything new that this game introduced fell short of expectations.