Sea of Stars

Pros: - Audiovisually it's a fantastic experience. The pixel art and the music are beautiful - Combat mechanics are pretty cool; boosting and lock breaking gives it a strategic feel Cons: - Not enough depth to combat and equipment systems. Each character gets like 3 skills; this also makes the combat feel very repetitive because you're using the exact same skills in every encounter from the beginning of the game until the end. Additionally, combat feels dragged out because some skills like moonarang, which is super useful so you use it in every encounter, take very long to execute. When it comes to equipment almost all of them are straight stat boosts with no interesting qualities whatsoever. - The world-building is very poor and often doesn't make much sense. For example, there's the port town, Brisk. Visually, the town screams that it's a trading hub. Except if you progress far enough into the game to see the world map you'll find out they have no one to actually trade with! The other settlements either don't have ports or are otherwise inaccessible. The game is just filled with all these elements that don't really coexist with anything else in the same world and kind of do their own thing. - The story, the characters, the writing in general. They're awful. There's no other way to describe it. The dialogue is boring, the jokes are painful, too many of the characters are bland and none of the interesting characters get any meaningful screentime. The story is pretty generic, save for one or two interesting moments it just falls flat. The pacing is awful, there's a part where you'll just spend hours trudging through these seemingly neverending dungeons just to get to another dungeon so the story can continue. There's a sign near the beginning of the game that reads "This way to the GOAT boat" that made me want to alt f4 immediately. - But far and away my biggest gripe with this whole game is: Garl. Fuck this guy. He's supposed to be Joe Everyman, the guy with no special powers. So why does this sidekick best friend character get so much of the spotlight? He hogs every moment for himself; every bit of story-important dialogue is delivered by Garl, every important interaction with an elder or council or whatever it's Garl that does the talking. When the two chosen one main characters save some people, the people cheer for Garl. It's fucking ridiculous. And the worst part is all the characters love Garl. The entire main cast, all the side characters, just can't stop talking about how good of a guy he is. Hell the villians are probably categorised as evil in this world because they DON'T love Garl. The two main characters especially are so obsessed with Garl that he is all they talk about. When he's not there all they say is: "Oh how I miss Garl","I wish Garl was here","Garl would know what to do!","Remember that thing we did with Garl, best time of my life". And when he is there they go: "What would we do without you Garl?", "You're the best Garl!", "You're so right Garl", "Thank Garl you're here Garl". I'm fucking sick of it. I was convinced partway through that Garl was going to turn out to be the evil wizard final boss, that he's been emitting spores or something to make everyone fall in love with him. All so he could manipulate the heroes and take their moments of growth away from them, so they could never grow powerful enough to defeat him. But no, he's just genuinely a Gary Stu that can do no wrong and everybody loves him because he's the best. Fuck you Garl. I'm gonna go wash the taste of Garl's dick out of my mouth, and I suggest the writers do the same. 5/10 too much Garl

It's not a bad game, but I feel it's overrated, with a variety of issues. The story has tonal issues, being overly comedic with bad jokes when it's not suited. There's a lot of unnecessary backtracking too. Perhaps most egregious revolves around the bonus collectable item spread throughout the world. The location to get rewards for collecting them is rather tedious to get to, requiring retreading the same several areas over and over again to reach. This isn't helped by world map movement feeling a touch too slow. The powers of the sun and moon play an important part in the game's story, and early on you get the ability to change the time of day when standing in certain spots. However, despite this, it's really only used to focus beams of light to hit switches. NPCs don't react to time changes. Enemies aren't affected by the time of day. Your party's powers don't change based on whether it's day or night. Nothing. Only one area in the game is affected by the day/night cycle, so really, the biggest purpose it serves is to look pretty as it changes in real time. Which, admittedly it does. It's gorgeous watching the lighting change and seeing shadows smoothly shift. But from a gameplay perspective, there's a lot of missed potential. Again, not a horrible game, but way overrated.