Sea of Stars: Sunset Edition

Credit where credit is due: the pixel art is remarkable, world is rather pretty, and the music is solid. But DAMN, the writing is cheeks. Garl alone is absurdly annoying, constantly stealing the spotlight and having far too much dialogue despite being the definition of a bore. Also, how did NO ONE react to him losing an eye??? The writing is just plain bad, plain and simple. It tries to be cheeky or clever by referencing old RPGs and using established combat akin to both Chrono Trigger and Mario RPG, but fails on both fronts to succeed where they did due to the lack of options, variety, and intrigue. The "hardest difficulty" you can select is less of a challenge and more of a nuisance, with every battle sort of just dragging on as you do perfect blocks and hits, only for it to do a miniscule amount more damage. Then you heal, attack, and repeat. Forever. There's so little innovation or intrigue. The world is pretty, but feels empty. Characters feel insanely uninspired. It's linear (at least so far), which can work if there's a reason to go on, but I feel no urge so far. Putting this one down.

I wanted to love it. I played for more than 20 hours waiting for something interesting to happen, but unfortunately this game is boring, mainly because of writing, which is simply weak.

### 本来说是玩点精品 结果这个游戏甚至加重了我的电子ED

The world is beautiful, but the story is dull, and the combat, repetitive. I might have liked this when I was younger, but I don't have the patience for it these days.

I really wanted to love this game. I tried and tried, booted it up again, left it, picked it up again multiple times. But I just cant play it. The visuals are amazing, the designs really cool, the music is both nostalgic and really good, the combat is fun and sometimes challenging, it has good QoL. So then, what is the problem with this game? The writing. Its horrid. It makes visually appealing characters feel hollow and generic. It makes an interesting premise fail to hook the player's attention. It makes the world feel shallow. It makes the game go from a gem of its genre to a forgettable one. And it frustrates me a lot, because it feels like they genuinely put so much love on this game, on every aspect of it... Except the writing. Would it have killed you to take a writing class? Did you try your best to make the story and dialogues as boring and empty as possible? I dont understand it, how nobody on the dev team looked at the final product and thought "wow, this kinda sucks". Dont' wanna get much into specifics, but two moments pissed me off so much I think I have to mention them (I'll try to not spoil anything). - When you get to a certain city, a character starts continuously breaking the 4th wall with terrible, and I mean TERRIBLE jokes about RPG game tropes. On a main story cutscene. It broke my inmersion so fast and so hard I got genuinely angry. What a genuinely obnoxious and dumb character. But she is a supporting character. She sticks with you for a good while. Incredible. - More or less halfway trough the game, after an important event, and when the truth starts to be revealed to the players, you get a random encounter with two mysterious villains very important to the plot. The dialogue goes like this: + ITS YOU!!!! > Calm down heroes, we dont want to fight, we just want to talk. + Oh, you scared? > Oh, you feisty? > Anyway, we want you to retrieve the [THING]. + No > Oh, okay, then we fight you. [ Boss battle ] > You win this round. We leave. Dialogue ends. You retain control. ..... What the heck. The heroes get jumped by TWO PLOT RELEVANT ANTAGONISTS, and after surviving they act like nothing happened? Not a single comment???? Nobody?!??! A perfect opportunity to show the characters interact, express their oppinions, build their characters, wasted, like many others, just thrown into the trash. I cannot recommend this game, sorry. I would love to, but I can't.

Started out nicely. Then I came along some enemies which had a duplicate option. The problem is... they can duplicate infinitely. So if they spam the ability before you could get your AOE off... it's game over. Died once... fine. Beat the foe. Then i came across the same type of foe again and they duplicated like hell before i got a proper move off. Never played the game after this. Such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ huge design flaw.

It's a good game. I just don't like timed blocked inputs in my JRPG's.

Shut up, Garl.

I don't get how this game can have such high reviews, while beautiful and with great soundtrack this is probably the worst game I have ever played.

The characters, sprite art, music, exploration, and story are good, but the combat and surrounding systems really get in the way of reaching these experiences. There are lots of options to customize your difficulty, and the baseline difficulty can be fairly unforgiving; it feels like the combat mechanics were designed for single-target fights so trash with 4 enemies is far more dangerous than most boss fights (can easily die to random monsters if you aren’t careful). Beyond difficulty, the battles can be very repetitive and slow-paced, which doesn’t take long to start making the experience feel like it is dragging. To make this even worse, there is about 8 hours of gameplay before you unlock any new basic abilities beyond the ones you start with, and there is quite a bit of FOMO with stat selection on level-up. Maybe the DLC areas are better, but I got bored with it long before reaching these.