- Tested on Nintendo Switch
- Code transmitted by the publisher
- Screens editors
- How long to beat announces 28 hours, I cracked after ten hours...
- It's always a dark omen when you wander on this site...
First conso macaron with the same value as the red label for Herta ham, Golden Joysticks Awards just rewarded Sea Of Stars right after his success at the Game Awards (other imposture of the middle). The title claims his love of the Japanese RPG. Behind his shimmering plastic and his licked animations, what is the value of the bariole role-playing role-play of the Québécois de Saboté studio? Hit Gut eye on a game that left on the tile after an endless opening without the slightest premise of ludo-narrative stakes.
Ostie, how beautiful!
Sdecree of Mana, Suikoden, Final Fantasy, EarthBound, Valkyrie Profile, Dragon Quest and so many other nuggets marvelled a whole generation of players before becoming unmatched references of the genre. More than thirty years after this bursting artistic, it is the season of the revivals with the excellent Star Ocean The second story R, Baten Kaitos or Mario RPG. It must be noted that nostalgia also satisfies the appetite of shareholders that the debonary quadra in pixel sickness. With such a legacy, contemporary outings are always carefully scrutinized. With its box straight out of the 9O years, the game caresses the croup of lovers of the golden age of the JRPG. But what is he hiding behind this tricky appearance?
Ah. Sea of Stars, it was expected as the messiah after the exuberance and insolence of the excellent The Messenger (or even our Interview) and its gameplay if chiseled. We are still looking for the relationship of the title after about ten hours of hard play. Today Thierry Boulanger holds the reins of the studio as CEO after the departure of Martin Brouard de Sabotage. From the beginning, he did not hide his will to realize a game inspired by Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG:
« Sea of Stars can be placed at the players on the same shelves as the games he inspired »
In Seo Of Stars, we find the composer Eric W. Brown and Yasunori Mitsuda, already behind the OST games Xenoblade. Argument marketing obliges, the casting was also targuing of the presence of Nobuo Uemastsu origin of the original soundtrack of the illustrious Chrono Trigger. Sea of Stars, it's a bit like the Rollingstones in concert, it throws some but it smells terrible like the tree today! In a few hours of play, the OST is of quality but does not surprise, while falling into the pitfall of the song that negates your brains in every fight. Damn, they're boring. If Sea Of Stars can boast of having a luxury coating, its playful content fry nothing. Explanations.
It's so boring!
First, five hours after a guaranteed game start without any stakes, we continue to spam the same two skillless attacks against insipid enemies. While inspired by RPG action paragons, where the turn-by-turn maintains a certain dynamism through defensive and offensive actions in real semi-time, Sea Of Stars never manages to draw a start of pleasure, the fault to a neglected gameplay.
Where Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga knew how to breathe a wind of madness and guarantee a precision clocker thanks to a remarkable visual and sound timing, the Sabotage game lacks nervousness and ambition. The permissivity of the animations harms the depth. Even worse, the same attacks where a boomerang ricoche ad eternam on enemies dynamite a gameplay under naphthalins. This is the case with the Moonerang heroin specialty for example. To recover other attacks and enjoy combinations in duo, it will take much too long. It's a taponing sting as they say in Quebec! Yes, Sea of Stars is radin and concentrates too much on accessory rather than the main one.
It's all the more bald for an RPG where the routine of fighting has to keep the player either a little bit in breath, or a well run system, or a gray gameplay, or both in the best of the worlds. The game also fails to stand out for its non-existent difficulty. Some gameplay options also show that developers lack confidence in their coredesign. It is thus possible to include an automatic care option after each fight as if the studio wanted to immediately sabotage its sensible kitchen mechanics allowing us to concoct valuable remedies. It's beautiful but so rebarbative. And yet the fights are so unstimulating that we eventually activate this helpful relic to move faster in history.
Tabernacle, do you have anything to tell?
On many aspects, Sea of Stars recalls Magical Starsign, another game of stunning beauty and inversely proportional to the boredom it aroused in the player. This RPG released on DS had at least the merit of exploiting the features of the double screen and generating impressive attacks that occupied all space. Apart from fighting, it looks like Sabotage is trying to keep the player awake by systematically doing something during world exploration. You often find yourself climbing, lying on a wall or jumping from a waterfall but never feeling the authenticity of a ultimately totally linear world. As if we had to simulate the even residual action in the face of the vacuum.
Let's not talk about the puzzles of pushing objects... Jonathan Blow will do a syncope! We chain them as a reminiscence of all these games without ideas that have always been copied without thinking for a second about the merits of their elementary bases. There was, however, room for more use of time mechanics to pass from day to night like mirror worlds of A Link to the Past. For all these reasons, repeatability will have led to the abandonment of the pursuit of adventure at the end of a small ten hours in flat encephalogram as a carpet, from both a playful and narrative point of view.
It's simple, at this level of adventure, our knights were still unable to see any threat in spite of their training of solstice GI. A cruel mistake in terms of writing, while at least one hoped to cling to the script after mourning the gameplay. It's simple in half the time on a JRPG like Star Ocean The Second Story R, I had already escaped a forced marriage, beaten the poor mobs turned into demons, wiped an earthquake and travelled all over the world to escape the Armageddon promised by destroyers of Freezer sauce planets! In Sea of Stars, I was still poking between two fights against caterpillars. It's not my war as they say!
Buddies first (or not)
In fact, it's almost the Harvest Moon JRPG and still the life of farmers was more crispy with engaging relationships between characters where Sea Of Stars Play the card at all costs. If Sea Of Stars is a « Love letter » At the JRPG, as we can read all over the world, it was written with Chat GPT so much organicity svanuit faced with so many good feelings. Even when the faithful companion loses an eye in front of a low-floor monster, his friends have nothing to shine about. Nice camaraderie! Although lightness has often been part of JRPG's general tone, it is not that gender does not have things to say.
It is even the tacit pact of any good role play. By locking in his trio of asepticated characters, Sea of Stars gives the impression of having nothing to tell, which is all the more embarrassing for a game that opens up on a storyteller who promises us mountains and wonders. With less internal changes, it is hard to understand this failure after the excellence of writing the tasty dialogues of The Messenger.
Then some may tell me that I'm not patient and that the frame is released after. We know how hard the beginnings of RPG are sometimes, but when you have the same month big calibers of the type Baten Kaitos, Star Ocean or Super Mario RPG, you can only be encouraged to pass your path for those who are hermetic to useless verbiage and gameplay. The others may find a fun-mouth between two sizes. Conformist on all levels, Sea of Stars has everything of the student who recrites his manual by heart but without any personality. A recital that will have simply repeated the master, the audacity less... Sea of Stars does nothing wrong but nothing good. Tabarnouche, what a disappointment! We wanted to love him so much.
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