Review: Sea of Stars
Games like Chrono Trigger aged well, and Sabotage Studio knows as much. It’s evident in the open-world encounters, ambitious soundtrack, vivid environments, and even a few overarching plot ideas within Sea of Stars, the developer’s latest, classically-inspired RPG.
You can’t mention it without some combination of Japan’s RPG legacy greats coming up, and for good reason. Sea of Stars embraces the games that inspired it and the generations of roleplaying adventures that followed, creating a delightful mishmash that doesn’t fall into heavy-handed uses of do-you-remember-when moments. There’s clear adoration for the threads it’s woven together, but Sabotage Studio still crafted an experience memorable in its own right.
Admittedly, I’ve long managed an awkward push-and-pull relationship with games clearly crafted from nostalgia. Plenty of my favorites fall flat when they’re no longer contextualized by the original era. Some gameplay gimmicks lost their flavor somewhere between the ‘90s and today’s conveniences, while other tributes falter when revisiting the magic of some of those stories.
Right, I’m a sourpuss when it comes to some ham-fisted throwbacks. Perhaps that comes with trying one too many games that tease an ode to an old favorite, or maybe I just didn’t love a few of those games as much as I thought. Regardless, I’ve softened in the last year or so with my adoration for Chained Echoes and now Sea of Stars.
The tale begins with Valere, a staff-wielding monk aligned with the moon, and Zale, her blade-wielding counterpart with an affinity for the sun. Destiny marks them as Solstice Warriors, and that’s where Sea of Stars begins its traditional storytelling with a battle of good versus evil.
As kids, you’ll learn
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