Sea Of Stars review: a slick RPG that harks back to the Chrono Trigger classics

rockpapershotgun.com:

Many attempts have been made to recapture the JRPG's glory days. In Tokyo RPG Factory, Square Enix founded a whole studio dedicated to the craft, and more recently Squeenix's "HD-2D" style has come to define both their own retro work and that of others. But it's arguably the RPGs from outside Japan that have been doing a better job of propping up the SNES nostalgia tent. Last year's Jack Move and Chained Echoes were both infinitely more refreshing to me than the slightly tired Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler sequels, for example, and now we have The Messenger studio's latest, Sea Of Stars, which is probably one of the few Japanese-inspired RPGs I've played in the last decade that's even come close to bottling the mighty Chrono Trigger and lived to tell the tale. If you're the sort to cry, 'They just don't make 'em like they used to anymore', well, you can dry your tears, because Sea Of Stars is the one that is.

This is a handsomely made RPG that follows Zale and Valere, two children of the Solstice who, due to their fortuitous birthdays on the celestial calendar, have been chosen to become magical, world-saving warriors. Their destiny is to cleanse the world of its evil Dweller monsters so the rest of humankind can continue to live in peace and harmony, and what follows is exactly the kind of grand, hero's journey fare you might expect. There are twists and turns aplenty as you cover the breadth of its island-based world map, relentlessly good and upbeat protagonists to befriend, and just a dash of fate-altering timey-wimeyness. It might not have the deep, narrative consequences of something like Chrono Trigger, but it moves along at a similarly decent clip, and maintains its momentum across its 30-odd hours much