Sea of Stars

 PC
User Score
7.4

Mixed or average reviews- based on 271 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 189 out of 271
  2. Mixed: 30 out of 271
  3. Negative: 52 out of 271

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  1. kjloma
    Sep 3, 2023
    0
    The game is slow and boring with nothing to highlight except for the soundtrack
  2. pervas
    Sep 6, 2023
    3
    No es un juego horroroso, pero tampoco nada especial, los gáficos estan bonitos y es soundtrack está ok, las historia es muy lenta y el combate se hace repetitvo demasiado pronto.
  3. Sammouse
    Aug 31, 2023
    4
    Just finished the game, including all the post game content, true ending etc.

    For the first half, I was definitely enjoying myself. Sure the writing is bad, the story is boring and the characters are.. yeah. But whatever - the game was making up for that in spades with it's charm, beautiful graphics and the combat still felt fresh and interesting to me. Traversing the world was    Just finished the game, including all the post game content, true ending etc.

    For the first half, I was definitely enjoying myself. Sure the writing is bad, the story is boring and the characters are.. yeah. But whatever - the game was making up for that in spades with it's charm, beautiful graphics and the combat still felt fresh and interesting to me. Traversing the world was wonderful, dungeons felt well crafted and I was excited for what would come next. The game promises you a lot in those first few hours.

    By the end though, unfortunately I feel like this is a 5/10 game at most. What you experienced in the first few hours of gameplay is what you will experience for the next 20 something hours, and it is painfully tedious.

    To break it down into points -

    Exploration.
    The game gives you this massive open world to explore, but all you can do is walk around. You aren't amply rewarded for going off the beaten path or backtracking when you have some new abilities to use. Everywhere is completely locked off and you are railroaded to do the main story for the most part. I wasted a good few hours exploring until I realised that it was best to just finish the story and just go back to get what I need for post-game content when everywhere is unlocked. There are no secrets to find or well hidden upgrades until the very end.

    Dungeons.
    As you progress through the game, you get more and more tools with the potential to make dungeons an interesting experience with varied, interesting puzzles. However, the puzzles seem to be made for people with a room-temperature IQ and end up mostly being variations of sliding some boxes across the floor repeated ad nauseum. Literally one of the "puzzles" about 70% through the game is a match the cards game with a whopping 3 pairs of cards. Massive wasted potential here.

    Combat.
    By far the worst offender. The combat by end game is mind numbingly boring. The main reason being that the game is just way too easy, the final boss is about as challenging as the first boss (so, not at all). You can just turn off your brain and just cast spells, melee attack to regain mana and heal throughout the entire game. Another issue is there is just not a lot of depth in the combat system. From about the 40% point onwards, you will be using the same strategy for the rest of the game. I think a big reason for this is that it relies solely on the typing + card interrupt system and nothing else. There are no status effects, no buffs, no unique gear choices or anything to bolster the base system so your experience at the very start of the game is going to be the exact same at the very end.

    In conclusion, Sea of Stars feels like it took the surface details of other classics such as Chrono Trigger and Golden Sun giving you a familiar feeling, but completely misses what made those games actually good. It's a hollow, boring, beautiful shell of an RPG    … Expand
  4. Yura2K
    Aug 30, 2023
    2
    Good sound and art, but no more, story, dialogs and characters are trivial, gameplay is boring 2/10.
  5. eded9999
    Sep 2, 2023
    2
    Another game ruined by a "Dumb down the game for me" toggle on settings... just put that "Tale Relic" in ON and you're invincible... What's the point of play the game?
    Dropped until they add some hard mode or something.
  6. Dash_Bannon
    Sep 2, 2023
    4
    Average game

    the amount of glow-up reviews im seeing just boils my blood ; either by fake bot accounts or ppl shilling HARD for this game ; the combat is fun for the first hour and then its very repetitive soon after ; im like halfway into the game and each character still only has 2 abilities with a very limited mana pool so you can only cast basically once each battle , theres team    Average game

    the amount of glow-up reviews im seeing just boils my blood ; either by fake bot accounts or ppl shilling HARD for this game ; the combat is fun for the first hour and then its very repetitive soon after ; im like halfway into the game and each character still only has 2 abilities with a very limited mana pool so you can only cast basically once each battle , theres team attacks but you have to build up a meter to use them and usually the monsters are already long dead before you can even utilize them at all , basically for bosses its only useful for

    I felt at times I was mashing X to speed up the wall of text I was all too accustomed to not wanting to read to progress the story forward , theres no option to unequip items and accessories and amulets are very missable with areas becoming non-acessible once you've cleared certain story points ; at times it really feels like a playstore android JRPG game behind a 31 $ price tag when those games are for free or very low cost

    I really cant recommend with the limited content the game has , some ppl praise the combat system but really its very shallow and you'll get bored of it almost immediately , how does this draw inspiration from past games when this game has the look, the feel of something you can make out of RPG-MAKER on the Playstation? theres no sidequest, theres a couple of secrets sure but nothing too wow about it , npcs talk on and on and on to the point you just want to progress , the story was so forgettable or barely explained I honestly forgot halfway through what the end goal for the two characers was supposed to be and frankly its a narrative I hardly cared for ; its not worth 30$ for what it is with and that is a very very basic JRPG that doesn't even come close to the 90's JRPG its somewhere in the NES level of content of JRPG and even some NES JRPG's blow this game out the water in content , storetelling, and combat mechanics    … Expand
  7. karnix
    Sep 1, 2023
    1
    The game it's ok, a nice soundtrack and a beautiful pixel art but the text speed is slow and the gameplay is boring with no depth at all.
  8. Carlax
    Sep 2, 2023
    0
    A game of which the only thing that stands out are the excellents graphics and art; a childish story with unbearable characters and slow combat without depth that gets very repetitive and boring.
  9. Odradek
    Sep 4, 2023
    0
    After 15 hours played something "funny" happened. I got killed by some random birds and chose the option "continue" to keep playing. So the game loaded a file -who knows how -of a past saved game where I had been playing for just 4 hours-ish... Needless to say this means goodbye for me playing this game. Might check the ending on youtube. Thanks for making me waste that time...
    I wanted    After 15 hours played something "funny" happened. I got killed by some random birds and chose the option "continue" to keep playing. So the game loaded a file -who knows how -of a past saved game where I had been playing for just 4 hours-ish... Needless to say this means goodbye for me playing this game. Might check the ending on youtube. Thanks for making me waste that time...
    I wanted to end it in order to have a complete opinion. But here goes nothing.
    (Clears throat)
    Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. Specially because it is all about what you understood of an entertainment product when your brain was not fully developed. And there comes the problem of this game. You just need a few hours to noticed how half-baked it is. Sea of Stars shows a colorful and attractive visual style... and that's it. It's OST is extremely overrated,it's combat system is too simple and repetitive and it's dialogues are far from funny or interesting. There's no dramatic weight whatsoever during the story, some characters make decisions completely out of the blue and only to make the story move on artificially. Let alone it has the most obnoxious, irritating, shallow character ever written in all fiction story. I'm serious, the main engine that kept me playing the game was the hope to see this character die alone in pain. Every like spoken by this character was worse than the previous. Just terrible.
    After wasting all these hours my only hope is that somebody reads this and decides not to play this game. Or at least waste their money on it. Thank the gods I played it on Game Pass.
    If you are thinking about checking it out, don't. Go play (or re-play) Chrono Trigger. Revive your own nostalgia. Don't let others try to convince you of their vision of what was cool, or funny, or moving, or epic, or just fun... this game is not.    … Expand
  10. w_shine_w
    Aug 30, 2023
    0
    Nice soundrack, thats it. Maybe pixelart is ok, but nothing more, really. Not gonna recommend it to my friends.
  11. Das_Boots
    Sep 11, 2023
    2
    Trash Gimmick

    Sabotage lives up to their name . they took 7 years to develope this and delivered a turd of a finished project. Garl is insuffereable, the rest of the party have no identity , plot wise things just... happen.. without further explanation or followup; the combat is very very basic the only innovation is the moonorang ability blue haired chick has everything is is just    Trash Gimmick

    Sabotage lives up to their name . they took 7 years to develope this and delivered a turd of a finished project.
    Garl is insuffereable, the rest of the party have no identity , plot wise things just... happen.. without further explanation or followup; the combat is very very basic the only innovation is the moonorang ability blue haired chick has everything is is just timing the button at the right time ; slow movement and tons of backtracking ; in order to get the True Ending a ton ton ton of backtracking is required to unlock it along with some very very hard minigames ; the story pacing is completely awful and at times you'll just be skipping walls of dialogue that dont seem to end and just go on and on and on; on top of all that I dont know about you guys but I hate puzzles in RPG'S the amount of puzzles you do in 1 dungeon is hair pulling and nerve racking ; you'll do 2-4 tedious puzzles EVERY dungeon some even more! and it completely takes you out of the element. the occasional one would have been fine but why did they think having multiple puzzles that range from simple but time consuming to medium difficult to solve and thought it would be ok??

    The character sprites are not even 16 bit they morely resemble something in between 10 bit -12 bit and dont reflect the jrpg's on the Snes ; think Neo-Geo graphics ; it doesnt even compare to the Snes titles of the Snes like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, Breath of Fire, Illusion of Gaia and other Jrpg's that came out that era ; this game is trash worse than a story pacing that was placed on the NES with below cookie cutter story telling, tons of Grammital Errors, no side quests, 1 mini game in the form of a rigged wannabe Might & Magic ripoff that you'll spend hours trying to win at ; this game is an absolute dogturd and it took them 7 YEARS to make this filth ; yeah Sabotage is correct because they are Sabotaging your hard earned money of 31 $ when this game belongs on Google PlayStore for FREEE!!!!!    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

19
#19 Best PC Game of 2023
20
#20 Most Discussed PC Game of 2023

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
87

Generally favorable reviews - based on 48 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 47 out of 48
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 48
  3. Negative: 0 out of 48
  1. Impulsegamer
    May 13, 2024
    86
    Sea of Stars is wonderfully evocative of the RPGs of yesteryear, recalling strong memories of Chrono Trigger and the like. Gorgeous pixel art is backed up with a soundtrack that for the most part is very pleasant to listen to, even if some of the loops do tend to repeat themselves a little too quickly. It seldom distracts, and almost always adds to the scene.
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  2. GameMAG
    Dec 6, 2023
    60
    Sea of Stars is an old-school JRPG, cut on modern molds, which because of its dragging and template solutions turns from a fun adventure into a routine work.
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  3. GameSpace
    Nov 2, 2023
    90
    Sea of Stars will keep players on their toes for dozens of hours with a huge variety of locations, enemies, bosses, side quests, riddles and puzzles. I have always kept both Chrono games very close to my heart, and now Sea of Stars took place next to them.
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