Sea of Stars Review

Rosebun Reviews
Sea of Stars (2023)

Sea of Stars is… a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed it! I definitely did! I wouldn’t have put something like 40 hours into a game I didn’t enjoy. I played maybe two hours of Last of Us before deciding it wasn’t my bag, so ya know, keep that in mind here. So, I liked it, but there’s some stuff about it that bothered me and I’ll get to those. First, I wanna talk about the stuff I enjoyed.

Art-wise, this game rules. Visually, it is rich and beautiful. They absolutely nailed the visual aesthetics of the super nintendo era, updated for high definition. And it’s all rich and colorful. Indie games don’t generally suffer from the all drab browns and greys problem that I think is common to triple-A games, but Sea of Stars for sure says “fuck all that.” There’s just so much texture and joy in how this thing looks and I cannot stress that enough.

I don’t talk about it sort extensively because it feels like saying “I love Chrono Trigger”, but I love Super Mario RPG. The holy trinity of JRPGs for me growing up were absolutely Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III VI, and Super Mario RPG. None of this probably needs to be said because I’m over 30 and have been playing video games for as long as I can remember. And Super Mario RPG was one of my first video games. It was my game. One I owned for our Super NES and one of the first games that I remember beating. So, shockingly, I love the timed hits system. I think it’s fun. It adds just the right amount of engagement to turn-based RPGs, which can easily run stale. And the fact that it combines that and dual/triple techs from Chrono Trigger? Killer choice. Love that stuff.

Now, on the topic of timed hits, I want to talk about the game’s “artifacts.” See, the game has some settings that are accessed as “artifacts”, little tweaks to how the game works that make it easier or harder, at your option. You unlock some more of these as you go through the game for greater granularity, but I am always a fan of any way that you can make a game more approachable. For example, if you don’t wanna deal with timed hits, you don’t have to. There’s a setting where you can set it to always happen. There’s one that I used all the time that made a chime and visual effect when you did timed hits right. There’s a setting that lets you heal to full after every single fight. I love that shit. Mint wrote about the next level of that in Inkenfell which is literally a skip battle button and I’m with him, it rules and should be more common. I think that what we have here is sort of a step in that direction and I’m a huge fan. Video games are such an incredible vehicle for stories and many people are gatekept from them by difficulty, so anything that can remove that hurdle kicks ass.

The last thing I’ll mention is that if you’re dedicated, if you’ve completed the true ending, you can unlock an Easter egg to meet the devs. When a game has the devs in there and each of them has a little sprite that says something to you, even if it’s “thanks for playing our game”, that shit absolutely rules. It almost brought a tear to my eye that they did that because I think it ultimately shows the immense pride and joy they took in creating the game. And that rules.

Now, it’s time to be a hater. See, this game has one big problem and that’s the characters. Ostensibly, the game is about Zale and Valere, the last of the Solstice Warriors, who ultimately witness the end of their order and the sort of beginning of a new era not only for their world, but by the end of it, all worlds. But they’re not actually the main characters. The cover art, the demo, and any promo material might make you think that. But the real main character is Garl. Who’s Garl, you ask?

Garl is the childhood best friend of the Solstice Warriors. He’s chubby, loves to cook, and is missing an eye. At the start of the game, you play as Vale, Zalere, and Garl as little kids, before the twins have to do their Solstice Warrior Training. And in a childish adventure, they get in over their heads and Garl loses an eye. They are saved by their mentors and are taken away to train, unable to see Garl again before they do. Now, this opening had me interested, what kind of relationship will emerge between them? And what we get is… Garl is just super happy to see them. Valere and Zale set out on their quest and Garl sneaks out of their village to join them and is just ecstatic to be on the adventure. Which is fine, except that his missing eye is never brought up again! It’s just that he’s got one eye now. Does he have any angst about the fact that his best friends are the reason he lost his eye and he didn’t even get to see them one last time before they began their training? Does he hold any resentment over this? Does he have complicated feelings being a regular boy hanging out with baby superheroes? NOPE! None of that ever comes up! What missing eye? We’ve got an adventure to go on!

Throughout the game, Garl is the character who always volunteers the team or suggests the team do something to help in a given situation. But, many times this isn’t needed. As I said, Valere and Zale are Solstice warriors. They were trained to fight beings essentially made of evil and so for them to help people in need is just doing their job. But Garl always speaks up. And there are moments, earlier in the game, where Garl has the potential to be interesting as he can’t participate in all the things they do. For example, before the big turn, they’re going to fight a Dweller, an enormous, powerful creature that regular people can’t stand up to. And so, they tell him to sit this one out and instead, he tries to find a way to expose the creature to the light of the eclipse. And he does! And that little section is kind of cool and interesting. But that just doesn’t keep going, nor is it a point of conflict for Garl. Garl, like a bad shounen protagonist, just keeps up with them because well, he’s Garl! He’s the main character.

When they go to meet the Earth Sage, who is it that calms him down? It’s Garl. When they end up having to relocate an entire city because of their failure to contain a threat, who is it that leads the charge in finding them a new place to live and build a new town? Garl. Who wakes up the world-ending dragon with bread and gives him a new name? Yeah, Garl. And who do you need to get the ‘true ending’ of the game? You already know, buddy!

The cost of this focus on Garl is effectively the characterization of every other character. Zale and Valere are woefully undercooked, largely defined by their job and their relationship to Garl. B’st has a bit of an Amarant FFIX problem, comes in too late to get the characterization he deserves. Serai is awesome, but kind of ends up one note because well, Garl is there.

And then there’s Resh’an. Resh’an has so much potential because he is, in effect, a god. He is an immortal being known as The Alchemist (or the Great Eagle, or the Archivist). He, as it turns out, used to be besties with the main baddie, the Fleshmancer, and is now in a cosmic game of chess with him. This means that Resh’an is bound by certain rules prohibiting the amount of assistance he can give. So, he goes out of his way to not stand out. But he uses the Solstice Warriors and seemingly creates them? It’s not super clear, but he shows up at a Winter or Summer Solstice with a kid so like, who knows. The point is that he’s got a huge hand in things. And that’s, again, a matter of enormous wasted potential to me. The understanding that your characters are just pieces on a giant chessboard and one of the actual players is just kind of… hanging out with you?? That’s such an incredible concept with so much potential (having recently reread Animorphs, it feels particularly striking). But that plays a backseat to, you guessed it, Garl.

The fundamental callousness of character like Resh’an or the Fleshmancer could be so much more than what it is. Instead, there’s one line after Resh’an “leaves” the party where Serai (iirc) comments on how easy it seemed for him to leave them alone. But that’s about it. Of course, he’s not gone in a mechanical sense, he leaves behind a mindless copy that has his powers, it just doesn’t talk (although, in getting the true ending, it does the funniest thing possible). But whatever, let’s save Garl!

See, when the group fights a suped-up Dweller, something cooked up by the Fleshmancer, Serai steals Resh’an’s bottle and throws it at the monster, breaking the rule of non-interference. As a result of this, Garl dies, throwing himself in front of Zale and Valere, who are about to be hit by the full force of the Fleshmancer’s magic. Just before this moment the Fleshmancer and Resh’an debate the consequences of the interference in a liminal space of frozen time that Resh’an creates. But, after the first run and we’ve completed certain tasks, we find out that this was, in effect, a giant distraction.

Resh’an froze that moment in time and then left a way for the party to get back to that exact moment. So, while Resh’an talks to the Fleshmancer, the party sneaks into this time bubble and replaces Garl with a double (sound familiar?). This means that they get to pretend Garl dies and bring him to the final confrontation. When you do so, Garl calls out The Fleshmancer and you fight the Fleshmancer, banishing him from the planet, which was actually the stakes of the other ending just that now you fight the actual Fleshmancer who says “fighting Solstice Warriors is beneath me.” But when Garl is there, for some reason it gets his goat enough for him to actually fight you.

At the end of the day, the thing that’s so frustrating about Garl is it’s like being constantly told how cool someone is and they never really live up to that. Everyone in the game, EVERYONE, talks about how much they loved Garl and how much they’ll miss him now that he’s gone. But having played the game and interacted with him a lot, I didn’t miss him that much. If anything, his death had the effect of strengthening Zale and Valere’s resolve, something sorely needed because these kids largely seem motivated to do the things they do because they’re Solstice Warriors, I guess? And again, that’s the real problem with Garl. Every other character plays second fiddle to the writers’ specialest li’l guy. And that is incredibly frustrating. I was initially excited about Garl because he was a fat character in a video game who isn’t a punchline. What a fucking concept in 20-fucking-23. But he’s so aggressively cheery, so utterly guileless that he’s boring. Again, it rules that the main character of a video game is fat and there’s not even one joke made about it. But Garl is so painfully uninteresting, that I struggle to care.