Sea of Stars

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If you’ve been reading Popzara or listening to our State of Gaming podcast, you’ve probably heard us gush about Microsoft’s Game Pass before. It’s basically the old Gametap model brought into the modern era and polished to a shiny finish – you pay a monthly fee and get access to more gaming enjoyment than you could possibly consume. It’s pretty nice, and more niceness keeps getting slapped onto it over time.

Take Sea of Stars, a throwback JRPG with high production values and plenty of rock-solid gameplay. Even if you don’t have Game Pass and still buy games outright it’s worth every dollar. How’s that for a deal?

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As you can probably guess, somebody called The Fleshmancer definitely isn’t going to be the friendliest fellow. Your hunch would be right, as his horrific creations ran amok and nearly ruined the world in times past. It’s only thanks to the Solstice Warriors, highly trained warrior-mages who wield the powers of the Sun and Moon, that The Fleshmancer was stopped. We follow newbie Solstice Warriors Valere and Zale as they go on a journey to save the world from Fleshmancer foolishness once and for all – but the proceedings might be a little more complex than just bashing monsters and calling it a day.

Sea of Stars is a pretty clear effort at taking the best bits of all manner of classic JRPG franchises and melding them together into something fresh and new. Graphically, it’s akin to Capcom’s Breath of Fire, while the overall plot and writing have a lot in common with Working Designs’ Lunar games and combat-wise we’re definitely playing Super Mario RPG. All of these disparate elements mostly harmonize, and Sea of Stars tends to be a more approachable experience than similar titles like Chained Echoes as a result.

In true old-school fashion, you’ll split your time between exploration and combat. Sea of Stars’ environments are gorgeous and packed with discoverable delights; your characters are athletic and capable of clambering all over the map, so you’ll need to be thorough to find everything. As you progress, you’ll find upgrades that expand your options further, like a wind blast for pushing objects and a hookshot for crossing gaps…so I guess we just added the Lufia games into that classic JRPG mix. There’s also fishing, cooking, a pseudo-TCG called Wheels and other minigames to check out.

Naturally there’s plenty of baddies to bash as well. As mentioned, combat in Sea of Stars most directly conjures up Super Mario RPG, though there’s a fair amount of positional attacks that call to mind Chrono Trigger as well. Battles are turn-based, with characters acting in whatever order you choose while monsters count down between attacks.

Timed button presses can enhance your heroes’ attacks or add on a little bit of defense against incoming blows, and while the game insists this is just a bonus, that’s not really the case; you’ll need to know about timed hits to get through this one. One quibble: it might be nice if there were a practice option, as we see in later Mario RPGs, in order to help establish how to time each move.

That’s especially true when one considers the Lock system, whereupon enemies charge up powerful moves that need to be disrupted by smacking them with attacks of the correct attribute. Properly-timed attacks tend to deliver multiple blows of their attribute, making it possible to break even longer and more complex Locks. Locks add an element of frantic strategy to combat, encouraging the player to plan ahead and conserve their resources just in case they need that one particular skill to break a Lock.

We can’t really talk about a retro throwback game without discussing how it looks, of course, and it’s clear that Sea of Stars is banking heavily on its presentation. This is a game that looks like it’d be right at home on the Sega CD, evoking memories of games like Lunar and Vay. Modern hardware is no slouch, of course, so Sea of Stars goes above and beyond where necessary – bosses in particular are often impressive screen-filling monstrosities. Sound design and music are also superlative, with a variety of tunes that are bound to lodge in the head.

In a gaming landscape where there’s practically infinite experiences that cater to every taste, it’s nice to see games like Sea of Stars effectively capitalize on nostalgia in all the right ways. This one really understands what made the classics it’s emulating tick, putting that knowledge to make a truly memorable adventure. All that and it’s on Game Pass. You really can’t go wrong with Sea of Stars.