Board 8 > Sea of Stars Review Zone

(+) Yeah! (+)

foolm0r0n posted...

I was gonna say it's probably quite expensive to get an editor to go over a large RPG script, but I guess there are people who would do it for close to free and it would be better than nothing

As someone who works as a translator on smaller narrative focused games and works with editors, I don't think it's that expensive to get a game of this size edited.

catesdb posted...

is it possible these editors are unionized or something and we aren't allowed to do this work

Practically no one in the game industry is unionized.

just finished what i'd call chapter 1, 2:25 playtime, and the editing has not been a dealbreaker for me

Got about 5 more hours of playtime in today, probably won't get a whole lot more for the next few days. Definitely really enjoying it. One of those games that just feels pleasant to go through.

Biggest criticism so far is that the two leads really don't have a lot of personality yet, but there's plenty of time for that to hopefully come out.

About 5-ish hours in as well, currently at Brisk.

Also enjoying the game quite a bit so far. I have 10 rainbow conches and no idea when I'll find whomever I'm supposed to give these to.

I think my main complaint with the game so far is that the relic system seems...weird? Like, there's a bunch of them that make the game easier in various ways, but you have to buy them...but they're also really cheap? What's even the point of that? Why not just have an accessibility menu from the start? I found a shop with a few that make the game harder, and those are expensive for some reason. But they don't really do anything interesting as far as I can tell (didn't buy), just make you take more damage. I dunno, it's just odd. I've just been ignoring all relics for now because I have no idea if I'm even really meant to engage with it.

Also it's kinda weird that in the beginning the game emphasizes that getting the right timing is just a nice bonus, but so many enemies have double sword/blunt icons. Feels like the game expects you to get the timing right pretty often. Which...it's not hard, but that feels like mixed messaging.

How's the pace of combat? It felt kinda slow in the demo, and with not a lot of ability to heal back damage.

azuarc posted...

How's the pace of combat? It felt kinda slow in the demo, and with not a lot of ability to heal back damage.

still a bit slow for my taste. when it comes to healing it seems like you pretty much have to use items, since magic is extremely expensive based on the amount of MP you have, and you need to save it for offensive magic to break enemies.

Pace of combat seems fine to me? It's not super quick, but I feel like the game tends towards less battles than the average RPG.

colliding posted...

still a bit slow for my taste. when it comes to healing it seems like you pretty much have to use items, since magic is extremely expensive based on the amount of MP you have, and you need to save it for offensive magic to break enemies.

Not sure I agree. I've been using primarily skills/combos to heal. You do have to be careful about when and how you use your MP, though.

Yeah I've just been mostly using combo points for the heal. A full group heal that only takes 1 turn beats whatever damage I can do in a turn with combos.

Also they put you in situations where it's literally impossible to break enemies sometimes so I don't think they expect you to always break.

Yeah I don't think they expect you to break all the time, but so many of those times seem contingent on getting the timing right. I'm not complaining because I kinda like it-- it adds some tension.

Also it might be because I've put little to nothing into defense but the boss at the end of "chapter 2" (Chromatic Aberration in the Abandoned Wizard's Lab) started doing attacks that would one-shot characters unless I blocked correctly.

I'm only an hour in but I really enjoyed my time with it so far. at first I was wondering why they had you play a few minutes before flashing back, but I think it's just to avoid criticisms about no gameplay in the first hour. love the tone it's setting and the music goes a long way.

transience 24 is wild

You probably don't think I can force this towel down your throat, but trust me I can, all the way.

24 Season 3 spoilers

in the middle of a giant ball of tension moment trying to obtain the virus, the show just casually drops in the possibility that Chloe STOLE A BABY

oh are you already on season 3? god damn how much have I missed

tell me all your thoughts! you can do it elsewhere

I've been talking about it in my topic, although the one where I covered the first two seasons already purged.

I can make a separate topic about it later tonight.

brb checking the archive site

where's my 24 JRPG

I'm liking everything about this game so far buuuuut Wheels kinda sucks right?

Maybe it'll get better but it's way too random to be any fun so far.

Wheels is kinda whatever. I don't hate it, but it's not something that I'm really eager to play more of.

i just came here to say shout out to wheels, i'm 3-1

also i love the idea of garl using this abacus to tell you how much HP the monster you're fighting probably has left

"yeah valere i think if you hit both of those two one more time, we'll be good"

So, I just started this and literally 10 minutes into it I fell asleep. Just woke up now a couple hours later. I've been overtired this week I guess, but not the best first impression.

i think wheels is neat but i'm not sure where it can really go since you don't have anything to collect for it beyond the other classes which seem to be all balanced anyway so they're not strictly upgrades. but maybe that changes when you get more than the copper wheel.

Started it and damn the environment art is so good, especially the shadows. And all the little platforming animations are really cute. But there's a flickering with the camera that is very distracting.

There's gotta be a way to speed up combat thought right?

the only way i've found is to make decisions quickly

foolm0r0n posted...

There's gotta be a way to speed up combat thought right?

I've been waiting for it to stop telling me that I need to press A to deflect my moonerang or charge my fireball. It has not stopped yet.

Played up to what I guess would be considered the first "big" story beat this morning after the Dweller of Woe. So I guess this is when things start getting real.

Still having a real good time with this one.

Got to the second island.

Game is very good. No complaints aside from that lengthy opening LORE dump. Simple combat with depth. Good world building. Good characters. I'm liking this a lot.

I'm on the fifth "chapter", which is after you help build Mirth. The third one felt like it kinda dragged because one of the dungeons felt longer than it needed to be.

I think my one complaint with the combat at this point is that I would like for there to be more skills.

I do think the two leads could stand to have more characterization that differentiates the two. There's been a little bit of that, but they still feel pretty similar.

Is there a reason they let you pick the lead character? I don't think I've ever seen that done really well outside of Seiken Densetsu

foolm0r0n posted...

Is there a reason they let you pick the lead character? I don't think I've ever seen that done really well outside of Seiken Densetsu

Unless there's something significant later in the game that I haven't reached yet, it's mostly just a cosmetic change, like picking a male or female trainer in Pokemon.

8 hours in, I'm not super loving this besides the graphics.

i think it's alright. i think i kinda liked chained echoes more (despite never finishing it lol) but i can't put my finger on why. the combat could be it - there's not a ton of variety or even strategy so far. i do like timed hit systems but the timing on many blocks doesn't feel intuitive to me and i rarely succeed. hell i don't think i've gotten the timing on valere's staff skill right even until now, or zale's dash strike. and when the quiz mini-game asked me what garl's apple turns into when you get the timing right, that was the first evidence i had against my theory of "maybe healing skills can't get timed hits" lol.

writing this, i'm just realizing that this game has... zero status effects so far too. i mean a lot of classic rpgs made status effects useless against bosses and therefore useless in general but most modern ones find good ways to use them, plus buffs and etc. i wonder if this game will introduce any but with only 4 skill slots it seems unlikely. even poison is just an elemental attribute that doesn't actually poison!

Yeah I was also under the impression that some moves just can't be timed but I guess that's wrong!

The 5th character throws potions and it took me a while to understand that his timing is getting 2 potions to hit at the same time, not timing when the first potion hits.

If you time it right it cleaves to other enemies but it's kinda tough.

nourish can be timed!? i'm shocked

regardless combat had a difficulty drop once we got four party members, i think

im enjoying just doing the little linear-but-not-linear pretty maps and listening to the music! no need to think about tweaking or whether im doing something horribly wrong, just play

i could stand to hear from our villains more, though

oh speaking of villains, i'm (third island spoilers) sort of confused about the motivation of the two mentor characters. like, the impression i thought the game was trying to give me was that they were cynical about the solstice religion and didn't want more kids to have to become warriors, which is fair enough. but their solution to this is to... summon a dark god to murder everyone and destroy the world??? like. that just seems inconsistent with their character unless i'm supposed to believe that they're actually just pure evil now? why is that the solution they turned to??? was that the only alternative? maybe this will make sense eventually because it doesn't to me right now.

I feel the same as what Dels said.

On the game as a whole, the graphics and music are fantastic, the gameplay is generally solid with good area design (though I find myself wishing for a map sometimes, and hate Brisk), and the story/characters are pretty mediocre. I thought the Sea of Nightmares sequence was excellent though, best part of the game so far.

Dels posted...

oh speaking of villains, i'm (third island spoilers) sort of confused about the motivation of the two mentor characters. like, the impression i thought the game was trying to give me was that they were cynical about the solstice religion and didn't want more kids to have to become warriors, which is fair enough. but their solution to this is to... summon a dark god to murder everyone and destroy the world??? like. that just seems inconsistent with their character unless i'm supposed to believe that they're actually just pure evil now? why is that the solution they turned to??? was that the only alternative? maybe this will make sense eventually because it doesn't to me right now.

Yeah, I'm also confused about this. Hoping there's a better explanation later. So far the game really enjoys delaying any explanations as much as possible.

I just got the ability to find out if I missed treasures in previous areas, so I'm doing a bunch of backtracking right now.

I've kinda gone back and forth on my opinion of the game. I think Wraith Island was pretty boring and had too much combat without enough to break it up. But the game has felt a bit better since then.

I still wish there were more skills. Like, finding new combos is cool, but I do not use those nearly as much. Moonerang is still one of the best skills I have after 15 or so hours, which seems a bit silly.

oh they said the thing

Probably going to drop this for a while. I just fought the Necromancer boss. I think this is well-intentioned and gorgeous to look at, but it's just extremely shallow, even as a retro game.

I absolutely love the animations and environments. Exploration is in general a delight. It totally nails Chrono Trigger's seamless transitions from area map to battle screen. It also understands the humor of those earlier games, like having bosses/enemies be random NPC's before fighting them.

I just can't get past how vanilla the main characters are. I think having two leads worked against them here. I just don't feel attached or invested in the story at all. I think the classic jrpg's this game takes influence from were a lot better at presenting an initial main conflict (you're lost in time! you're on the run from the empire! you have to save this village! you're secretly a princess!). These are cliches obviously, but it's also driving action that this game simply doesn't have.

And in terms of the battle system, I don't think it's a lack of skills that's the main issue. I think there's just a sameness to every battle that gets monotonous. You kind of are forced to use your main regular attack a lot, which is boring. Again, timed hits should just be done away with as a mechanic.

I'm about 18 hours in and yeah the leads don't really get much better. With how much inspiration they took from Chrono Trigger they didn't need to take everything. Making the leads have 0 personality almost feels like a choice.

That being said the 2nd half does make some interesting choices in the story.

But yeah the combat just needs more going on. I'm not done yet but I think I can easily say that Chained Echoes is the better game in pretty much all major regards.

The thing about these two versus Crono is that the latter feels like more of a character, even when he's a true silent protag and the others actually have dialogue. The difference is that CT gives you the Millenial Fair. In retrospect, it's brilliant. The game gives you a lot of optional stuff that actually creates a character through gameplay. You can make choices that the game literally uses to judge your character. The empty vacuous dialogue of the SoS leads is actually worse than no dialogue at all.

5th party member story spoilers i am one again very confused. so the narrator's room was in the water tower? or no? we try to open the door, we fail, then narrator says "they failed and died" but we jump to a parallel universe where they... instead went to an ice mountain? where is the ice mountain? how did they get there? then when they're done they're in the narrator's room and they are a bit confused but mostly just go along with it... ok? the whole sequence felt incredibly jarring to me.

i hope the takeaway from this game isn't "few skills bad, more skills better" but i worry that's what it will be. lots of games have a ton of skills and 80% of them are useless or just an excuse to have more buttons for the sake of it. having fewer skills but making you use them in lots of different ways is good design. this game just kinda doesn't do that because the combat isn't very dynamic.

i don't wanna be too negative on this game though because i'm still enjoying it and it is very pretty. the odd thing is we've all played JRPGs with poor characterization (see: most things made 20 years ago) but i guess the bar is just higher these days so it really stands out.

5th character spoilers: He says they're supposed to fail and die based on the story he's reading... but what if they didn't. Then he opens the door for them so they can keep the story going. His archive room is in the water tower or whatever, he opens a portal to the ice mountain.

okay. that makes sense i guess.

i'm really trying to think, like, in a parallel universe where sea of stars came out for the SNES when we were 10 years old, would we grow up thinking zale and valere were amazing classic characters and have fond memories of the lore of solstice warriors doing elder mist trials? and if chrono trigger came out as an indie retro game on steam in 2023 we'd think crono was a boring silent protagonist and that a random frog and robot were not very compelling? i feel that's not the case! but who knows!

As someone who played Chrono Trigger for the first time in 2021 it didn't hold up great. The thing that stood out to me the most was how little the cast all interacted with each other.

But that could also be a byproduct of only being able to take 3 out on a mission at a time or however the system worked in that game.

Either way if Chrono Trigger released in 2023 it would be pretty disappointing I think.

Im pretty early in so far, but enjoying it. I just got to meeting Teaks and I feel like the timing for some combat stuff is rough to get right. Blocking some attacks in particular, but also if you can boost your healing with a button press Ive been completely incapable of figuring out the timing on it.

Yeah I have never successfully boosted my healing with timing as far as I am aware

Didn't even know about it until the quiz question like someone else noted

since learning about the nourish boosting, i have done it successfully once

zale's healing with the sparkle is easy, you hit before the sparkle is about to go away

i've also gotten lunar shield to boost once but it barely makes a difference