I’ve always been a fan of turn-based J-RPGs, with the dream of maybe making one some day. But making any kind of RPG is very expensive, thus pretty dangerous for any indie studio. A friend of mine, @hl0dwig, offered me a Switch gift card for my birthday along with the suggestion that I play Sea of Stars, and boy was it a good suggestion.

Most articles will cite Chrono Trigger as one of the references for this game. I have not played Chrono Trigger, so I can’t say, but I’ve been a lifelong fan of Golden Sun, and this is what this game reminds me of. Which is a huuuuuge compliment coming from me. It’s even smarter than Golden Sun in some respects. Kudos to you, Sabotage!

1. What makes a great J-RPG (from my perspective)

I’ve played a lot of turn-based and action J-RPGs, yet none have ever surpassed Golden Sun in my heart. And Golden Sun deployed quite a lot of clever tricks to get there.

1. A compelling story: An RPG is a role-playing game; if I’m playing a role in a boring story, it does not have the same appeal. Duh. Personally, I like to challenge a God, but less specifically, the characters usually have a status-quo-shaking role.
2. Likeable characters: Role-Playing Game means you’re identifying as one or several characters; I need to be able to do that; the character has to be interesting and likeable. A touch of humour is welcome; if the characters are all business all the time, are they even human? – looking at you, Triangle Strategy and Octopath Traveller.
3. Clever Turn-Based Mechanics: J-RPG responds to a lot of codes and norms, yet we’ve seen them all. If you want your RPG to stand out, its mechanics need to be innovative and make you feel clever; otherwise, it’s yet another Final Fantasy (which has stopped making turn-based installations, maybe because it was becoming repetitive?). Golden Sun did that with its Djinns and invocation mechanic that drastically changed your character’s class. FF Tactics did that with its mixable classes system.
4. Exploration mechanics: A lot of time in JRPGs is spent outside of battles, exploring dungeons, towns, and the world map. Having something to make it interesting is a plus; for Golden Sun, it was puzzles everywhere, in every dungeon, that made them worth it (I loved Bravely Default, yet its dungeons are just a long maze with dead ends and discoverable chests, littered with random-ish encounters).
5. Balanced progression: Role-playing games often—if not always—have a progression element, be it stat increases, a skill tree, etc. But this progression has to be well balanced so the game isn’t too hard (need for endless grind to finish a dungeon) or too easy (fights become boring because you’re just smashing every enemy without even trying—hello Suikoden Tierkreis). It’s a very hard balance to get right.

Sea of Stars ticks all those boxes, though in different proportions, and with its own twists.

2. Sea of Stars clever mechanics

Puzzles and exploration

First of all, Sea of Stars has a few puzzles here and there. Not as many as Golden Sun, but enough of them that the dungeons don’t feel like an endless corridor. It’s enough to make me very happy, at least.

Also, Sea of Stars got rid of random encounters, and it’s a good thing. Every battle is different and brings a different challenge to the table, allowing each battle to be specifically tailored for a given difficulty. You can skip some of them—but why would you do that?! You haven’t done this one, I guarantee it.

But most of this game’s cleverness comes from its battle mechanics.

Difficulty management

There’s the question of difficulty; Sea of Stars manages it with relics that you can toggle on or off at any time. It’s not easy/medium/hard; you can enable or disable gameplay features at your leisure, which have clear difficulty implications. You can even unlock new artefacts during gameplay, which, in any game, you would promptly equip/activate because the game makes it part of the progression curve. Here, if it is clear that if you want to keep the challenge running, you are free not to use them.

I’ve been playing in Tactician mode, which means every helping relic is disabled, and damage-boosting relic is enabled, and boy has it felt good. Not because I want to suffer, but because I want games to stand up against me. I’m playing a game and expect to lose or be close to losing sometimes; otherwise, I’d be watching a movie. Guaranteed success doesn’t feel like success, does it now? Every battle, I feel like I could lose, even standard encounters. I don’t, usually, but it makes me feel clever. A true tactician! It’s very rewarding.

Close-call situations in every battle

At the same time, battle mechanics are made to accommodate that apparent difficulty: characters that are KO’d resuscitate automatically after a time with half their HP, and most characters have a way of protecting or healing their comrades. When the situation becomes desperate, there is always a way to get back up on track that is not expensive (most games have very expensive ways of reviving, for instance, using finite-quantity items or very mana-expensive spells).

In tactician mode, the situation is quite often desperate. And that’s what makes it so great! You feel like you were inches away from being obliterated, but the game lets you come back with a vengeance, without doing you any favours either. Some bosses—and at times regular enemies—will one-shot you if you’re not paying attention. And paying attention, you must!

Stay alert at all times

In most games, once you have chosen your action, and during your opponent’s turn, you have nothing to do except cross your fingers for a critical hit or an evade, which are, most often, random-ish, even when driven by a stat.

Sea of Stars twists that, making you responsible for those, with Quick Time Events; if you press the main button at the exact time you’re being hit, you’ll avoid some of the damage, sometimes saving you from KO. The same goes for critical hits: pressing A at the right time will allow you to hit twice, which does not come with twice the damage but will allow you to break twice the locks—more on those a little later.

It feels like playing a turn-based souls game. * Learn every enemy’s timing, and you can block some of the damage they do, sometimes saving you from KO. And it requires you to pay attention and stay engaged.

I love tactical games, but most of them require some kind of speed adjustment so that the enemy’s turn does not feel like an hour-long cinematic. Here, even during the enemy’s turn, you’re expected to do something. And when you succeed, it makes you feel rewarded, even if you’ve just been hit. Hard. It also boosts your combo gauge, so even when there is no way you’re not gonna get KO’d, you still have an incentive to successfully block and stay alert.

In tactician mode, failing a block can put you in dire situations.

Smart Tactics

It’s been a long time since turn-based games have started adding some kind of stunning mechanic to their games to add a little diversity to their gameplay. Stun the opponent, then use a short time frame to make massive damage. (Hello, FF XIII, Octopath Traveller, and the like!) This has been done with various degrees of success, sometimes just adding to the length of battles without bringing any excitement. The main appeal is to force players to do something else than try to do the most damage at each turn. But Sea of Stars has found a way of making it a compelling part of their combat system, with locks.

Locks are different from traditional stun mechanics in several ways:

• They are a casting mechanic: if you break all locks before the opponent attacks, it will stop them from attacking. All attacks don’t have a breakable casting mechanic, but the most deadly usually do.
• It’s not gauge-based; instead, it’s damage type-based: you need to hit them a given number of times with various combined damage types, physical and/or magical, in order to stop the attack.
• Failing to break all locks won’t prevent the attack, but breaking some of them will lessen its effect.

This, combined with the fact that you can choose the order of your character’s turns (without affecting the timing of your opponent’s turns, which will attack you on time, whichever character you choose to start the turn with), creates an incentive to think about what you’re going to do in 2/3/4 turns to avoid the most damage and deal the most damage at the same time, making it a tactical game. You’re not just trying to make the most damage; you’re thinking forward while staying rooted in the present to succeed in your blocks and critical hits.

Since a critical hit can break twice the locks, sometimes failing one will prevent you from breaking all the locks in time, giving you an incentive to always succeed.

Also, most locks will require regular attacks, making it an option for the whole game, and not only the first few hours.

Rehabilitating regular attack

In a lot of J-RPGs, regular attacks often suffer from being kind of weak compared to other abilities, relegating it to a last-resort choice or a status-ailment consequence. Sea of Stars makes sure that this does not happen.

First, because of the aforementioned lock mechanic. Second, because mana is sparse and special abilities expensive. Quite often, you just don’t have enough MP to cast a spell and need to attack instead. But also, a regular attack has its own special perks:

• It restores a bit of your mana; that’s how you alternate between abilities and attacks.
• It “spills” magic onto the battlefield, allowing you to use it later to boost an attack/ability up to three times.
• It breaks locks

All of this combined makes a regular attack a tactical choice, not only a last-resort I-only-have-that-left-to-do option. This is great and so f*cking clever.

Even if there are very few special abilities per character, the fact that a regular attack is a solid option, that critical hits and evades can change the odds of a battle, and the fact that you can choose the order of your turns really gives you plenty of options, while staying manageable and not inducing choice paralysis. You know your options, their effects, and master all of them quickly. The difficulty lies in thinking forward enough so that you choose the right one and the fight goes your way. Usually, there is a right one, or at least you feel that way at the end of the fight.

Once again, the game makes you feel clever. I love it. Thanks, game, for boosting my ego!

3. I’m just getting started.

I’ve been talking about Sea of Stars’ excellent game design so far because I feel like a lot of critics often disregard the depth of the gameplay in favour of commenting on the general feel, the story and art-style, but those are also great. I won’t get into specific details; you have eyes and ears, and you should play the game anyway. But the pixel art is stunning and fluid, the cutscenes always have a wow effect, the music is great, the story is interesting, and the characters are likeable.

Have I mentionned it is inclusive, with a diverse cast of characters and a simple well-thought leading-character gender choice with no influence on story or gameplay ?

There’s a now-mandatory and completely skippable fishing mini-game, an integrated—still skippable—board game with tactics of its own, cooking mechanics, and so much more. I haven’t even finished the game. I have no idea which percentage I’m at and don’t want to spoil the story for myself. I might still have a few surprises!

Even though, if you haven’t considered playing Sea of Stars, you should.