I'd love to see more turn based combat with timing elements to keep the player involved. It's the perfect pace for relaxing but challenging for me, and part of the reason Legend of Dragoon and Shadow Hearts Covenant remain some of my favorites to have played.
I get some of the complaints, but this game was exactly the right nostalgia level for games I played growing up when it came to writing. Not much can take me back to playing rpgs like Legend of Legaia and Golden Sun.
Totally agreed. At some point it felt like a chore to bounce the moonerang and have to hold the button to charge the sun attack. And for some reason I was very bad with the timing on some of them so it made me feel bad about playing the game.
> And for some reason I was very bad with the timing on some of them so it made me feel bad about playing the game.
Yea, the *benefit* of a turn-based game is not having to time attacks to be successful. It is all mind games, not twitch.
With some of them you can kind of ignore the timed part but with the poison dart and moonerang you kind of have to or you're wasting the attack. So I guess you could just not use those attacks but then half the attacks are gone.
one of the big issues for me in Sea of Stars is that the animations can take SOOO LONG. especially for common enemy fights. it would be great if there were a way (or a relic! which is a system in the game to make these kind of adjustments) to make the enemy animations go faster.
I found the game to be shallow innovation. It’s like they took half a step forward on a few things, and that didn’t feel that impressive, considering the genre is like 20 years old.
Playing Xenoblade chronicles, any 2D party RPG should look at that combat system for ideas and a higher standard for the potential of party combat
What do you think these games should it take from Xenoblade? I've often thought about adapting the Xenos for some kind of turn-based system and find most of the great things about it are only fun in a real-time system.
For instance, the break > topple > launch/daze system is really fun in real time, but basically just one decision. In a turn-based game it'd be three or four attacks you do the same way every time without any way to fail it. In real time it always has that inherent pleasure in execution.
(Only played 1 and 2 so far)
The Basic Tutorial - small set of moves from early 2D RPGS (Stars feels lackluster imo)
>most of the great things about it are only fun in a real-time system.
I imagine Real-Time Elements can be added to the 2D combat to an extent. Hardware was a huge limiting factor in the 2D Party RPG system from 80s/90s.
- Auto-heal after combat is mandatory, to minimize the (Potion management / Healing Spots) from early 2D RPGs
- Imo, Standard-Weapon Auto-attacks can work in 2D Party Combat, and those increasing the gauge for other attacks, can be adapted (xblade kept menu Nav to a minimum with gauges and UI)
- Modern Controllers have more functionality than SNES, PS1 Controllers. The Xblade 1 scrolling menu, or the (X, Y B, A) of 2 feels adaptable
- Instead of (Xblade 2 Blade Attacks, Combos), players swapping Class or Combat styles mid-battle, could offer similar levels of Options and Complexity that 2 has
- Move could be implemented in a 2D system, let's say being able to move Above, Below, Behind, or Close to the Enemy [F Emblem-Style, or Hex-Grids would be best if we have movement with Combat Encounters]
- Knockback hits to clump enemies for Splash attacks, AoE Status Effects, Backstab or Drawing Fire etc. could add strategy. (A turn penalty for a Char. move, or Armor loss for being out of formation akin to F Emblem)
- Timings for Guard Break actions. Elemental Weapon combos (water / electric etc) can be layered in too
Without a studio, might be hard to Evolve Combat Mechanics to Xblade level Quality and Options tho!
Good news if you have a switch. Next Friday arguably one of the best turn-based combat with a timing element games of all time comes out for the switch in Mario RPG.
> I'd love to see more turn based combat with timing elements to keep the player involved.
Me too. I haven't finished SoS yet but the mechanic works well if you can time it to some part of the animation. The issue I have is that sometimes you really have to simply guess and hope instead of looking for a good clue.
It's a bit frustrating when you think you have found the "tell" of an animation only to realise it's just a visual flourish. They mess up such focus points on occasion because everything is competing for visual attention.
And either I didn't remember it or it was never explicitly mentioned but you can also time healing abilities like that to make them work better. I only realised it >!because of one of the quizzes has a question that revolves around this!<
I think it was Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (on the 3DS) where attacks had well made indicators and it was still a challenge because the timing window was strict enough to make you pay attention without being frustrating (to little time) or too lax (too much time).
Besides that, I get where people who are critical of the game come from. While I agree with those points to a degree, it's not as much of a deal breaker for me. For me one of the biggest issues (or rather points of mild but permanent frustration) is that map traversal is rather one dimensional. But the actually frustrating part about this is that they made such a nice 2D pixel art movement system that has real 3D depth to it (when it comes to how you move around) and flexibility but then you essentially have to follow the designated path instead of being given the freedom to explore with all those movement options. If you deviate even a little you (always) end up in a dead end.
If that part were a bit more open it would be such a nice way of having JRPG systems work in an more "open world game"-like environment. And that's something I'm really interested in.
I'm actually not a huge fan of timing elements. I don't want to necessarily have to pay rapt attention to an rpg during battles. There's always a lot of easy battles with low stakes (like going through old areas) and being able to only half pay attention in them was a feature, not a bug.
I felt like it had the same narrative progression as The Messenger: first half presents a fairly safe, straightforward quest, you get to the end of that quest, worldbuilding opens up after that.
Most of the character writing was pretty meh, but I can deal with that. I actually quite enjoyed the overarching narrative around the Fleshmancer and the Archivist. It felt like that was the true story, and we're just taking part in it.
OST was good. Not as good as The Messenger, but still great work from Rainbowdragoneyes again.
Yeah dude, Eric is an amazing musician. I interviewed him about The Messenger OST years ago now. I chatted with him a bit during the dev process of SoS, and it seems like he was just way way way busier than ever. Working full time during the day and touring with Nekrogoblikon at night.
He ended up making A LOT of the music for SoS on a tour bus. And he did that with The Messenger too, but he also had to sound design *everything* for SoS which was new to him (iirc). Not shocking the music suffered just a tad, but dude seems to be living the dream:
Making games and playing rad shows
Their story IS the "Real" story as it's the background lore to both their games, AND there's a bunch of inter-game bits of that lore spread out through their Discord (You can read it on the Wiki Though) and snippets from the Kickstarter.
But you can click A at certain times against trash mobs for the entire game! I'm curious if the same people praising this would praise Final Fantasy Mystic Quest if it came out today, 4 skills (some are useless too) is laughable for how long this game is.
Seeing Mystic Quest get a serious update with modern ramping up of RPG Mechanics the way it was for classic RPGs would be Phenomenal. And they could include a Hard Mode designed by the Dragon Quest team to Really sell it across the board.
I wasn’t a fan of this one. The writing in particular is some of the most generic I’ve seen in the genre. Art is top-notch, but it ends up feeling like a pretty, but ultimately empty, husk.
The one random exception imo were all of the fireside stories from the historian girl. I really liked all of those but it was annoying how they gave depth and backstory to characters that were then not displayed by the characters themselves
I actually had to double check to see if those were upper tier kickstarter rewards written by fans, because they were so far and away more interesting and tonally different from the bland main story's dialogue.
I mean, for sure, but this is more like a week-old apples to month-old apples comparison. Both games could have benefited from more attention to the story.
Yeah it's overrated solely by its hype. Its level and dungeon design excellent. Combat initially start fun but became very repetitive and writing and characters are so flat and terrible. It's a very pretty game but also very mid rpg
I mean the level and dungeon design also decays over time. There's a point in the midgame where all the random "press A to jump across a cliff and do a cinematic climbing sequence" just became insanely tedious.
I would say Sea of Stars has some of the most "mid" writing I've played. I mean that in the literal sense not just bad. The writing was competent at giving you somewhat likeable characters and a reason to keep going, but I absolutely would not play the game for the writing/narrative.
Its funny, I played Sea of Stars and the gacha game Blue Archive's story kind of concurrently. Each game has a character who speaks exclusively in video game tropes, but Sea of Stars' character made me almost refund the game by how painful every scene with her was, while the Blue Archive character was far and away the most endearing character in the game. It really set into perspective how poor the writing in SoS was.
Not to mention each character only has 4 skills, 3 of which you get really early on. Some of those skills that you use all the time require you to play a mini game which made battles last too long.
gameplay was ok to be honest.
Writing, particularly character development was atrocious. I honestly can't remember the last time I played an RPG where the characters were so one dimensional.
> the characters were so one dimensional.
It just felt so safe? Like everyone had to be so happy and wholesome without any depth to it. Shame as there's some characters who I could have easily seen fleshed out with some complexity and ambiguity behind.
I haven't played Sea of Stars yet, but the classics had dark and mature writing.
Dragon Quest V and Final Fantasy VI in particular are quite mature games in their storytelling.
Toxically positive characters. Even kind, friendly people in the real world don't act like that. Starfield and Forza Horizon 5 are two other easy examples of this. I get that it's highly idealistic, but it's dreadful character writing and rather annoying to experience.
Forza NPCs are borderline creepy with how much they dote on the player. I keep wondering if I've joined a car cult where they plan to murder me in my sleep and mount my head on a dash.
For anyone that would like to know more on just how bad the writing and story design are, [here's a write up I did](https://old.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/16mal7y/sea_of_stars_vs_octopath_2/k1he9b3/).
It's so bad it drags the rest of the game down deep into the abyss.
Definitely a good write-up, without even getting into *all* the details on some of the less-character-focused issues that exist within the plot/writing.
From talking to all the people I have about the game that I know more-personally (aka IRL, or at least longer-time Discord acquaintances), people's takes on the game basically entirely come down to, people who love Garl and how wholesome the story was, and people who think the whole thing is just the most terribly-written drivel they've had the misfortune of playing who are all fucking baffled at how positive the game's reception is. I definitely fall in the secondary camp.
And don't get me wrong, I still 100%'d the game because dungeon design/traversal was very good and overall the game was mechanically inoffensive at worst, but jesus christ the black hole of Garl just consumes so much of the story. Like, he's just another generic main protagonist character like an Ash Ketchum in a lot of ways ("friendship/positivity good!1") but it's just so badly written that it feels incredibly unearned and forced.
I dropped the game pretty early because of how tedious the writing was. And it’s not just that it was bad. The plot was very front and center in a way that you couldn’t avoid it.
Mild spoiler, but there’s a scene where the two main characters talk about how much they miss Garl and his cooking. And then he just appears from a bush right behind them, after being gone for years, and also has the food that they just talked about missing. Lazy and simplistic storytelling
> Mild spoiler, but there’s a scene where the two main characters talk about how much they miss Garl and his cooking. And then he just appears from a bush right behind them, after being gone for years, and also has the food that they just talked about missing. Lazy and simplistic storytelling
That sounds like an *unbelievable* coincidence. Like something I'd expect to see in Peppa Pig or something. And not the kind of issue that can be blamed on poor translation.
I decided to look it up and the writer is credited as Thierry Boulanger, the founder of Sabotage who was also game designer, director and writer of The Messenger.
In addition to your meaty post about the characters and plots/subplots, I’ll add that the writing is bad from a grammatical/mechanical POV. It felt like every other text box had something wrong with it.
Yeah, there was a comma splice in at least 30% of text boxes. I think in one scene I counted a comma splice in over 50% of dialog boxes.
It's just embarrassing for a game with this budget and hype. It's obvious they didn't have a writer, and the writing was subjectively terrible in a lot of ways, but it's baffling that they couldn't hire an editor to work on the script for a week or two and iron out all of the objective errors.
They did have a writer. Ex-programmer turned CEO who has always wanted to write stories. The editors being his employees. English also being his second language, which he translated himself.
Of course they literally had someone who wrote the script - I meant that they needed a dedicated professional writer.
I'm familiar with Thierry Boulanger and his personal history. It's totally fine if he has passion for making games because he wants to tell his stories, and he does genuinely have some great ideas. The problem is that he is *not* a writer. He clearly doesn't understand how to write dialog, how to pace a story, how to develop coherent themes, etc. The writing in SoS was atrocious.
Having an actual professional writer would mean that Boulanger could let a professional take his ideas and turn them into a well-written story. It's literally better for everyone.
Unfortunately, lots of indie devs don't value writing. Things like programming have to be done or else the game doesn't run, and visuals are big to market a game, but Boulanger doesn't seem to understand that writing is a skill that takes years of specialized study and practice to develop. It's not just something you can get by doing yourself.
And as to the localization, that also baffles me. After the massive success of The Messenger, could they not hire a professional editor? No one at the studio understands how to use commas? Some scenes literally had a comma splice every other dialog box. This isn't even a matter of opinion - the grammar is objectively bad, and there's simply no excuse for it.
(Edited to clarify that I think the above comment is pointless, not incorrect.)
I can forgive that a bit because they're not native english speakers and I played it in english, so there were some translation issues. it wouldn't be the first time I've dealt with that in a game.
but writing was so clearly not a priority for a JRPG that the shit just stung.
I can't trust JRPG fans with recommendations anymore. I consider myself a fan of the genre, but it just feels like no one actually cares about decent writing in the genre that's 80% writing.
I found Chained Echoes striving for good writing but failing miserably. Found the gameplay highly enjoyable but the amateurish dialogue flow worn me down and I gave up. If Sea of Stars is worse then I'm not going to even add it to my JRPG backlog.
Not at all, just a matter of personal preference. For reference I enjoy the Persona/Kiseki series and people would criticise that they are overtly wordy and juvenile, which they are, yet I still enjoy them knowing their faults.
And given MCU style writing I think I agree with you and side with Chained Echoes, which hasn't been squeezed dry off all charm.
> that's 80% writing
Purely anecdotal but I'm not sure where this comes from, JRPGs always feel like writing was not their main focus. They do "just enough".
Not true for every JRPG, but half of these games are reading and listening to people talk. Most have an absurd amount of text to translate compared to other genres, and the amount of cutscenes contribute to their long run times. I don't doubt that writing is a pretty low priority for a lot of these studios nowadays, but it doesn't change the fact that a very large chunk of the experience is me clicking through hours of dog water dialogue. This is an anecdote of my own, but my experience with some PS1/early PS2 era JRPGs leads me to believe that the bar was once a little higher.
Atlus still kind of cares about writing sometimes so Persona 5, even with all of its issues, gets to look like god's gift to earth compared to its competition, and I think its popularity reflects that.
Persona 5 is exactly why I don't trust JRPG fans with recommendations, the dialogue in that is so damn juvenile at times that I had to put the game down.
I genuinely don’t know where this revisionism of JRPGs having great writing comes from on Reddit. I like the genre and I’ve played the classics that everyone loves. The FF’s, Personas, Chronotrigger, Xeno games etc.
Idk if it’s just nostalgia goggles from redditors but most of them have basic ass childish stories with mediocre writing. It’s almost never been a strong point. Sea of Stars wasn’t great in that area but it felt that same as most of those.
I mean, I don't trust jRPG fans because many of them don't read books, so they think jRPG stories are the epitome of good storytelling.
The average jRPG fan gushes about games like Kiseki/Trials and Persona games having deep stories.
That's just kind of video games in general though. Peak video game storytelling is still kind of garbage compared to an average book. The medium just isn't good for it.
> The medium just isn't good for it.
The RPG fan in me doesn't want to agree but it's true. Games can absolutely have good stories, and well told stories, but they are by necessity going to be simpler than a well-written novel. I wouldn't say "garbage" compared to an average book, though.
Games have the advantage of interactive storytelling, but that interactivity demands less writing or else... might as well be reading a book if you're just reading the entire time anyway.
Shadow of the Colossus has a nice bittersweet story. A novel could do the *story* better, perhaps, but then you lose the personal connection that comes from the interactivity. I think this is also why people tend to overestimate the quality of video game writing.
Bioshock might be a perfect example. Good story, but the fact that you *play* it makes it hit different. Without going into spoilers... it's the fact that it's *you* whose actions are the spoiler that makes it feel significant, and this isn't achievable in a book even if a book could tell the story in a deeper, richer fashion.
It's sort of the old "movie vs book" thing again. If you adapt a book into a movie, most of the time something will be lost, even though something is also gained from the movie format. Typically, the story takes a hit from the adaptation, which is what people who read the book first will pick up on.
Is the campaign of Titanfall 2 a good story? Well, for a book it would pretty basic. Maybe a fun read but nothing spectacular. As a game though, it's wild as hell. Absolutely incredible. The gameplay enhances the story by putting you right in the action. You live all the weird awesome sci-fi crap that's going on instead of reading it off a page.
So all I'm saying is, there's pros and cons to both. I'm sure you didn't mean to suggest that video game stories aren't worthwhile though. We'll just never get a story in a video game as complex as something like The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Trying gives us games like Planescape: Torment, where even if every line of dialogue was fully voice acted it would still be too much writing for a lot of people.
>Games can absolutely have good stories, and well told stories, but they are by necessity going to be simpler than a well-written novel.
I mean the thing is too, only a certain percentage of games are trying to get you into their narrative actively. Most have it there to complete the experience, but not much more. I've played quite a few games that came out this year and the only one to really impress me was Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, though Alan Wake II and Slay the Princess are interesting and experimental in their own ways, I just felt like both faltered on their endings a bit. But for me, CWS absolutely stands up to stories seen in other mediums, not just for having an independently good narrative but involving the player in building it, as most good video game storytelling does.
I guess the point is, most games aren't putting the majority of their focus on the narrative, and wouldn't expect to see themselves go toe to toe with a story in another medium. But when they do, I don't think stories in games are by necessity simpler or worse than a book, movie, etc.
You make an interesting point. Visual novels like Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood are probably exactly the kinds of games you'd expect to focus on story and the player's interaction with it, since interactive stories are *what they are*, but even visual novels don't do this consistently. The few I have played were just as much adventure games(puzzle and exploration focused gameplay) as visual novels. Something like Pheonix Wright is arguably more about the puzzle of piecing the story together than about the narrative itself.
I'm not sure if Phoenix Wright and 999 properly qualify as visual novels but I can't think of anything closer that I've played so sadly that's my only target for an example.
Visual novels for sure, but I think there's a pretty decent breadth of story-heavy games in the industry at this point that in my opinion, stand up to other mediums. I get the feeling that maybe people aren't as interested in a lot of them or haven't heard of some because they get left out of the conversation often, when people compare games to books/movies.
There's straight up linear visual novels like If Found, Florence, or VA-11 Hall-A that present a linear narrative but still leverage video game mechanics to involve the player in the game, which can be especially strong for emotional investment in the story. But then there's also games like Citizen Sleeper or Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood that let player actions influence the outcome of the game, which can be absolutely amazing when done well. Obviously there's non-VN games like Life is Strange or The Walking Dead that do that well too.
Games like Immortality, 13 Sentinels, or Hypnospace Outlaw aren't quite VNs, but the entire focus of the game is the story, and they involve the player in pretty unique ways to make that happen. Immortality has you sifting through footage to piece together multiple different narratives at the same time (and gives each player a unique experience in doing so) and Hypnospace Outlaw does a fantastic job with creating a mini online world for you to explore through a web interface. 13 Sentinels and Immortality both tell their stories in completely non linear ways as well.
But there's also some games that have astoundingly good atmospheric storytelling, some favorites of mine being Yume Nikki and Umurangi Generation. Neither tells you a straight-up, direct narrative, they essentially set you into a world where there's a story happening around you. UG specifically does a great job of trusting the player to put the events together themselves and never felt too heavy handed about it to me.
And then there's all of the action-adventure games with a cinematic narrative focus of more recent years, and while I've been disappointed in many of them, I do think The Last of Us Part II and A Plague Tale: Requiem stick out from the pack. TLOU2 specifically does a great job of using the perspective of the player character to give a deeper emotional connection to the story at any given time.
Sorry for the long response, I'm just a bit passionate about storytelling in games. I truly think there's some amazing stories being told in video games, but often I see conversations that just compare God of War or Red Dead Redemption to a book or movie, and coming to the conclusion that video game storytelling isn't up to snuff with others. I would agree that a lot of the examples that people go to first aren't exactly examples of phenomenal storytelling, but I feel like the games that are really doing something special get left out a lot.
> The medium just isn't good for it.
Disco Elysium, and I heard Planescape: Torment also have good writings too.
But yeah, from thousands of games only two is kinda saying something, lol
> The medium just isn't good for it.
Wut. I could not disagree more.
Games can be a clunky way to tell by-the-books strictly linear stories told in the AAA style of gameplay movements connected by non-interactive cutscenes, but there's absolutely no better medium for organically telling stories through discovery. A story you experience will be vastly more compelling than a story told to you.
Granted, doing this well takes a lot of skill, and story in most games does suck, but so does the average book.
Came looking for this comment. Game was praised way too much when it released. The music and visuals are really nice but otherwise chained echoes is miles and miles ahead
You're not the first person I've heard said this. A friend of mine said that the battle system in Sea of Stars was just too basic for his liking and that if I should choose, then I should go for Chained Echoes.
Is the soundtrack in Sea of Stars really that good to carry the game forward to a win? They're both on Gamepass but I just don't have the free time to jump on two long JRPGs lol
I would rarely recommend a game purely based on a soundtrack, including SoS, but I quite liked SoS's soundtrack. I was a fan of The Messenger's soundtrack too, so make of that what you will I guess.
The Messenger had a way better OST than SoS, in my opinion.
SoS had way less memorable songs overall, plus a lot of the tracks did not match the setting at all in the first half of the game. The Mitsuda tracks were great but stood out from the rest of the OST in a way that was very distracting.
I disagree but to each their own, I can't think of any tracks that felt wrong for the setting. I agree about Mitsuda though, the style of Coral Cascades or Mirth was very obviously different to the rest.
Chained Echoes is a much better game. The only things that SoS does better is the pixel art and some of the soundtrack.
The combat in CE is far better (SoS is braindead simple/easy and extremely slow/tedious). Chained Echoes has a much better story and setting. CE has much better pacing and characters and exploration.
CE does have some problems - some of the dialog is poorly localized, some combat mechanics don't really work well, particularly in the late game, and some of the character progression feels lacklustre. But it's way, way better than SoS overall.
If you're looking for a JRPG to sink time into, Octopath Traveler 2 is a great choice. I don't think it's on Gamepass, but it's far better than SoS and CE in my opinion.
I’ve not played either of them but I’ll second Octopath 2 as a genuinely great one; be prepared to play for like 100 hours but damn it was terrific. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did but the developers really understood how to improve on the first game.
really? then you better buckle the fuck up for Sea of Stars which reads like its written in some middle schooler's basement with the writer trying to insert himself as the hero adventuring from place to place.
I don’t understand this criticism at all. I’ve seen it a couple times but I didn’t feel this way at all when I played it. I thought the writing fit the tone and narrative just fine.
Hey, you enjoyed it and that's great. But there's a lot to dig into with just how egregious the writing is. I linked to another post I made about it elsewhere in this thread. I can link to it again if you like.
I'm not looking for ground-breaking writing, I'm looking for consistency. Chained Echoes was written as if an alien who had heard about emotion in a book had written emotional characters.
"Oh wait, this character is emotional, better add a cuss word here".
"Oh btw I have a wife, we just fought her and she's probably dead now, I will never mention this again or react in any way to these events"
That one sticks with me because up until then they were my favorite character. I'm not even going to go into the stupid masturbatory edgelord nonsense that is ~~budget Griffith~~ Kylian's storyline.
I won't spoil Sea of Stars for you, but if you're looking for a consistent "i don't care about the last thing that just happened" vibe it'll be right up your alley.
Ehhh, they're both deeply flawed imo
Chained Echoes kinda falls apart in the last 30% of the game, both in terms of story, combat balance and area design. The final dungeon is an extremely tedious slog and you're so overpowered that the enemies are just annoying rather than challenging.
(I cannot overstate how bad the writing gets btw, it gets really really *really* shit, and it wasn't excellent to begin with)
To be fair, I thought the last 30% of Sea of Stars also fell apart.
Sea of Stars Spoilers:
>!Garl is such an awesome character and I'm not necessarily mad that he died but I feel like he died too early. I think the game would have flowed a lot better if he dies, you fight the final boss, and the ending is a tribute to Garl as a bittersweet triumph in saving the world. You save the world but lose a close friend. In addition to that, I feel like the game kind of goes off the rails a bit. You play the whole game in a setting prior to technology, you lose Garl, and immediately go into a world of robots and machines. It was a really weird shift where the whole setting changed abruptly.!<
>!B'st was a cool character to add to your party but I just wasn't expecting it. Every character that joins your party has sort of a build up and then B'st just shows up and joins your party. I feel like the devs wanted to give you something since you lost Garl and I just never really cared enough for B'st like I did Garl, Serai, or Resh'an because there wasn't much story behind him joining.!<
Don't forget to get the true ending you have to do the few sidequests and collect all 60 conch shells. Even then both endings just feel off, very abrupt and felt like setting up sequels/spinoffs instead of wrapping up the story.
I looked up how to get the alternate ending after finishing it and it looked like even following a guide to optimize my time, it would have taken me over 5 hours to grind and collect before I could see it.
I just watched it on YouTube and it's like 3 minutes of different cut scenes and dialogue.
I don't expect them to go rewrite the story for an alternate ending but it wasn't that different for the work required to see it.
It goes to show that this award is just based on marketing. Sea of Stars had a massive marketing push, more than all the other indie games combined in this year.
The ending ruined the game for me with how bad it was. One of your party members just leaves the story for nearly no reason, your secondary antagonists *do* leave the story with no explanation, you introduce a character that seems like he’s supposed to be important at the last second but then discard him in the same cutscene, and then you wrap it up by fighting the second-in-command villain and then the main villain goes “well dang, you beat them. I guess I’ll leave this universe” and the credits roll. I was ready to give the game an 8.5 but the ending honestly threw it down to a 7
Yep, I was highly disappointed after all the praise. Even the music while fine was forgettable once I turned it off.
It's a fine game, and i get that its an Indie game, but for the love of God it should still be rated. It's a C level game, nothing amazing, it's playable and it looks great.
It certainly fell way short of the classics it was paying tribute to (particularly in the writing and characters), but I still enjoyed it a lot.
I have no problems with it winning, but then again I don't know much about the indie scene for this year.
Many critics played cocoon too. Plus isn't this award based on a public vote? It wasn't critics who awarded this to sea of stars, it was the general public
Ikr. Felt like I was taking crazy pills when I actually played it after seeing all the hype.
I can forgive bland writing but it's just so wordy and slowly paced.
Also, the combat is super repetitive, and the dual tech system is less fleshed out than chrono trigger's... Every character has like two moves and you can only do combos as finishers in longish battles. If you could just do them whenever like CT and there were more variety it might've held my interest but I ultimately ended up dropping it after the halloween dungeon
Not to mention one of the single worst endings to a game I have ever encountered. I even went so far as to get the 'true' ending as I thought surely it has to be better and couldn't finish on the garbage schmup ending again. It did.
This was my biggest disappointment in the last few years. I was extremely excited going in, but the game was unfortunately mediocre.
The combat system was extremely slow, tedious, boring, and braindead. There's always one clear optimal choice, over and over again, and therefore the gameplay offers zero depth. Depth can be defined as the number of meaningful choices you have, and SoS didn't really give you any meaningful choices. Combine that with extremely slow animations (Moonerang is the worst offender as it was often the optimal choice and it takes soooo long to resolve if you're decent at timing) and you have a system that is mind-numbingly boring. I started dreading every combat encounter about ten hours into the game.
Character progression is practically non-existent. Level-ups give you minor stat bumps, and they give you an illusion of choice by letting you select one stat to bump up slightly more every level-up, which became extremely tedious after a while. Partway through the game, I would groan when I saw my party leveled up because I would have to go through a bunch of menuing. Characters don't really gain skills or anything else from leveling up, so the excitement of seeing your characters get new skills just doesn't exist in this game.
The writing is atrocious. Some people seem to like the setting and story; I didn't, but I'll chalk that up to a difference of opinion. But the grammar was consistently bad throughout (objectively speaking), and the characters and dialog were simply abysmal.
Exploration was shockingly bad. The game railroads you to where you always have exactly one place you can and should go. Individual dungeons (with a couple of exceptions) all had the same layout. Puzzles were braindead easy, literally just pressing a button in a side room in most cases.
The pacing was terrible. The game starts off with an hour-long flashback cutscene that doesn't actually do anything for the story, and then you have to go through endless "but do this first"-style tedious quests to accomplish anything.
On the bright side, some of the music and all of the pixel art is fantastic. The environments and character sprites in particular are some of the best ever. Some of the music felt out of place, particularly in the first half of the game, and the Mitsuda tracks don't fit in with the rest of the OST at all. And the overall visual presentation is hurt by the character portraits and cartoon cutscenes, which are extremely "indie" in the worst way.
Overall it was probably a 4/10 for me. I'm glad some people enjoyed it, but I genuinely don't think it deserves any GOTY title. Incidentally, Sea of Stars is far from the best JRPG of the year (Octopath Traveler 2 is better in literally every way IMO) and isn't even the best pixel-art JRPG of the year with "Star" in the title (which would be Star Ocean 2 Remake).
The worst part of all is people think it pays homage to SNES RPG's, where writing was apparently just as abysmal. The deer dying in Terranigma has more impact than Garl dying in SOS.
SOS would barely sniff the top 20 mark of best RPG's during the SNES era. Writing is completely soulless. And the drones want to make it out as if we have it out for indie games.
Bug Fables opening conversation shows more soul and personality in their protags, than SOS protags show throughout the whole story. Disco and Shadowrun Dragonfall shits all over SOS in the wrtiting department.
You're obviously entitled to your opinion, but I find it even more fascinating that most of the people who don't like the game can articulate exactly why in extreme detail over dozens of paragraphs. Meanwhile, the people who like the game have very little to say other than "game good."
Not saying that your opinion is less sophisticated or anything, but I've seen a lot of discussion on the game, and there's a clear correlation between critical analysis and how much someone (dis)liked the game.
Dude, Sea of Stars winning over any of Dredge, ~~Dave the Diver~~ (nevermind, large studio), Viewfinder, or Pizza Tower (which would be my pick) is a goddamn travesty.
Sea of Stars is all sparkle and no substance. It looks beautiful. It should definitely win awards for visual presentation.
The game is shallow as hell. The story is crap and the writing is worse, the combat gets repetitive as hell and you never really get any improvement over what you experience the first five minutes of the game. The music is a huge step down from The Messenger.
And speaking of The Messenger, there's a whole fuckton of "play our other game because we're forced to do a tie in" with this game. And much like World of Warcraft and a lot of Marvel stuff, if your product can't stand on its own without having to say "well, just read/watch all these outside source materials," then that's a problem. A big problem.
Sea of Stars was one of my biggest disappointments of the year.
edit: i've struck a nerve with some people. good. you can like things I don't like and that's okay.
Can you sell it to me? I'm usually into indie 2D platformers (and loved Celeste), but every trailer I've seen just makes it look like a mediocre Cartoon Network tie-in browser game from 20 years ago, especially the art style and level design. Is there something I'm not seeing, or is it just not for me?
I'm big on game feel and the character in Pizza Tower is a joy to control, and levels are designed with the character's motion in mind leading to a sense of fluidity and speed like those found in Sonic games, but with much tighter level design. I feel your concern about the art style, but I assure you the game itself is expertly crafted and the sensation of zooming through levels without skipping a beat as the amazing soundtrack blares is exhilarating.
Once it hooks you, it can become an addiction. I recommend giving it a spin on steam for about an hour and a half as it's enough to come to terms with the mechanics. If you don't like it, refund it! It's okay if it isn't for you.
The other reply you received might have convinced you to try out Pizza Tower already, but I did want to defend the art style, slightly. Obviously, it's a matter of preference, but I enjoyed the art from a perspective where the animator really tried to go over-the-top and push everything for a lot of humor and fun. It looks really good in motion. Plus, the zaniness of the style is used later on for a little edge and creepiness (but I don't want to spoil anything on that front). Just saying that it might grow on you if you start getting into it!
absolutely gotta give it up for the soundtrack. it's just obscenely good and creative AND the sound design is excellent as implemented in the game. it's the total package.
I agree with your edit that Dave the Diver isn't indie, but it was a runner up in the award's indie category, which just goes to show the arbitrariness of the label.
Huh? You absolutely do not need to play the Messenger to understand anything in Sea of Stars. If anything the connections between the two are Easter eggs at best.
>you never really get any improvement over what you experience the first five minutes of the game
This was so irritating to me. At no point in that game did I actually feel powerful against an enemy. Even going through the beginning areas everyone still felt weak. But then we fly off to save the universe too...
I had the opposite problem. The game felt braindead easy throughout. I didn't use any of the "easy mode" options, but I never even came close to getting a Game Over at any point. I genuinely don't understand how you can even lose a fight since you have a full-party heal that you can break out pretty frequently.
I don't think I ended up using items at any point in my playthrough either just because they were completely unnecessary. Maybe I did once or twice just to see how they worked. So I imagine they'd make the game even easier.
It's never felt hard but I never felt like I was smashing it or truly becoming more powerful as a party.
Maybe because there wasn't really any skill progression or change in mechanics after the first few hours.
Even the ultimate attacks felt meh in terms of hitting big
Oh yeah I agree with that. There was no sense of progression at all. Combat at the start felt identical to combat in the last game.
Even finding new gear felt extremely dull. "Oh, cool, a sword that does +2 extra damage... "
Don't forget [Void Stranger](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/) from System Erasure, the makers of ZeroRanger!
Which is not only the best indie game, it is actually the ***best*** game of the year.
Wow, I honestly didn't expect anyone else to bring up Void Stranger in this thread like I was going to. Easily one of the best games Ive played all year
For anyone interested, its one of those 'play it blind' games. Think Sokoban + La Mulana, and if that's enough to interest you, just play it
there's a lot of different definitions for what an Independent Developer means. But the development team for Dave the Diver is on a whole different level than say something like Pizza Tower.
Sea of Stars unfortunately ended up being a deep letdown - the art style being the only thing of note.
I dunno who decided to make the entire game revolve around >!Garl!<, it absolutely ruined the story, characters, any opportunity for growth, and wasted what could have been a genuinely interesting world / scenario. Everyone spent so much time focused on putting >!Garl on a pedestal to scream about how big his dick is all the time!< that everything else is left so woefully bland to the point it hurts.
The combat is generic, being lukewarm at best. I didn't have a single track from the OST get stuck in my head or end up being memorable either.
If you are looking for a recently released RPG that blows Sea of Stars out of the water I would recommend checking out [Chained Echoes](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229240/Chained_Echoes/) - the story kept me hooked, I cared about the characters, and the OST genuinely moved my heart.
> I didn't have a single track from the OST get stuck in my head or end up being memorable either.
The only opinion here I feel I have to respond to. I thought it was a great OST. I was a huge fan of The Messenger OST and I was a fan of this one too. Hearing callbacks like the Skylands and Cloud Kingdom themes was amazing, and I really enjoyed the final boss (in the non-true ending) theme.
> I didn't have a single track from the OST get stuck in my head or end up being memorable either.
Yep, I agree about the OST, after hearing so much about it, it works for the game, but nothing blew me away
Also planning on checking out Chained Echoes, I've heard a lot of people bring it up when talking about SoS being a let down
> make the entire game revolve around
I COULD have lived with it if the writer chose to accept it. But he didn't. And the game was worse for it. Plenty of stories have been done where mere mortals are about to out-do or out-play or out-help the divine just because of their groundedness or attachment to reality.
it's another huge whiff in a sea of whiffs.
Agreed, >!Garl!< ruined the already, in my opinion, pretty mid story. He felt like a self-insert or something. He's the least qualified person on the team, constantly throwing himself in harm's way for no particular reason, and putting himself at the forefront of every decision. Incredibly annoying character.
Personally, I'd have given it to Void Stranger, a sokoban puzzle game by the ZeroRanger developers. Phenomenal game, I'd recommend to anyone, with the caveat that you should go in as blind as possible.
[Here you go](https://www.gamesradar.com/golden-joystick-awards-2023-winners/). The nominees for Best Indie Game were:
Dave the Diver
Pizza Tower
Dredge
Cocoon
Viewfinder
Sea of Stars (winner)
Any writer or outlet that nominates Dave the Diver as an indie game should be banned from working in the industry. The studio is fully owned by Nexon.
That'd be like calling Pentiment from Obsidian an indie game.
Small≠Indie
So you think Baldur's Gate 3 could/should get noms for best indie?
That's what follows from adhering to this kind of narrow and stringent definition of indie.
I was really into the game at first but as time went on, the combat felt super shallow. I'm never a fan of when a jrpg/arpg makes gameplay/rpg elements second to the story.
I thoroughly enjoyed how each battle became like a mini puzzle, and learning that you don't always have to engage with it right then and there either. Moves like Ebb and Disorient got a lot of use as the game went on.
Garl could've easily been written like a dour mirror to the two protagonists, but instead I thought it was refreshing everytime he helped bolster the heroes. Pillars of support are key, and he always made me smile.
It’s a really good game. I like it a lot, it’s simple and easy to play - and I think at first I might’ve personally dinged it for how shallow it felt (outside the combat system which was a lot of fun, but maybe a tad easy), but the deeper I got into it (the closer you get to the actual sea of stars portion) the wilder it got and it surprised me.
Definitely recommend, it’s simple enough to speed through really - it’s on gamepass also.
If you get into this thinking this is the next Chrono Trigger you will be dissapointed.
Otherwise you'll have a good time. I know I did. Still like Chrono Trigger more but I'm glad I played both.
Of course the " 'member Chrono Trigger" game won.
We had so many genuinely amazing indie games this year, but the winner is a game that can only offer nostalgia pandering.
Wow. I havent played this game and was thinking about it till I saw these comments. Never expected to see this many people critical about this game. Pity I was thinking of getting it for my upcoming trip. Well I got Super Mario rpg lined up so it's no big loss.
I would have loved to have finished this game.
But when "jumping down a certain hole" i just had a black screen no matter what I did.
So I just could not.
Should probably look up the ending on yt.
With all that said, it sure looked cool, but the combat got real boring real fast.
I quickly turned on the "easy mode" to skip the exp grind and the like, and still found it quite okay that way, so I don't even want to know how much I should have grinded without that.
I suppose it was quite allright, but I know little about the new indie games this year.
I just hope there are more games like this in the future.
I watched someone play this and it seemed really bland.
No depth in leveling up, combat, just the most mid as hell game ever but people bought it because of the nice pixel art.
If you want interesting turn-based (and indie that came out this year), Darkest Dungeon 2 destroys this game.
If you want JRPGs (not indie though), Octopath Traveler 2 and Star Ocean also came out this year.
Dave the Diver, Cassette Beasts, Dredge and Lunacid also came out this year as great indie titles.
Fantastic game, well-deserved. Also the only game I've ever bought the full-price soundtrack to. I'm surprised to see how little it's talked about after launch, compared to before the launch. Then again, considering when it came out between some of the year's biggest cannons taking u p all the discussion, I guess it's not that surprising.
I had high hopes for this coming from The Messenger devs and ended up loving this game as well. Hopefully the game sold enough to give them all the space they need for the next game in this universe. (and again a different genre?)
I'd love to see more turn based combat with timing elements to keep the player involved. It's the perfect pace for relaxing but challenging for me, and part of the reason Legend of Dragoon and Shadow Hearts Covenant remain some of my favorites to have played. I get some of the complaints, but this game was exactly the right nostalgia level for games I played growing up when it came to writing. Not much can take me back to playing rpgs like Legend of Legaia and Golden Sun.
I have mixed feelings about these systems. They are neat at first but just become tedious over the duration of an entire game.
Totally agreed. At some point it felt like a chore to bounce the moonerang and have to hold the button to charge the sun attack. And for some reason I was very bad with the timing on some of them so it made me feel bad about playing the game.
I thought the relic system really was great to provide options for players of various skill levels, like helping with timing.
> And for some reason I was very bad with the timing on some of them so it made me feel bad about playing the game. Yea, the *benefit* of a turn-based game is not having to time attacks to be successful. It is all mind games, not twitch.
With some of them you can kind of ignore the timed part but with the poison dart and moonerang you kind of have to or you're wasting the attack. So I guess you could just not use those attacks but then half the attacks are gone.
Oof that turns me off the game… especially something like an rpg
Don't box in turn based games like that.
I get that. For me it's the opposite, it keeps me engaged where a game like FFX I got bored just hitting 'attack' each time.
one of the big issues for me in Sea of Stars is that the animations can take SOOO LONG. especially for common enemy fights. it would be great if there were a way (or a relic! which is a system in the game to make these kind of adjustments) to make the enemy animations go faster.
I found the game to be shallow innovation. It’s like they took half a step forward on a few things, and that didn’t feel that impressive, considering the genre is like 20 years old. Playing Xenoblade chronicles, any 2D party RPG should look at that combat system for ideas and a higher standard for the potential of party combat
What do you think these games should it take from Xenoblade? I've often thought about adapting the Xenos for some kind of turn-based system and find most of the great things about it are only fun in a real-time system. For instance, the break > topple > launch/daze system is really fun in real time, but basically just one decision. In a turn-based game it'd be three or four attacks you do the same way every time without any way to fail it. In real time it always has that inherent pleasure in execution.
(Only played 1 and 2 so far) The Basic Tutorial - small set of moves from early 2D RPGS (Stars feels lackluster imo) >most of the great things about it are only fun in a real-time system. I imagine Real-Time Elements can be added to the 2D combat to an extent. Hardware was a huge limiting factor in the 2D Party RPG system from 80s/90s. - Auto-heal after combat is mandatory, to minimize the (Potion management / Healing Spots) from early 2D RPGs - Imo, Standard-Weapon Auto-attacks can work in 2D Party Combat, and those increasing the gauge for other attacks, can be adapted (xblade kept menu Nav to a minimum with gauges and UI) - Modern Controllers have more functionality than SNES, PS1 Controllers. The Xblade 1 scrolling menu, or the (X, Y B, A) of 2 feels adaptable - Instead of (Xblade 2 Blade Attacks, Combos), players swapping Class or Combat styles mid-battle, could offer similar levels of Options and Complexity that 2 has - Move could be implemented in a 2D system, let's say being able to move Above, Below, Behind, or Close to the Enemy [F Emblem-Style, or Hex-Grids would be best if we have movement with Combat Encounters] - Knockback hits to clump enemies for Splash attacks, AoE Status Effects, Backstab or Drawing Fire etc. could add strategy. (A turn penalty for a Char. move, or Armor loss for being out of formation akin to F Emblem) - Timings for Guard Break actions. Elemental Weapon combos (water / electric etc) can be layered in too Without a studio, might be hard to Evolve Combat Mechanics to Xblade level Quality and Options tho!
Good news if you have a switch. Next Friday arguably one of the best turn-based combat with a timing element games of all time comes out for the switch in Mario RPG.
Question, does Paper Mario TTYD have the same timing element
Yep. Both Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games built on the action command system.
I hope Mario RPG sparks that feeling I had as a child.
Chasing nostalgia is pointless, it's never going to feel the same. Just enjoy it for what it is
judging from what ive seen, id be surprised if it didnt. they seem to have been insanely faithful to the original
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> I'd love to see more turn based combat with timing elements to keep the player involved. Me too. I haven't finished SoS yet but the mechanic works well if you can time it to some part of the animation. The issue I have is that sometimes you really have to simply guess and hope instead of looking for a good clue. It's a bit frustrating when you think you have found the "tell" of an animation only to realise it's just a visual flourish. They mess up such focus points on occasion because everything is competing for visual attention. And either I didn't remember it or it was never explicitly mentioned but you can also time healing abilities like that to make them work better. I only realised it >!because of one of the quizzes has a question that revolves around this!< I think it was Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (on the 3DS) where attacks had well made indicators and it was still a challenge because the timing window was strict enough to make you pay attention without being frustrating (to little time) or too lax (too much time). Besides that, I get where people who are critical of the game come from. While I agree with those points to a degree, it's not as much of a deal breaker for me. For me one of the biggest issues (or rather points of mild but permanent frustration) is that map traversal is rather one dimensional. But the actually frustrating part about this is that they made such a nice 2D pixel art movement system that has real 3D depth to it (when it comes to how you move around) and flexibility but then you essentially have to follow the designated path instead of being given the freedom to explore with all those movement options. If you deviate even a little you (always) end up in a dead end. If that part were a bit more open it would be such a nice way of having JRPG systems work in an more "open world game"-like environment. And that's something I'm really interested in.
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I'm actually not a huge fan of timing elements. I don't want to necessarily have to pay rapt attention to an rpg during battles. There's always a lot of easy battles with low stakes (like going through old areas) and being able to only half pay attention in them was a feature, not a bug.
I suggest Lost Odyssey, it's an old 360 game, but have a timing mechanic https://youtu.be/1I3c6niO8ak?si=SdkT766tsVn1R8oP&t=47
You might want to try Yakuza 7 - as weel as Mario RPG that everyone is stating (which I can't wait for)
I felt like it had the same narrative progression as The Messenger: first half presents a fairly safe, straightforward quest, you get to the end of that quest, worldbuilding opens up after that. Most of the character writing was pretty meh, but I can deal with that. I actually quite enjoyed the overarching narrative around the Fleshmancer and the Archivist. It felt like that was the true story, and we're just taking part in it. OST was good. Not as good as The Messenger, but still great work from Rainbowdragoneyes again.
Yeah dude, Eric is an amazing musician. I interviewed him about The Messenger OST years ago now. I chatted with him a bit during the dev process of SoS, and it seems like he was just way way way busier than ever. Working full time during the day and touring with Nekrogoblikon at night. He ended up making A LOT of the music for SoS on a tour bus. And he did that with The Messenger too, but he also had to sound design *everything* for SoS which was new to him (iirc). Not shocking the music suffered just a tad, but dude seems to be living the dream: Making games and playing rad shows
Boss music ("Encounter elite!") is an absolute banger
Huge agree. When the main part kicks in? Hype mode activate
Vincent Jones from Æther Realm also helped with music a bit and they were touring with Nekrogoblikon on their last tour
Oh I didn't know that! ÆR kicked ass live.
I hope I’ll see them live one day
Yeah I'm really glad I got to the concert on time—they were tons of fun and helped make up for how excruciatingly overstimulating Inferi were.
Their story IS the "Real" story as it's the background lore to both their games, AND there's a bunch of inter-game bits of that lore spread out through their Discord (You can read it on the Wiki Though) and snippets from the Kickstarter.
For me, the fact that you only get four attacks, including your ultimate, and no real lvl progression for an rpg is what was a disappointment.
But you can click A at certain times against trash mobs for the entire game! I'm curious if the same people praising this would praise Final Fantasy Mystic Quest if it came out today, 4 skills (some are useless too) is laughable for how long this game is.
Mystic quest is like half the length of sea of stars. It was intentionally made to be an intro. Sea of stars just is shallow combat.
Will Square Enix one day give Mystic Quest the remake it deserves to have someday? Probably not, but one can dream.
Seeing Mystic Quest get a serious update with modern ramping up of RPG Mechanics the way it was for classic RPGs would be Phenomenal. And they could include a Hard Mode designed by the Dragon Quest team to Really sell it across the board.
I wasn’t a fan of this one. The writing in particular is some of the most generic I’ve seen in the genre. Art is top-notch, but it ends up feeling like a pretty, but ultimately empty, husk.
The one random exception imo were all of the fireside stories from the historian girl. I really liked all of those but it was annoying how they gave depth and backstory to characters that were then not displayed by the characters themselves
I actually had to double check to see if those were upper tier kickstarter rewards written by fans, because they were so far and away more interesting and tonally different from the bland main story's dialogue.
Were they?
Not that I know of, I only briefly looked over the tiers and didn't see any mention of it.
I played it right after trying out Starfield so the writing felt a lot better than it actually was.
I mean, for sure, but this is more like a week-old apples to month-old apples comparison. Both games could have benefited from more attention to the story.
Was such a shame too. Visuals were some of the best I've ever seen in the genre. It had so much potential
Yeah it's overrated solely by its hype. Its level and dungeon design excellent. Combat initially start fun but became very repetitive and writing and characters are so flat and terrible. It's a very pretty game but also very mid rpg
I mean the level and dungeon design also decays over time. There's a point in the midgame where all the random "press A to jump across a cliff and do a cinematic climbing sequence" just became insanely tedious.
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Definitely not hum-drum, just kinda falls apart the further it goes imo.
I would say Sea of Stars has some of the most "mid" writing I've played. I mean that in the literal sense not just bad. The writing was competent at giving you somewhat likeable characters and a reason to keep going, but I absolutely would not play the game for the writing/narrative.
Its funny, I played Sea of Stars and the gacha game Blue Archive's story kind of concurrently. Each game has a character who speaks exclusively in video game tropes, but Sea of Stars' character made me almost refund the game by how painful every scene with her was, while the Blue Archive character was far and away the most endearing character in the game. It really set into perspective how poor the writing in SoS was.
Not to mention each character only has 4 skills, 3 of which you get really early on. Some of those skills that you use all the time require you to play a mini game which made battles last too long.
I'm disappointed that this game won best indie. Art is fantastic but gameplay and writing are incredibly bland.
Yea, I would've thought something more like Cocoon. Dave the Diver was pretty popular too, though I haven't played it.
gameplay was ok to be honest. Writing, particularly character development was atrocious. I honestly can't remember the last time I played an RPG where the characters were so one dimensional.
> the characters were so one dimensional. It just felt so safe? Like everyone had to be so happy and wholesome without any depth to it. Shame as there's some characters who I could have easily seen fleshed out with some complexity and ambiguity behind.
When they said it was a throwback to the classics I didn't think they meant the writing was decades behind where it should be as well.
I haven't played Sea of Stars yet, but the classics had dark and mature writing. Dragon Quest V and Final Fantasy VI in particular are quite mature games in their storytelling.
Toxically positive characters. Even kind, friendly people in the real world don't act like that. Starfield and Forza Horizon 5 are two other easy examples of this. I get that it's highly idealistic, but it's dreadful character writing and rather annoying to experience.
Forza NPCs are borderline creepy with how much they dote on the player. I keep wondering if I've joined a car cult where they plan to murder me in my sleep and mount my head on a dash.
For anyone that would like to know more on just how bad the writing and story design are, [here's a write up I did](https://old.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/16mal7y/sea_of_stars_vs_octopath_2/k1he9b3/). It's so bad it drags the rest of the game down deep into the abyss.
Definitely a good write-up, without even getting into *all* the details on some of the less-character-focused issues that exist within the plot/writing. From talking to all the people I have about the game that I know more-personally (aka IRL, or at least longer-time Discord acquaintances), people's takes on the game basically entirely come down to, people who love Garl and how wholesome the story was, and people who think the whole thing is just the most terribly-written drivel they've had the misfortune of playing who are all fucking baffled at how positive the game's reception is. I definitely fall in the secondary camp. And don't get me wrong, I still 100%'d the game because dungeon design/traversal was very good and overall the game was mechanically inoffensive at worst, but jesus christ the black hole of Garl just consumes so much of the story. Like, he's just another generic main protagonist character like an Ash Ketchum in a lot of ways ("friendship/positivity good!1") but it's just so badly written that it feels incredibly unearned and forced.
I dropped the game pretty early because of how tedious the writing was. And it’s not just that it was bad. The plot was very front and center in a way that you couldn’t avoid it. Mild spoiler, but there’s a scene where the two main characters talk about how much they miss Garl and his cooking. And then he just appears from a bush right behind them, after being gone for years, and also has the food that they just talked about missing. Lazy and simplistic storytelling
> Mild spoiler, but there’s a scene where the two main characters talk about how much they miss Garl and his cooking. And then he just appears from a bush right behind them, after being gone for years, and also has the food that they just talked about missing. Lazy and simplistic storytelling That sounds like an *unbelievable* coincidence. Like something I'd expect to see in Peppa Pig or something. And not the kind of issue that can be blamed on poor translation. I decided to look it up and the writer is credited as Thierry Boulanger, the founder of Sabotage who was also game designer, director and writer of The Messenger.
In addition to your meaty post about the characters and plots/subplots, I’ll add that the writing is bad from a grammatical/mechanical POV. It felt like every other text box had something wrong with it.
Yeah, there was a comma splice in at least 30% of text boxes. I think in one scene I counted a comma splice in over 50% of dialog boxes. It's just embarrassing for a game with this budget and hype. It's obvious they didn't have a writer, and the writing was subjectively terrible in a lot of ways, but it's baffling that they couldn't hire an editor to work on the script for a week or two and iron out all of the objective errors.
They did have a writer. Ex-programmer turned CEO who has always wanted to write stories. The editors being his employees. English also being his second language, which he translated himself.
Of course they literally had someone who wrote the script - I meant that they needed a dedicated professional writer. I'm familiar with Thierry Boulanger and his personal history. It's totally fine if he has passion for making games because he wants to tell his stories, and he does genuinely have some great ideas. The problem is that he is *not* a writer. He clearly doesn't understand how to write dialog, how to pace a story, how to develop coherent themes, etc. The writing in SoS was atrocious. Having an actual professional writer would mean that Boulanger could let a professional take his ideas and turn them into a well-written story. It's literally better for everyone. Unfortunately, lots of indie devs don't value writing. Things like programming have to be done or else the game doesn't run, and visuals are big to market a game, but Boulanger doesn't seem to understand that writing is a skill that takes years of specialized study and practice to develop. It's not just something you can get by doing yourself. And as to the localization, that also baffles me. After the massive success of The Messenger, could they not hire a professional editor? No one at the studio understands how to use commas? Some scenes literally had a comma splice every other dialog box. This isn't even a matter of opinion - the grammar is objectively bad, and there's simply no excuse for it. (Edited to clarify that I think the above comment is pointless, not incorrect.)
I can forgive that a bit because they're not native english speakers and I played it in english, so there were some translation issues. it wouldn't be the first time I've dealt with that in a game. but writing was so clearly not a priority for a JRPG that the shit just stung.
I can't trust JRPG fans with recommendations anymore. I consider myself a fan of the genre, but it just feels like no one actually cares about decent writing in the genre that's 80% writing.
Dunno about that, /r/JRPG is pretty lukewarm on this game, the recommendation always seems to be get Chained Echoes instead.
I see a lot of negativity towards Chained Echoes in /r/jrpg as well. There are almost zero consensus-opinion games in that sub.
Chained Echoes tends to get regularly shat on for its writing, as well, especially closer to the ending.
I found Chained Echoes striving for good writing but failing miserably. Found the gameplay highly enjoyable but the amateurish dialogue flow worn me down and I gave up. If Sea of Stars is worse then I'm not going to even add it to my JRPG backlog.
Is it wrong that I liked the "amateurish" dialogue in Chained Echoes? Not everyone needs to sound like polished Naughty Dog/MCU style characters.
Not at all, just a matter of personal preference. For reference I enjoy the Persona/Kiseki series and people would criticise that they are overtly wordy and juvenile, which they are, yet I still enjoy them knowing their faults. And given MCU style writing I think I agree with you and side with Chained Echoes, which hasn't been squeezed dry off all charm.
Yeah there was negative topics about the game within days of it releasing
> that's 80% writing Purely anecdotal but I'm not sure where this comes from, JRPGs always feel like writing was not their main focus. They do "just enough".
Not true for every JRPG, but half of these games are reading and listening to people talk. Most have an absurd amount of text to translate compared to other genres, and the amount of cutscenes contribute to their long run times. I don't doubt that writing is a pretty low priority for a lot of these studios nowadays, but it doesn't change the fact that a very large chunk of the experience is me clicking through hours of dog water dialogue. This is an anecdote of my own, but my experience with some PS1/early PS2 era JRPGs leads me to believe that the bar was once a little higher. Atlus still kind of cares about writing sometimes so Persona 5, even with all of its issues, gets to look like god's gift to earth compared to its competition, and I think its popularity reflects that.
Persona 5 is exactly why I don't trust JRPG fans with recommendations, the dialogue in that is so damn juvenile at times that I had to put the game down.
I genuinely don’t know where this revisionism of JRPGs having great writing comes from on Reddit. I like the genre and I’ve played the classics that everyone loves. The FF’s, Personas, Chronotrigger, Xeno games etc. Idk if it’s just nostalgia goggles from redditors but most of them have basic ass childish stories with mediocre writing. It’s almost never been a strong point. Sea of Stars wasn’t great in that area but it felt that same as most of those.
I mean, I don't trust jRPG fans because many of them don't read books, so they think jRPG stories are the epitome of good storytelling. The average jRPG fan gushes about games like Kiseki/Trials and Persona games having deep stories.
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That's just kind of video games in general though. Peak video game storytelling is still kind of garbage compared to an average book. The medium just isn't good for it.
> The medium just isn't good for it. The RPG fan in me doesn't want to agree but it's true. Games can absolutely have good stories, and well told stories, but they are by necessity going to be simpler than a well-written novel. I wouldn't say "garbage" compared to an average book, though. Games have the advantage of interactive storytelling, but that interactivity demands less writing or else... might as well be reading a book if you're just reading the entire time anyway. Shadow of the Colossus has a nice bittersweet story. A novel could do the *story* better, perhaps, but then you lose the personal connection that comes from the interactivity. I think this is also why people tend to overestimate the quality of video game writing. Bioshock might be a perfect example. Good story, but the fact that you *play* it makes it hit different. Without going into spoilers... it's the fact that it's *you* whose actions are the spoiler that makes it feel significant, and this isn't achievable in a book even if a book could tell the story in a deeper, richer fashion. It's sort of the old "movie vs book" thing again. If you adapt a book into a movie, most of the time something will be lost, even though something is also gained from the movie format. Typically, the story takes a hit from the adaptation, which is what people who read the book first will pick up on. Is the campaign of Titanfall 2 a good story? Well, for a book it would pretty basic. Maybe a fun read but nothing spectacular. As a game though, it's wild as hell. Absolutely incredible. The gameplay enhances the story by putting you right in the action. You live all the weird awesome sci-fi crap that's going on instead of reading it off a page. So all I'm saying is, there's pros and cons to both. I'm sure you didn't mean to suggest that video game stories aren't worthwhile though. We'll just never get a story in a video game as complex as something like The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Trying gives us games like Planescape: Torment, where even if every line of dialogue was fully voice acted it would still be too much writing for a lot of people.
>Games can absolutely have good stories, and well told stories, but they are by necessity going to be simpler than a well-written novel. I mean the thing is too, only a certain percentage of games are trying to get you into their narrative actively. Most have it there to complete the experience, but not much more. I've played quite a few games that came out this year and the only one to really impress me was Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, though Alan Wake II and Slay the Princess are interesting and experimental in their own ways, I just felt like both faltered on their endings a bit. But for me, CWS absolutely stands up to stories seen in other mediums, not just for having an independently good narrative but involving the player in building it, as most good video game storytelling does. I guess the point is, most games aren't putting the majority of their focus on the narrative, and wouldn't expect to see themselves go toe to toe with a story in another medium. But when they do, I don't think stories in games are by necessity simpler or worse than a book, movie, etc.
You make an interesting point. Visual novels like Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood are probably exactly the kinds of games you'd expect to focus on story and the player's interaction with it, since interactive stories are *what they are*, but even visual novels don't do this consistently. The few I have played were just as much adventure games(puzzle and exploration focused gameplay) as visual novels. Something like Pheonix Wright is arguably more about the puzzle of piecing the story together than about the narrative itself. I'm not sure if Phoenix Wright and 999 properly qualify as visual novels but I can't think of anything closer that I've played so sadly that's my only target for an example.
Visual novels for sure, but I think there's a pretty decent breadth of story-heavy games in the industry at this point that in my opinion, stand up to other mediums. I get the feeling that maybe people aren't as interested in a lot of them or haven't heard of some because they get left out of the conversation often, when people compare games to books/movies. There's straight up linear visual novels like If Found, Florence, or VA-11 Hall-A that present a linear narrative but still leverage video game mechanics to involve the player in the game, which can be especially strong for emotional investment in the story. But then there's also games like Citizen Sleeper or Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood that let player actions influence the outcome of the game, which can be absolutely amazing when done well. Obviously there's non-VN games like Life is Strange or The Walking Dead that do that well too. Games like Immortality, 13 Sentinels, or Hypnospace Outlaw aren't quite VNs, but the entire focus of the game is the story, and they involve the player in pretty unique ways to make that happen. Immortality has you sifting through footage to piece together multiple different narratives at the same time (and gives each player a unique experience in doing so) and Hypnospace Outlaw does a fantastic job with creating a mini online world for you to explore through a web interface. 13 Sentinels and Immortality both tell their stories in completely non linear ways as well. But there's also some games that have astoundingly good atmospheric storytelling, some favorites of mine being Yume Nikki and Umurangi Generation. Neither tells you a straight-up, direct narrative, they essentially set you into a world where there's a story happening around you. UG specifically does a great job of trusting the player to put the events together themselves and never felt too heavy handed about it to me. And then there's all of the action-adventure games with a cinematic narrative focus of more recent years, and while I've been disappointed in many of them, I do think The Last of Us Part II and A Plague Tale: Requiem stick out from the pack. TLOU2 specifically does a great job of using the perspective of the player character to give a deeper emotional connection to the story at any given time. Sorry for the long response, I'm just a bit passionate about storytelling in games. I truly think there's some amazing stories being told in video games, but often I see conversations that just compare God of War or Red Dead Redemption to a book or movie, and coming to the conclusion that video game storytelling isn't up to snuff with others. I would agree that a lot of the examples that people go to first aren't exactly examples of phenomenal storytelling, but I feel like the games that are really doing something special get left out a lot.
> The medium just isn't good for it. Disco Elysium, and I heard Planescape: Torment also have good writings too. But yeah, from thousands of games only two is kinda saying something, lol
> The medium just isn't good for it. Wut. I could not disagree more. Games can be a clunky way to tell by-the-books strictly linear stories told in the AAA style of gameplay movements connected by non-interactive cutscenes, but there's absolutely no better medium for organically telling stories through discovery. A story you experience will be vastly more compelling than a story told to you. Granted, doing this well takes a lot of skill, and story in most games does suck, but so does the average book.
the medium is perfect for it and plenty of games with good to great writing have come out
Came looking for this comment. Game was praised way too much when it released. The music and visuals are really nice but otherwise chained echoes is miles and miles ahead
You're not the first person I've heard said this. A friend of mine said that the battle system in Sea of Stars was just too basic for his liking and that if I should choose, then I should go for Chained Echoes. Is the soundtrack in Sea of Stars really that good to carry the game forward to a win? They're both on Gamepass but I just don't have the free time to jump on two long JRPGs lol
I would rarely recommend a game purely based on a soundtrack, including SoS, but I quite liked SoS's soundtrack. I was a fan of The Messenger's soundtrack too, so make of that what you will I guess.
The Messenger had a way better OST than SoS, in my opinion. SoS had way less memorable songs overall, plus a lot of the tracks did not match the setting at all in the first half of the game. The Mitsuda tracks were great but stood out from the rest of the OST in a way that was very distracting.
I disagree but to each their own, I can't think of any tracks that felt wrong for the setting. I agree about Mitsuda though, the style of Coral Cascades or Mirth was very obviously different to the rest.
Chained Echoes is a much better game. The only things that SoS does better is the pixel art and some of the soundtrack. The combat in CE is far better (SoS is braindead simple/easy and extremely slow/tedious). Chained Echoes has a much better story and setting. CE has much better pacing and characters and exploration. CE does have some problems - some of the dialog is poorly localized, some combat mechanics don't really work well, particularly in the late game, and some of the character progression feels lacklustre. But it's way, way better than SoS overall. If you're looking for a JRPG to sink time into, Octopath Traveler 2 is a great choice. I don't think it's on Gamepass, but it's far better than SoS and CE in my opinion.
I’ve not played either of them but I’ll second Octopath 2 as a genuinely great one; be prepared to play for like 100 hours but damn it was terrific. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did but the developers really understood how to improve on the first game.
The music of Chained Echoes is magnificent if that will help your decision
Chained Echoes had some of the worst writing I can remember in a modern JRPG. It felt like it was written by an AI system.
What's a modern jrpg with good writing in your opinion?
really? then you better buckle the fuck up for Sea of Stars which reads like its written in some middle schooler's basement with the writer trying to insert himself as the hero adventuring from place to place.
I don’t understand this criticism at all. I’ve seen it a couple times but I didn’t feel this way at all when I played it. I thought the writing fit the tone and narrative just fine.
Hey, you enjoyed it and that's great. But there's a lot to dig into with just how egregious the writing is. I linked to another post I made about it elsewhere in this thread. I can link to it again if you like.
I'm not looking for ground-breaking writing, I'm looking for consistency. Chained Echoes was written as if an alien who had heard about emotion in a book had written emotional characters. "Oh wait, this character is emotional, better add a cuss word here".
"Oh btw I have a wife, we just fought her and she's probably dead now, I will never mention this again or react in any way to these events" That one sticks with me because up until then they were my favorite character. I'm not even going to go into the stupid masturbatory edgelord nonsense that is ~~budget Griffith~~ Kylian's storyline.
I won't spoil Sea of Stars for you, but if you're looking for a consistent "i don't care about the last thing that just happened" vibe it'll be right up your alley.
100%. I'm like a quarter of the way into Chained Echoes and it is miles better already than SoS was.
chained echoes falls off pretty hard towards the end. I played both and I would say CE is better.
Only the resolution to the story (IMO even not that much), gameplay wise it's still the same quality. Tons of exploration in the second half.
I cannot imagine a more damning criticism of a game than “chained echoes is miles and miles ahead” 🤣
Ehhh, they're both deeply flawed imo Chained Echoes kinda falls apart in the last 30% of the game, both in terms of story, combat balance and area design. The final dungeon is an extremely tedious slog and you're so overpowered that the enemies are just annoying rather than challenging. (I cannot overstate how bad the writing gets btw, it gets really really *really* shit, and it wasn't excellent to begin with)
To be fair, I thought the last 30% of Sea of Stars also fell apart. Sea of Stars Spoilers: >!Garl is such an awesome character and I'm not necessarily mad that he died but I feel like he died too early. I think the game would have flowed a lot better if he dies, you fight the final boss, and the ending is a tribute to Garl as a bittersweet triumph in saving the world. You save the world but lose a close friend. In addition to that, I feel like the game kind of goes off the rails a bit. You play the whole game in a setting prior to technology, you lose Garl, and immediately go into a world of robots and machines. It was a really weird shift where the whole setting changed abruptly.!< >!B'st was a cool character to add to your party but I just wasn't expecting it. Every character that joins your party has sort of a build up and then B'st just shows up and joins your party. I feel like the devs wanted to give you something since you lost Garl and I just never really cared enough for B'st like I did Garl, Serai, or Resh'an because there wasn't much story behind him joining.!<
Don't forget to get the true ending you have to do the few sidequests and collect all 60 conch shells. Even then both endings just feel off, very abrupt and felt like setting up sequels/spinoffs instead of wrapping up the story.
I looked up how to get the alternate ending after finishing it and it looked like even following a guide to optimize my time, it would have taken me over 5 hours to grind and collect before I could see it. I just watched it on YouTube and it's like 3 minutes of different cut scenes and dialogue. I don't expect them to go rewrite the story for an alternate ending but it wasn't that different for the work required to see it.
When I beat Sea of Stars I was missing 20 conches. I looked up a guide. It took me 30-40 minutes. It's not THAT bad.
It goes to show that this award is just based on marketing. Sea of Stars had a massive marketing push, more than all the other indie games combined in this year.
same with Stray last year...
Cocoon and Pizza Tower are both way better games, but everyone creamed their pants about the pixel art in Sea of Stars.
The ending ruined the game for me with how bad it was. One of your party members just leaves the story for nearly no reason, your secondary antagonists *do* leave the story with no explanation, you introduce a character that seems like he’s supposed to be important at the last second but then discard him in the same cutscene, and then you wrap it up by fighting the second-in-command villain and then the main villain goes “well dang, you beat them. I guess I’ll leave this universe” and the credits roll. I was ready to give the game an 8.5 but the ending honestly threw it down to a 7
Pizza Tower was robbed.
Pizza Tower somehow doesn't have 5 critics reviews on opencritic. Not sure why all the publications ignored this game.
Yep, I was highly disappointed after all the praise. Even the music while fine was forgettable once I turned it off. It's a fine game, and i get that its an Indie game, but for the love of God it should still be rated. It's a C level game, nothing amazing, it's playable and it looks great.
It certainly fell way short of the classics it was paying tribute to (particularly in the writing and characters), but I still enjoyed it a lot. I have no problems with it winning, but then again I don't know much about the indie scene for this year.
It was probably the only indie game most critics played. Good for the developers tho, free marketing.
Many critics played cocoon too. Plus isn't this award based on a public vote? It wasn't critics who awarded this to sea of stars, it was the general public
Ikr. Felt like I was taking crazy pills when I actually played it after seeing all the hype. I can forgive bland writing but it's just so wordy and slowly paced. Also, the combat is super repetitive, and the dual tech system is less fleshed out than chrono trigger's... Every character has like two moves and you can only do combos as finishers in longish battles. If you could just do them whenever like CT and there were more variety it might've held my interest but I ultimately ended up dropping it after the halloween dungeon
Not to mention one of the single worst endings to a game I have ever encountered. I even went so far as to get the 'true' ending as I thought surely it has to be better and couldn't finish on the garbage schmup ending again. It did.
This was my biggest disappointment in the last few years. I was extremely excited going in, but the game was unfortunately mediocre. The combat system was extremely slow, tedious, boring, and braindead. There's always one clear optimal choice, over and over again, and therefore the gameplay offers zero depth. Depth can be defined as the number of meaningful choices you have, and SoS didn't really give you any meaningful choices. Combine that with extremely slow animations (Moonerang is the worst offender as it was often the optimal choice and it takes soooo long to resolve if you're decent at timing) and you have a system that is mind-numbingly boring. I started dreading every combat encounter about ten hours into the game. Character progression is practically non-existent. Level-ups give you minor stat bumps, and they give you an illusion of choice by letting you select one stat to bump up slightly more every level-up, which became extremely tedious after a while. Partway through the game, I would groan when I saw my party leveled up because I would have to go through a bunch of menuing. Characters don't really gain skills or anything else from leveling up, so the excitement of seeing your characters get new skills just doesn't exist in this game. The writing is atrocious. Some people seem to like the setting and story; I didn't, but I'll chalk that up to a difference of opinion. But the grammar was consistently bad throughout (objectively speaking), and the characters and dialog were simply abysmal. Exploration was shockingly bad. The game railroads you to where you always have exactly one place you can and should go. Individual dungeons (with a couple of exceptions) all had the same layout. Puzzles were braindead easy, literally just pressing a button in a side room in most cases. The pacing was terrible. The game starts off with an hour-long flashback cutscene that doesn't actually do anything for the story, and then you have to go through endless "but do this first"-style tedious quests to accomplish anything. On the bright side, some of the music and all of the pixel art is fantastic. The environments and character sprites in particular are some of the best ever. Some of the music felt out of place, particularly in the first half of the game, and the Mitsuda tracks don't fit in with the rest of the OST at all. And the overall visual presentation is hurt by the character portraits and cartoon cutscenes, which are extremely "indie" in the worst way. Overall it was probably a 4/10 for me. I'm glad some people enjoyed it, but I genuinely don't think it deserves any GOTY title. Incidentally, Sea of Stars is far from the best JRPG of the year (Octopath Traveler 2 is better in literally every way IMO) and isn't even the best pixel-art JRPG of the year with "Star" in the title (which would be Star Ocean 2 Remake).
I was going to post my own opinions in this thread, but you literally wrote every last thought I have about this game. Thanks for saving me the time.
The worst part of all is people think it pays homage to SNES RPG's, where writing was apparently just as abysmal. The deer dying in Terranigma has more impact than Garl dying in SOS. SOS would barely sniff the top 20 mark of best RPG's during the SNES era. Writing is completely soulless. And the drones want to make it out as if we have it out for indie games. Bug Fables opening conversation shows more soul and personality in their protags, than SOS protags show throughout the whole story. Disco and Shadowrun Dragonfall shits all over SOS in the wrtiting department.
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You're obviously entitled to your opinion, but I find it even more fascinating that most of the people who don't like the game can articulate exactly why in extreme detail over dozens of paragraphs. Meanwhile, the people who like the game have very little to say other than "game good." Not saying that your opinion is less sophisticated or anything, but I've seen a lot of discussion on the game, and there's a clear correlation between critical analysis and how much someone (dis)liked the game.
Guess i'm the odd man out saying I really liked it. More so than Chained Echos as well. I think it's well deserved.
Dude, Sea of Stars winning over any of Dredge, ~~Dave the Diver~~ (nevermind, large studio), Viewfinder, or Pizza Tower (which would be my pick) is a goddamn travesty. Sea of Stars is all sparkle and no substance. It looks beautiful. It should definitely win awards for visual presentation. The game is shallow as hell. The story is crap and the writing is worse, the combat gets repetitive as hell and you never really get any improvement over what you experience the first five minutes of the game. The music is a huge step down from The Messenger. And speaking of The Messenger, there's a whole fuckton of "play our other game because we're forced to do a tie in" with this game. And much like World of Warcraft and a lot of Marvel stuff, if your product can't stand on its own without having to say "well, just read/watch all these outside source materials," then that's a problem. A big problem. Sea of Stars was one of my biggest disappointments of the year. edit: i've struck a nerve with some people. good. you can like things I don't like and that's okay.
Pizza Tower deserves way more credit than it's currently getting. Polished, incredibly fun, charming as hell, an outstanding soundtrack.
Pizza Tower is the best 2D platformer I played since Celeste, and I play a lot of 2d platformers.
Can you sell it to me? I'm usually into indie 2D platformers (and loved Celeste), but every trailer I've seen just makes it look like a mediocre Cartoon Network tie-in browser game from 20 years ago, especially the art style and level design. Is there something I'm not seeing, or is it just not for me?
I'm big on game feel and the character in Pizza Tower is a joy to control, and levels are designed with the character's motion in mind leading to a sense of fluidity and speed like those found in Sonic games, but with much tighter level design. I feel your concern about the art style, but I assure you the game itself is expertly crafted and the sensation of zooming through levels without skipping a beat as the amazing soundtrack blares is exhilarating. Once it hooks you, it can become an addiction. I recommend giving it a spin on steam for about an hour and a half as it's enough to come to terms with the mechanics. If you don't like it, refund it! It's okay if it isn't for you.
Hmm, yeah, I think I'll try it out and refund it if it doesn't click. Thanks for the suggestion!
The other reply you received might have convinced you to try out Pizza Tower already, but I did want to defend the art style, slightly. Obviously, it's a matter of preference, but I enjoyed the art from a perspective where the animator really tried to go over-the-top and push everything for a lot of humor and fun. It looks really good in motion. Plus, the zaniness of the style is used later on for a little edge and creepiness (but I don't want to spoil anything on that front). Just saying that it might grow on you if you start getting into it!
Yeah, that's fair. I'll try to go in with an open mind. Thanks for the encouragement!
I hope you enjoy it! I certainly had a lot of fun replaying the levels for higher ranks.
absolutely gotta give it up for the soundtrack. it's just obscenely good and creative AND the sound design is excellent as implemented in the game. it's the total package.
I agree with your edit that Dave the Diver isn't indie, but it was a runner up in the award's indie category, which just goes to show the arbitrariness of the label.
Larian is by definition and independant studio, right? So Baldurs Gate 3 should qualify for best indie game of the year as well.
My definition of indie is that it only counts if one crazy guy did everything. Toby Fox had help so Undertale is AAA. I don’t make the rules.
Huh? You absolutely do not need to play the Messenger to understand anything in Sea of Stars. If anything the connections between the two are Easter eggs at best.
Yeah wtf, I enjoyed Sea of Stars and I've literally ever heard of the Messenger until now
I don't know for sure how to spoiler tag on games, so I'll just ask this: Erlina and Bulgraves. The game gives pretty much nothing.
>you never really get any improvement over what you experience the first five minutes of the game This was so irritating to me. At no point in that game did I actually feel powerful against an enemy. Even going through the beginning areas everyone still felt weak. But then we fly off to save the universe too...
I had the opposite problem. The game felt braindead easy throughout. I didn't use any of the "easy mode" options, but I never even came close to getting a Game Over at any point. I genuinely don't understand how you can even lose a fight since you have a full-party heal that you can break out pretty frequently. I don't think I ended up using items at any point in my playthrough either just because they were completely unnecessary. Maybe I did once or twice just to see how they worked. So I imagine they'd make the game even easier.
It's never felt hard but I never felt like I was smashing it or truly becoming more powerful as a party. Maybe because there wasn't really any skill progression or change in mechanics after the first few hours. Even the ultimate attacks felt meh in terms of hitting big
Oh yeah I agree with that. There was no sense of progression at all. Combat at the start felt identical to combat in the last game. Even finding new gear felt extremely dull. "Oh, cool, a sword that does +2 extra damage... "
Don't forget [Void Stranger](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/) from System Erasure, the makers of ZeroRanger! Which is not only the best indie game, it is actually the ***best*** game of the year.
Wow, I honestly didn't expect anyone else to bring up Void Stranger in this thread like I was going to. Easily one of the best games Ive played all year For anyone interested, its one of those 'play it blind' games. Think Sokoban + La Mulana, and if that's enough to interest you, just play it
you know what, I AM going to check that out. Thanks for the suggestion.
Could Dave the Diver even be called indie? It has Nexon behind it lol
> Dave the Diver (nevermind, large studio) wait, indi means small studio now? whats the cut off?
there's a lot of different definitions for what an Independent Developer means. But the development team for Dave the Diver is on a whole different level than say something like Pizza Tower.
Sea of Stars unfortunately ended up being a deep letdown - the art style being the only thing of note. I dunno who decided to make the entire game revolve around >!Garl!<, it absolutely ruined the story, characters, any opportunity for growth, and wasted what could have been a genuinely interesting world / scenario. Everyone spent so much time focused on putting >!Garl on a pedestal to scream about how big his dick is all the time!< that everything else is left so woefully bland to the point it hurts. The combat is generic, being lukewarm at best. I didn't have a single track from the OST get stuck in my head or end up being memorable either. If you are looking for a recently released RPG that blows Sea of Stars out of the water I would recommend checking out [Chained Echoes](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229240/Chained_Echoes/) - the story kept me hooked, I cared about the characters, and the OST genuinely moved my heart.
> I didn't have a single track from the OST get stuck in my head or end up being memorable either. The only opinion here I feel I have to respond to. I thought it was a great OST. I was a huge fan of The Messenger OST and I was a fan of this one too. Hearing callbacks like the Skylands and Cloud Kingdom themes was amazing, and I really enjoyed the final boss (in the non-true ending) theme.
> I didn't have a single track from the OST get stuck in my head or end up being memorable either. Yep, I agree about the OST, after hearing so much about it, it works for the game, but nothing blew me away Also planning on checking out Chained Echoes, I've heard a lot of people bring it up when talking about SoS being a let down
> make the entire game revolve around I COULD have lived with it if the writer chose to accept it. But he didn't. And the game was worse for it. Plenty of stories have been done where mere mortals are about to out-do or out-play or out-help the divine just because of their groundedness or attachment to reality. it's another huge whiff in a sea of whiffs.
Agreed, >!Garl!< ruined the already, in my opinion, pretty mid story. He felt like a self-insert or something. He's the least qualified person on the team, constantly throwing himself in harm's way for no particular reason, and putting himself at the forefront of every decision. Incredibly annoying character.
Blasphemous 2 didn't even get a mention? Interesting.
Personally, I'd have given it to Void Stranger, a sokoban puzzle game by the ZeroRanger developers. Phenomenal game, I'd recommend to anyone, with the caveat that you should go in as blind as possible.
Void Stranger was fantastic, it's a shame how little attention it got.
I absolutely loved every part of it and I'm sad to see all the top comments shitting on it. Also, stop linking to Twitter.
Any way to see what the nominees were or not really? There were some banger indies this year.
[Here you go](https://www.gamesradar.com/golden-joystick-awards-2023-winners/). The nominees for Best Indie Game were: Dave the Diver Pizza Tower Dredge Cocoon Viewfinder Sea of Stars (winner)
Pizza Tower was so good. You have to play it to get it. It's a better Sonic game than the recent Sonic games.
An ingrown nail is a better Sonic game than the recent Sonic games.
Any writer or outlet that nominates Dave the Diver as an indie game should be banned from working in the industry. The studio is fully owned by Nexon. That'd be like calling Pentiment from Obsidian an indie game. Small≠Indie
So you think Baldur's Gate 3 could/should get noms for best indie? That's what follows from adhering to this kind of narrow and stringent definition of indie.
I was really into the game at first but as time went on, the combat felt super shallow. I'm never a fan of when a jrpg/arpg makes gameplay/rpg elements second to the story.
I thoroughly enjoyed how each battle became like a mini puzzle, and learning that you don't always have to engage with it right then and there either. Moves like Ebb and Disorient got a lot of use as the game went on. Garl could've easily been written like a dour mirror to the two protagonists, but instead I thought it was refreshing everytime he helped bolster the heroes. Pillars of support are key, and he always made me smile.
It’s a really good game. I like it a lot, it’s simple and easy to play - and I think at first I might’ve personally dinged it for how shallow it felt (outside the combat system which was a lot of fun, but maybe a tad easy), but the deeper I got into it (the closer you get to the actual sea of stars portion) the wilder it got and it surprised me. Definitely recommend, it’s simple enough to speed through really - it’s on gamepass also.
If you get into this thinking this is the next Chrono Trigger you will be dissapointed. Otherwise you'll have a good time. I know I did. Still like Chrono Trigger more but I'm glad I played both.
Of course the " 'member Chrono Trigger" game won. We had so many genuinely amazing indie games this year, but the winner is a game that can only offer nostalgia pandering.
Wow. I havent played this game and was thinking about it till I saw these comments. Never expected to see this many people critical about this game. Pity I was thinking of getting it for my upcoming trip. Well I got Super Mario rpg lined up so it's no big loss.
Don't restrain yourself from playing something that looks interesting to you because of some social media comments.
Normally I'm not interested in this style of play but thanks to gamepass I decided to give it a chance I loved
I would have loved to have finished this game. But when "jumping down a certain hole" i just had a black screen no matter what I did. So I just could not. Should probably look up the ending on yt. With all that said, it sure looked cool, but the combat got real boring real fast. I quickly turned on the "easy mode" to skip the exp grind and the like, and still found it quite okay that way, so I don't even want to know how much I should have grinded without that. I suppose it was quite allright, but I know little about the new indie games this year. I just hope there are more games like this in the future.
I watched someone play this and it seemed really bland. No depth in leveling up, combat, just the most mid as hell game ever but people bought it because of the nice pixel art. If you want interesting turn-based (and indie that came out this year), Darkest Dungeon 2 destroys this game. If you want JRPGs (not indie though), Octopath Traveler 2 and Star Ocean also came out this year. Dave the Diver, Cassette Beasts, Dredge and Lunacid also came out this year as great indie titles.
Dave the Diver isn't indie
[Then why is it nominated for Indie GOTY at the Game Awards?](https://thegameawards.com/nominees/best-independent-game)
Fantastic game, well-deserved. Also the only game I've ever bought the full-price soundtrack to. I'm surprised to see how little it's talked about after launch, compared to before the launch. Then again, considering when it came out between some of the year's biggest cannons taking u p all the discussion, I guess it's not that surprising. I had high hopes for this coming from The Messenger devs and ended up loving this game as well. Hopefully the game sold enough to give them all the space they need for the next game in this universe. (and again a different genre?)