Sea Of Stars is a beautifully made retro-inspired RPG that will instantly transport you back to the 16-bit golden years.
Many attempts have been made to recapture the JRPG’s glory days. In Tokyo RPG Factory, Square Enix founded a whole studio dedicated to the craft, and more recently Squeenix’s “HD-2D” style has come to define both their own retro work and that of others. But it’s arguably the RPGs from outside Japan that have been doing a better job of propping up the SNES nostalgia tent. Last year’s Jack Move and Chained Echoes were both infinitely more refreshing to me than the slightly tired Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler sequels, for example, and now we have The Messenger studio’s latest, Sea Of Stars, which is probably one of the few Japanese-inspired RPGs I’ve played in the last decade that’s even come close to bottling the mighty Chrono Trigger and lived to tell the tale. If you’re the sort to cry, 'They just don’t make ‘em like they used to anymore’, well, you can dry your tears, because Sea Of Stars is the one that is.
Will definitely check this one out (I think it’s coming to ps+ premium or whatever the 2nd tier is and gamepass), but I swear that article read like 2 different people wrote it between the first and second halves.
With all the emphasis they seemed to have running up to release on how they crafted the environments and moving through them I’m a little disappointed there doesn’t sound to be much in the way of exploration. But the combat system sounds unique so I’ll play it just to experience that aspect alone.