Sea of Stars does that too, sure, but it’s also so much more than that.
More importantly, the game also never feels derivative, balancing old and new on a knife’s edge.
Let’s take a step back for a second, though.
That’s partly thanks to a staunch attention to detail.
Those are endearing character moments, but the game also painstakingly authors even the seemingly cursory scenes.
I’m sufficiently too pumped for this fight against enemies that arguably don’t invite such an epic introduction.
The one mood that Sea of Stars can’t pull off is dramatic and/or sad.
The problem is that moments where you peek behind the curtain and into their psyches are too few.
How do Valere and Zale feel about what’s transpired?
They don’t talk about world events much.
Some skills can rejig enemy placements, making the unfriendly party susceptible to AOE moves.
Fights frequently feel more scaled back than other turn-based contemporaries, in a good way.
It’s a smart way to kind-of-remix the “conditional turn-based” systems found inFinal Fantasy XorBlue Dragon.
A stripped-back approach also extends to your character building choices.
But everytime you level up, it’s possible for you to give one stat an extra nudge.
These don’t add drastically to your strategic options, but they’re always a pretty spectacle.
You’re always racing time, choosing between health and damaging pawns and delaying a boss' turn.
Sea of Stars goes one step further with grapple hooks and other handy tools.
Movement options aren’t just here to make the A-B treks less monotonous.
Exploring the game’s (sometimes shockingly) dense dungeons felt two steps removed from playing a top-down Zelda-like.
One area has you rearranging pipes to flush yourself into different rooms.
Another lets you mix and match coloured gems to create different coloured portals.
A bundle of dried leaves can’t be just that, can they?
And that looks like a ledge I can reach now, doesn’t it?
Sea of Stars accessibility options
Option to remap controls.
Difficulty modifiers can be found, bought, and unlocked in the game.
Something rare actually happened to me while playing Sea of Stars.
I was rediscovering the world anew - it had changed in large and little ways.
Buildings that had been under construction for a dozen hours were finished.
NPCs that were once silent had entirely new requests for me.
