Sea of Stars was provided by Sabotage Studio for review. Thank you!
When leaning into nostalgia of popular games, you are opening yourself up for comparisons with games that are hard to beat. With Sea of Stars clearly influenced by JRPG classics like Chrono Trigger and Star Ocean, the game is going up against some of the most renowned titles in the genre. But I am pleased to say that Sea of Stars stands on its own as a unique, beautiful, and sometimes simple, RPG that rightfully deserves its own place next to the greats.
In the game, you follow Valerie and Zane on a quest that sees them become Solstice warriors and go on a quest to save the world. Along the way, you will meet new party members, travel to various different worlds, and grow as you fight and explore with your team. Sea of Stars does an incredible job handling the tones of each location, and while it does well with most of them, it feels like the more dramatic or sadder moments didn’t have as much impact as I would have liked. Regardless, I did feel the weight of their actions and the camaraderie the team shared, I just wish we had a bit more complexity to round-out each character.
The combat is a fantastic blend of simplicity and engagement, even if it can start feeling a little too simple towards the end of the game. You and your team will fight enemies in turn-based combat where you can attack regularly, use skills or items, or boost your attacks with life mana. As you fight, you can get experience to level up and food to cook that will heal you if used. You can also break through some enemy skills by hitting them with specific attacks.
The simple nature of combat, and building your character, is a mix of good and bad. Gone are the complexities of tons of different status effects with specific skills or items being able to cure them and having to manage everything all at once, but as a trade off, characters can’t change classes and you can’t pick and choose skills. Leveling up just increases all of their stats to some degree, as well as gives you an option to increase one of them a bit further. If you’ve played Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, you know what I’m talking about.
Outside of combat, you will explode the incredibly vibrant, beautiful world that awaits you. Running through the wonderfully crafted lands, finding hidden secrets, taking on mysterious bosses, and acquiring legendary loot is one of the highlights of the game and completely captured my interest and excitement as I got to see what parts of the world awaited me. I even looked forward to backtracking to find whatever I could!
Overall, even with the simplicity in RPG elements, Sea of Stars succeeds in telling an engaging tale set in a gorgeous world. It does it’s job well, along with making sure it doesn’t feel too much like it’s infouenceszc but still enough to see the love of these games that was poured into it. And playing on the Steam Deck is by far the best way to play.
With no issues whatsoever, Sea of Stars plays perfectly on the Steam Deck. At 60 FPS and a battery life of around 5 hours, there are no compromises needed to enjoy this epic RPG on-the-go. This is great news too because playing this in the palm of your hands is definitely my favorite way to enjoy the game.
It doesn’t support 16:10 resolutions, so there are black bars, but it does fully support controllers and cloud saves. I was also initially worried about text size being a problem, but after playing, I can confidently say it’s not bad at all.
Sea of Stars succeeds in ways that a lot of other games influenced by classic titles can fail. It takes what made these games great and stands apart with its story and world that stand on their own. There is a little bit too much simplicity, especially as you get to the end of the 30+ hour campaign, but I never felt sad by it. This is an amazing game and it is a joy being able to play it so well on the Steam Deck. After all is said and done, I would easily consider this an essential to your Deck library.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Sea of Stars is an exceptional RPG that stands on its own, even with the clear inspirations it has. And it runs flawlessly on the Steam Deck!
So happy to see the battery life. Hurricane Idalia is about to hit near me and I needed a nice, long steam deck game that sips battery life! Great work!