Okay, "Yes I recommend," IF you love Chrono Trigger, because that's what this is all about. If you aren't looking for a "love letter to CT and other early Squaresoft," you may find this a little saccharine. I played CT about 80 billion times when I was a kid and so this is absolutely working on the part of me that will always love and adore that game. But I'm hearing people's complaints about Garl and...yea, I see it. We'll see how it goes along, I haven't finished it yet. But it looks/sounds absolutely lovely and the character sprites are very expressive and fun. Having a great time with it.

I wanted to like this game but the characters, story, combat and just general pacing all felt entirely too tedious. I started to dread picking it back up more and more until I just stopped.

I played this game in 2023 when the hype was at its peak, like everyone else I was dazzled by the graphics and what seemed like a neat twist on traditional JRPG gameplay. I'll just say it up front though, this game is awful and a complete waste of your time.

Yeah, that's harsh, but 3 years on when I think about Sea of Stars I just remember how angry the game made me because of how good it could've been. It absolutely squanders some of the best pixel art put to motion with super repetitive gameplay and abysmal story and dialogue.

I was just in a conversation with people in discord and someone brought up Garl as an icon of toxic positivity and it's very true, and the way the game's whole universe practically bends to his will just feels really gross and kind of cheapens the whole setup of the two main characters being special trained... whatever they are that are supposed to save the world. Who cares about anything those two cardboard cutouts you control actually do when this random fat guy is just gonna walk up and make the entire world about him?
I wish there was more to say about the story but that's really it, the two main characters just get dragged along on what is essentially someone else's adventure never really providing any input apart from hitting things and doing magic.

The hitting things and doing magic in the overworld is pretty nice at least. For as many misguided comparisons this game gets to Chrono Trigger, I found it much closer to Illusion of Gaia in terms of the overworld design and the puzzles and traversal stuff you get to do in the game. If the game was just about moving from area to area and nothing else it would be an infinitely better game.

Unfortunately you also have to hit and do magic to enemies along the way and that's where the game really falls flat. At first the mechanics are interesting, you have to use skills of specific types to nullify enemy attacks which can be pretty vicious even in the early game. However, the game never really expands on it meaningfully, you do get a couple other characters who have their own types of spells to use but the base combat remains unchanged for the entire game, nobody learns any new tricks, there's no sort of shifts to the meta, you just spam the exact same skills you were using at level 1 when you see orange or blue above an enemy's head until you beat the final boss.

Yeah that's pretty much it, the game's really nice to look at and the traversal stuff and puzzles are fairly interesting, but unfortunately this game presents itself as a JRPG which it utterly fails at.