Past Post
***** SPOILERS THROUGHOUT POST *****
Team Update
Valere – Moonerang was still a heavy hitter and great if a foe had multiple Moon locks. Lunar Shield heals a small amount and establishes a shield on each party member to block one hit.
Zale – Sunball still does good AoE damage. Dash Strike does a Slash and Sun to all foes and was necessary for some lock formations.
Garl – Garl struggled to find a spot in my party as time went on. He can only break one kind of lock and Nourish is still okay but Mending Light and a new character were doing better.
Seraï – I used Disorient more and more. Hammer and Poison damage, but more importantly it delays the target’s action by two. Necessary to break some locks or just useful to slow an enemy down.
Resh’an – The Immortal Alchemist joins you. His attack can be timed to be AoE. He gets an on-demand AoE heal in Petrichor. His attack does Poison, he can imbue with Arcane, and he has Ebb to radomly erase any two locks. Very useful.
And that’s before his Ultimate, Great Eagle. All the other Ultimates are powerful and flashy AoE attacks. Great Eagle does high AoE damage, heals the party including revive, and delays any surviving enemies. It’s very OP and can turn a whole battle.
B’st – The last character. He joins pretty late. Good physical and he gets the Arcane element. He also gets a revive skill, the only one (otherwise you revive with an item or waiting for KO to wear off). He also got a lot of time on the bench.
Dungeons and Bosses
Meduso
This was a fun and challenging fight. A take on the classic Medusa, it’s a machine boss with tentacles that pull up cannisters. These cannisters all charge an action and if not disrupted those actions can be single attack, AoE attack, or healing Meduso. You need to disrupt as many as possible and otherwise prioritize targets and actually hitting Meduso.
The challenge comes at low HP when Meduso starts using a purple cannister. That gives him an AoE attack that did about 70% of my team’s max HP. From then on disrupting those cannisters was priority one.
Sky Base
This dungeon was a lot of fun. You start in a futuristic base high in the sky. As you go on you go into space. The visuals are amazing in showing sky then space in the background yet not impeding seeing where your characters actually are. The enemies are appropritately mechanical and the flavor text of the puzzles was fun too.
The Catalyst is the boss here. It’ll generate six machines you need to defeat to damage the main unit. And when you do that you have to be quick as it’ll regen the machines. The machines can be laser turrets, missile launchers, and healers. Juggling all the different types and prioritizing targets while also juggling your own resources was a fun challenge here.
Late Game Sidequests
Much like Chrono Trigger you get a bunch of endgame sidequests tied to your characters’ backstories that also gives them their ultimate equipment. It didn’t have the same oomph as CT though. Much of the ultimate equipment doesn’t have cool extra effects, just more attack. Many of the bosses are recolors of early bosses.
One cool new boss was the Gun Goddess. Her thing is she summons six gun shells. They’re extra targets and dilute your attacks. If you leave them out she gets powerful attacks. Zale’s Dash Strike is a pure AoE that doesn’t get diluted by number of targets so it was good here.
Difficulty
Sea of Stars measured out at a 44.74, 43rd out of 194 (78th percentile). That’s next to games like Dragon Quest VII (PS1) and Final Fantasy Tactics War of the Lions. That was a shock to me as my experience was SoS was a lot easier than games like those. I googled around and saw mostly posts of people saying it was easy too.
Reminder that my source is checking difficulty ratings on GameFAQs. But SoS is multi-platform so I always check the platform I play on. The ratings for the PS5 and PC versions were much lower. I doubt there’s many, if any changes, to those versions. I guess Switch players just had a more difficult time with this game. Personally, I’d put it more like around Bravely Second, which had a 3.08.
Conclusions
This was a fun game with some mechanics I hadn’t personally experienced before and I liked it. The pixel art was amazing and the soundtrack catchy. Put this down as another indie game I enjoyed.
***** PLOT SECTION *****
Clockwork Tower
Resh’an, the Immortal Alchemist, joins the party to help them reach the revived Dweller of Strife. He cannot help fight the Dweller or the Dweller’s creator, Aephorul the Fleshmancer, will be allowed to return to the world as per their agreement.
In the Clockwork Tower some strange children with old faces work. They are geniuses that were forced to work for the Fleshmancer as children. Time does not flow for those inside the tower but continues if they leave. The geniuses have worked for so long they will immediately die of old age if they leave. But they have worked to sabotage the Fleshmancer when they can. They have made a device they believe will help against Strife.
The team confronts the Dweller of Strife. Even eclipse-boosted Solstice Magic barely hurts it. But the geniuses’ device focuses Solstice Magic into a powerful beam that hurts Strife. Then Strife destroys the device. Valere and Zale try to fight Strife on their own but to no avail. Seraï demands Resh’an help but he refuses. Seraï angrily takes a vile of Resh’an’s and chucks it at Strife.
This counts as Resh’an attacking Strife. The Fleshmancer appears. He rewards the Acolytes for their service and they disappear through a portal. He also rewards Brugaves and Erlina, the heroes’ treacherous mentors. They disappear too. He also sends Strife away. These are tie-ins to the developers’ earlier game, The Messenger. Most of these servants become powerful demons in that game.
Some flashbacks give context to Brugaves’s and Erlina’s betrayal. Reminder that Solstice Warriors are anyone born on a solstice, not volunteers. They never had appropriate temperments for such a job. Then when they were still kids all the adult Solstice Warriors went to fight Strife and only one returned. Finally, the Acolytes told them about the Dweller of Torment, who would’ve been invincible if not for Resh’an and Seraï. From Brugaves’s and Erlina’s viewpoint they were forced to fight horrific monsters to save a world that was screwed anyway. The Acolytes gave them a way out.
Aephorul demands an “eye for an eye” on Resh’an’s transgression. He fires a beam amd Garl steps in front. He takes a mortal hit and is about to die. A Potion of Borrowed Time keeps him around to help his friends one last time.
The Sea of Stars
Garl’s borrowed time is used to help convince a council of giants to allow the party onto the Sea of Stars. I was a bit lost at this part. But it’s the game’s title and Garl worked really hard to get access to it so I figured it was important.
Then when the team was about to go on it they admitted they didn’t know what it was either. What?? You did all this work and it’s the title of the game and we don’t know anything about it??
When his task is finished Garl dies. An emotional funeral is held. Valere and Zale mourn their friend.
The Sea of Stars ends up being a sea between worlds. Very cool visuals when going through it.
A Hopeless World
The team ends up at the world Seraï is from. It’s a world already ruined by the Fleshmancer and where his lair is. Seraï reveals that she is a cyborg by taking her mask off. Her jaw is robotic and she looks deformed. All her people are cyborgs. The Fleshmancer had them transformed into cyborgs and eternally tormented so their souls would be neverending nourishment for the Dweller of Dread.
To further protect Dread, the sky is perpetually blocked and the moon was sunk into the ocean. In order to fight Dread, the group goes to Sky Base which has been pumping out clouds to block the sun. They shut that operation down.
While exploring the group finds the spirits of a whole race wiped out by the Fleshmancer. One wants to help. Resh’an puts it into a Living Glass Golem. The spirit golem joins the group as B’st.
Then the team goes to Dread. Dread lairs near the moon. There’s no eclipse but Valere and Zale have grown so powerful they destroy Dread just by having access to sun and moon.
The Final Confrontation
Finally, the group goes to the Fleshmancer’s Lair. It’s a sickening place with strange meat and organs all over and an appropriately sickening theme.
When they find the Fleshmancer he sics his champion on them. It’s Erlina, now a demon sorceress. The team emerges victorious. As per his agreement with Resh’an, the Fleshmancer leaves the world once again.
It’s time for Valere and Zale to go too. They have grown powerful enough to ascend into Guardian Gods. They leave as balls of light, bringing down a nearby World Eater as they do so. Years later, they revisit their home world every year on Garl’s birthday.
There is a true ending and a different final boss. I didn’t go for it though. Mostly because I found out you need to get all 60 Rainbow Conches (collection quest). I had 39. And while it was a good game I was about ready for it to be done.
Super Romo Brothers 