Curi Lagann

Great post that gets at all the problems I had with the writing in the game. You nailed it with the idea that it doesn't seem to have a "purpose" to its writing.

i didn't actually play the game so i can't comment on most of this (other than to say "whoof that does sound bad"), but i just wanted to note that i did download the demo and found it immediately off-putting that it made a big deal of letting me choose which protag would lead the party, gave each protag a little description, and then put in brackets (by the way you can change it and it doesn’t affect the story)

why even bother, then...? couldn’t this have been a simple toggle after you started the game, like “remember you can press “START” to change which character leads the party”?

it’s a small thing, but when that’s the first impression shared with a new player, it’s concerning

(what little i played of the actual demo was also concerning. they literally put in things like "after some adventures, they went to..." and "I will use it to [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]." like... was there not a better way of presenting this. it may as well have said "you're not here for the story right. come run around in this pretty landscape." which i could have possibly been okay with if it was lampshaded as comedy! but it wasn't...?)

well said. you're not crazy, the positive critical response to this game is insane, and yes the writing is that bad

Well this is bleak. But it’s important analysis, done well.

Yess long Kyle read. All the sentence rhythms i know and love. I feel so nourished!

I haven't played the game but I appreciate your analysis and framing ("I know that it is easier to shit on a piece of art than it is to make one. I don't want to do that." etc)

The whole post -- and particularly the "wouldn't it be cool if we did that too?" comment -- reminds of this video essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fdKWOHrdE (hbomberguy analyzing RWBY in a similar way; 2.5 hours (!))

i've been watching a streamer play bits of it, and the writing for the singular scenes i've seen function well enough. they have a sort of casual tone about them, the way that The Messenger did, but less dump-y than The Messenger was. like, the npc in TM would just talk for awhile and sometimes it was funny but it just went on and on, as one might do in a casual conversation. so it's weird that the dialogues in Sea of Stars are shorter, even when more characters are involved in scenes.

instead the dialogue seems like it has one purpose: to direct you to the next town, dungeon, boss, etc, and nothing else. all the writing i've seen seems to follow the general vibe of, "we need to go to to get in order to . we might run into , who is a <enemy/elemental archetype>." but that's all it does! whenever a character starts to say something that could be character arc-y, another character speaks up to say something like "yeah we knew" or "oh you don't have to worry about that, we trust you" and the matter is settled and the conversation ends there so that you can go to the next place to get the next thing to fight the next boss. it is as if someone told their writer(s?) that all the good character stuff you want from an RPG is needless exposition—and as we all know, Exposition is Bad Writing™—and so they only say enough to suggest something, but then throw up a "this road is closed" sign to keep you on track.

maybe the writer is a BIG fan of jj abrams?

The big red flag to me was a few hours in when the game introduces an NPC whose dialogue was all jokes ragging on tired JRPG tropes, in a game that is leaning so hard in to ham-fistedly playing tired JRPG tropes straight as an arrow without doing anything new or transformative with them. If you're going to be lazy that's fine I guess but maybe don't remind me repeatedly how lazy you're being.

Thanks for writing this, writing/storytelling is a really important component of rpgs for me and it's frustrating how that stuff just gets shafted by so many projects

I started off enthusiastic, and really psyched myself through the first couple hours. But the desire to play kept plummeting day by day, until I realized that it's because I had zero stake in anything!

This writeup makes me both hopeful and worried about the writing in the RPG I'm working on, haha

I feel like so long as I know what I want out of the story and what I want to communicate to the player it can't be worse than this, right?

I got the "True" Ending and... Yeah, i agree the writing is the weak point of the game. I do feel like (having played through NES And SNES RPGs over the last year and a half) SNES-level writing isn't that good in the first place.

it's a cold comfort, sure, but... I think a SNES-style RPG can easily succeed with subpar writing. I don't go to that type of game for the stellar writing because nothing can compare to my nostalgia-tinged recollections of Chrono Trigger (that's why Chrono Trigger will probably never be dislodged from its position as most important game to me.)

I still placed Sea of stars pretty high on my ranking list. And I think with time, I'll soften even more on the game, since i will mainly remember the cool moments over the bits that felt meh.

This felt like a nice meal of whatever comfort food you find most comforting (For me i would say home-cooked lasagna).

It's not gonna win Michelin stars but it's enjoyable and comforting.

Basically, I think I liked this game more than many because i didn't come to a retro-style game for modern-style writing. The ending still is Awful, though. I certainly felt that slap in the face too.

i'm like 20 years late to this post but i wanted to thank you for writing this!! i haven't played this game, but i still found myself connecting with the part about your growing worries as a writer, and the specific highlights about the ending & weak points of the story... idk this is probably weird lol, I just felt like re-examining and putting in more time to pinpoint the themes/direction of my own projects after I read it. Excellent Freaking Post

For years I tried to get a job writing on a game development team. I assumed that so many games had poor or minimal writing only because game devs were unable to find writers, so I figured my chances of being hired were pretty good. Wouldn’t game devs look forward to having a real writer on hand? Imagine my shock when I looked at one website after another, and almost never saw any demand for writers. Game devs look for artists, level designers, musicians, programmers, and so on - but not writers! And it always seemed so odd to me, because obviously you can’t make art, music, and functional code without specialists. But then why would they leave something as important as storytelling to chance? Why run that risk? Most writers are desperate and will work for pennies, or even just “exposure”. But the fact is, they’re not even wanted!
I’ve asked around and heard some of the strangest reasoning why this is the case. One idea is that artists and level designers and all those other people stay in touch with each other during development, but a writer would be out of the loop. And it’s like, okay, what? Why would they be out of the loop? Does a writer go down into his bunker and cut off any form of communication so he can write the story? As absurd as this sounds, this is a common belief! It only sounds ridiculous because I’m saying it out loud!
Another goofball idea is, well… a writer wouldn’t understand video games, or how to write for video games. Again, this is just completely bonkers. I can only imagine that game devs think of writers as existing only in publishing houses, maybe chained to 1950s style typewriters. I don’t know, I’m trying to rationalize an idea that isn’t rational. Or maybe they think that a writer can ONLY write books, and if they try to write for a game, they’ll just print a wall of text thousands of pages long, and then be like, “What do you MEAN you can’t make a game out of this?!” which would be quickly followed by, “Look, I don’t even know what the HELL a video game even is! I write BOOKS for a living… not toys for children!”
The situation is absurd but ultimately, it will never, ever be solved. So if any games are going to have good stories, it will have to be because one of the people already on the team just so happens to be gifted at writing as well as coding or visual art or level design or whatever they’re already doing. If you’re a writer and you want to get into game development, go ahead and get used to writing game reviews for free, because that’s as good as it gets for us!