It's an exciting day when another dev, especially an indie dev, is able to publish their very own "feature-length" RPG. Chained Echoes, Virgo Versus the Zodiac, Bug Fables, Crystal Project, etc. have all been cool projects to see make it across the finish line and into our living rooms. It should go without saying that I'm immensely impressed by, proud of, and happy for any developer who manages to see their vision for a game like this all the way to completion and into the players' hands.
The latest success story in this lineage is Sea of Stars by Sabotage Studio, a kickstarted RPG with a for-the-fans-by-the-fans ethos. By all accounts, it seems to be doing quite well financially and in the hearts of many of its players. It attempts to combine the best parts of Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, and various other "RPG classics" into one modern-retro blend.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. And despite the fact that I had zero hype or expectation before going into this one, I've never felt more disappointed and let down by a game by the time it ended than I have with Sea of Stars.
As it stands, I would mostly recommend Sea of Stars for folks who haven't played "the old RPG classics" themselves, may be new to the RPG genre, and/or may not hold story as a high priority for them when they play RPGs. Those are all completely valid, and I think the game is worth the purchase if that sounds like you.
For everyone else, maybe not so much.
FULL SPOILERS for Sea of Stars below.
The overwhelming feeling I get from Sea of Stars...
...is that the writing wasn't a high priority.
Much love is dedicated to the visuals, the sound, and making the combat streamlined + easy-to-understand. I cannot understate how beautiful the art and animations are. The character portraits, lush environments, and little moments of character acting and cool magic effects are truly astounding. It has some of my favorite pixel art in any indie game, I think.
I don't know much about programming games, but the game feels good: I didn't notice much in terms of bugs, and everything operates pretty smoothly and how you would expect it to work. It's no small feat to get Chrono Trigger-style "battling on the overworld" to work, and to get all those attack minigames working. I'm sure it was no small feat to pull off the overworld mechanics such as the grappling hook. There's a whole side game you can play in the tavern. The team really came together and put out a polished project, something that I'd easily believe was made by a AAA studio on the Playstation 2 or the Gameboy Advance.
The writing does not feel like it was given the same attention and love.
I'm hesitant to say critical things about indie games. Partially because I'm worried the creator will see the mean thing that I said, and I don't want to hurt their feelings. It's also because I'm a indie game dev myself (and a writer too lol), and I know how incredibly difficult it is to make something. It's a miracle that Sea of Stars was finished at all, as it is a miracle that any video game is finished and published to the public. I'm happy for the team that they were able to make this dream project of theirs.
But it does truly make me sad when people pay artists to make great art, pay composers to make great music, pay programmers to put great games together, and don't pay writers to come to the team and put together a great story.
In a genre that isn't built on story, like a platformer or a shmup, this doesn't bother me. But I feel like there is an inherent pitch that an RPG has an interesting story to unfold. Sea of Stars has a narrator at the beginning who LITERALLY hypes up the twisting tale of woe and conflict we're about to embark on. This is something that we're going to be spending hours and hours of our free time with, usually with the expectation that the story and the characters are leading us somewhere.
If you're making an RPG in this style, you're promising a thought-out story.
Taking the reader on an adventure
Things didn't start out on a high note. I was very skeptical about the opening of Sea of Stars. As mentioned, we get an omniscient narrator in a spooky chair talking about how the twisting and turning of timelines have made for a complicated web of an adventure. Then, we're given a short tutorial section, then a lengthy flashback chapter that takes about 30 minutes. A lot of time is spent watching our protagonists' childhoods, where we get another combat tutorial (???) and a bunch of lore about Zenith Academy and Solstice Warriors.
It didn't seem like a good sign that the two leads, Valere and Zale, are not given individual personalities. Instead, they are interchangably and generically "good people" who "fight evil" (what constitutes good and evil in this world, and how we should feel about it, isn't explored) and are just largely agreeable to things going on. In a sense, they don't serve any different purpose than a silent protagonist does, and part of me kind of wishes they just made them silent protags anyway. They do not change or grow in any way by the end of the story.
In this world, children who had the bad luck to be born on a certain day of the year are destined (read: forced) to become child soldiers who train for battle constantly for 10 years straight, isolated from the rest of society. When they're finally allowed to emerge and socialize with their friends and neighbors again, they're shunted off into the world to "kill demons and protect humanity." A lot of hay is made about this and the relationship between the protagonists and their stern mentor.
Sadly, none of this really ends up mattering, and the game doesn't have much else to say or explore about these themes, which I mistakenly thought would be the central themes of the game.
The game doesn't really have central themes, or "character arcs" in the way you might assume it would based on other games in this genre.
What's weird about this is that the game dedicates a lot of time and effort to cutscenes and dialogue, but I can't tell what the author wants us to take away from the game.
Attempts are made to endear us to characters, to make us chuckle, or "surprise us." But the game constantly feels like it's undercutting itself. It undercuts itself by undo-ing sad things that happen, setting up threads that don't get paid off, implying that there's a deeper complexity out there somewhere (a multiverse tie-in with their other game The Messenger and apparently a 4th-wall-breaking ARG), and having characters literally just walk out of the story when they don't feel like being around anymore.
To me, it is literally unclear when the story is meant to be taken seriously and when everything is "just a joke." The game fails to set itself up as a comedic RPG, in the vein of Paper Mario, Super Mario RPG, and Mario & Luigi. Instead, it seems to be taking its overall lore and story quite seriously, and we're meant to take it seriously too. Thus, we're meant to get emotionally invested, which makes it feel more like a slap in the face when the game's end credits start rolling and it feels like the devs didn't keep up their half of the "emotional investment" bargain.
I know that it's not easy
I hate saying things like this. I hate being mean. But I've never rolled credits on a game that made me feel this crazy before, I just have to get the thoughts out somewhere. Above all else, the game felt like a cautionary tale about my own writing. I, by happenstance, also work as a writer on an indie game that has a lot of eyeballs on it and I feel a responsibility about hopefully delivering a good narrative by the time we finish it.
There's two big reasons I feel a growing responsibility as a writer.
One is that the programmers, level designers, musicians, and artists who work on our game are making something so incredible that I don't want to let them down. I worry a lot about people saying "the writing is the worst part of the game", which is exactly what I'm saying about Sea of Stars right now. I don't want to be the weak link in a chain of creators who spent years of their lives making something polished, fun, and resonant. I don't want writing flaws to be a glaring stain on something that is otherwise really enjoyable, because that glaring stain can drag the player's entire experience down.
Two is that once we launched in Early Access, I started to realize how much players liked the characters and have HIGH HOPES that the plot will resolve and that plot threads will be addressed and that the game will have a satisfying ending. And seeing that hope build in real time, seeing the fanart and the fanfics and the emotional investment people put into the characters, makes me realize that I can't just type whatever I want into the doc and be complacent that it'll work out just fine. In some way, shape, or form...you want to do right by the audience that is connecting with these characters.
Writing is just like art and music. It takes thought, it takes planning, it takes brainstorming, it takes revision, it takes heart and soul, and it takes collaboration.
Writing is like programming, too. It takes time and effort and knowledge and lots and lots of "bugfixing."
It's not something to be taken lightly. It's not something to "leave to the end." It's not something to "bang out in a day." Just because typing words on a keyboard into dialogue boxes takes less physical effort than making an art asset, and thus is the quickest and cheapest asset (by a mile) to insert into your indie game doesn't mean you should actually treat it as the quickest, cheapest, easiest department of the team.
These are the things that I want to take seriously because I don't want to let our players down. I want to work hard. I don't want players to hit the final credits after the full 1.0 launch and say "That's it? That was...basically a slap to the face."
Because that's how I felt when Sea of Stars ended.
This can't be right...right?
I don't know what to say. I'm posting this here because I just want to get these thoughts out. I know that there is a risk of being a grumpy, overly-critical internet user who rants about things for easy clicks and attention. 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.
I just want to get this out there because it saddens me to think how "writing" is not treated as a priority in the same way as "programming" in the world of game development.
And because of that, the constant returning feeling of playing the game wasn't joy, or curiosity, or engagement, or a feeling of laughter. Instead, my most constant refrain was...
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Hyping up that the protagonists have a complicated, traumatic relationship with their best friend and that the best friend might have mixed feelings about them...and then not exploring that at all?
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Using a genuinely fun and endearing party member as a way to charm the audience and then blatantly use them to tug at heart strings, and then undo'ing those consequences...twice?
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Having a magical character give the party a prophecy of the future that not-so-subtly tells you what is going to occur later in the plot...three times?
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Implying a complexity or interesting backstory to the villain and then not exploring that whatsoever...possibly because that will explored in some other piece of media and thus this game can't have lasting consequences?
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Having central characters who have clear emotional, thematic, and moral ambiguities to them literally just walk out of the story when, I guess, they're not relevant anymore?
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Making a purposefully (???) abrupt and unsatisfying final boss fight and ending so that you can nudge players into reloading their save, doing a bunch of overly strict and tedious requirements in order to access the "true ending", which is also abrupt and unsatisfying?
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Making the true ending not any emotionally, narratively, or thematically different than the neutral ending despite all the extra effort it takes??
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Having the final villain, the most evil and fucked up entity imaginable who has caused immense pain and suffering throughout the multiverse literally just STAND UP AND WALK AWAY at the end of the story with no conversation or closure???
I don't know if you're allowed to do that...
(you can't skip lunch, guys...........you just can't)
There are a lot of AAA RPGs with stories that don't land, or may even be annoying or offensive. The strange difference that I've found between those, and this game, is that those RPGs usually at least have SOMETHING going on in its writing, even if you personally find that something to be distasteful or uninteresting. In Sea of Stars, for me, the problem feels more that there's a lack. Like a book with pages that are missing. I can find Final Fantasy 16 flippant or find Trails from Zero anime tropey, but the writers of those games at least seem to have something they're trying to communicate and land on.
For RPGs like that, it feels like the writing has a target audience. The goal might be for the game to "feel like you're watching an anime" or "feel like you're watching Game of Thrones" or "feel like you're playing Dungeons and Dragons." Whether that clicks with you is ultimately up to you.
For this game...it can't seem to decide what it's going for exactly.
Instead, it takes pages from RPGs that came earlier, and asks "wouldn't it be cool if we did that too?"
A lot of times, indie games can't excel in every area because they don't have the budget, the team size, or the connections with talented peers to focus on every area. That's completely understandable.
I'm disappointed because Sabotage Studio DOES have the budget, the team size, and the connections in the industry to focus on every area. And they chose to make a feature-length game in a genre that is famous for its writing and its memorable stories.
By the time the game was done, I realized they weren't interested in putting the time and budget into making that happen.
