Sea of Stars
I have the JRPG tag ignored on Steam - the endless grinding, poor English and weird item names usually put me off. However, I really needed another Steam Deck game to play while the child is napping so I picked this up in the recent sale. It's a gorgeous pixel art RPG about a boy and girl who are trained to be elemental warriors. I really enjoyed the first 10 or so hours of it, but once I realised that the combat doesn't change at all from the beginning to the end of the game, and the writing isn't that great - I decided not to bother finishing it.
Pros
- Beautiful pixel art
- The game reminds me of Chrono Trigger from my childhood (which I am now going to ditch this for and go and play that instead)
- Your characters each do different kinds of damage (blunt, sharp, moon, sun etc). Sometimes enemies try to cast spells and you have to hit them with a variety of damage types to interrupt them. These "locks" are hidden until you discover which damage types to use.
- Characters can combo with each other
- There's a system where hitting with basic attacks allows you to boost subsequent attacks
- Moving around the environment feels great. Walking speed is fast and you can climb, balance, shimmy and jump around all kinds of environmental objects
- You can buy “relics” which enable different difficulty settings for the game. That being said, the default version is very easy.
Cons
- I hate the mechanic where you have to press a button at the correct time to do extra damage or block more effectively. It's a tiny window of opportunity and it's difficult to tell when to press it
- Uses a manual save point system, which means it can be difficult to find a place to stop (thankfully you can just put the Deck to sleep)
- If you take a break from the game or forget what you’re doing, there’s no kind of quest log to tell you what to do next. It's not awful, given that the game is entirely linear so far.
- The writing isn't great
- Combat is very repetitive, and it doesn't evolve for pretty much the entire game. You get a few more moves over time, but it's basically the same 2-3 attacks for the whole game, interspersed with basic attacks to regain mana
- Gear you buy is pretty much just a straight stat upgrade in every town - there's no itemisation
- Considering how shallow the combat is, it's annoying that there isn't a "fast mode" to make it pass by quicker. This is because of the timing based attacks