Stellar Seas has a huge bag of tricks, treats, and surprises in store for the player; but the bag is also mixed and a little bit bloated with excess. I have to preface this by saying that I didn't finish the main quest or post game, but I went to the final boss of the main quest before calling it quits, so I think I got a good impression of the quest. I did want to finish and explore more of the fabled post-game tricks, treats, and surprises, but I just had enough of the final boss.

The obvious quality of SS is that the quest is that this doesn't even feel like playing Zelda Classic, but rather some sort of action-RPG mash up along the lines of Secret of Mana meets Star Ocean. The gameplay and overall experience while playing is a technical achievement, for sure, and runs smoothly, seamlessly, and really without any annoying errors - so great job there. Everything, down to the "overworld" and the menus are thoroughly hacked and customized into something unique and unexpected.

I think the "mid quest" gameplay is probably the shining quality of SS. I really enjoy that there are a lot of side quests and an almost open-world to explore, nearly right from the start. I definitely had the most fun while procrastinating on the main-quest advancement and seeking a non-linear path of looking for hymnstones, checking side-quest bullets off the list, and trying to buff the characters. The dungeons and caves in the "middle" of the quest are all pretty entertaining and full of interesting and well-conceived puzzles and mechanics that will make you think. Some of the puzzles are legitimately "head-scratching" hard in all the right ways. Sometimes the solution to a puzzle is so obscure that I never would have intuitively solved the puzzle. Instead, I found myself throwing every item or attack at the wall and seeing what would stick, because a particular trigger is not clearly indicated. I actually really like this kind of gameplay, where solutions are not well telegraphed or are obtuse, but I know a lot of other people aren't a fan of such puzzles.

Unfortunately, SS also veers towards the excessive. By that I mean, some of the dungeons, bosses, and story-related elements just seem to drag on and on and ultimately, wear out their welcome in such a way that I just wanted to be done with it and get on with the game. Case in point: the Under Sea Mine level and its Tidal-Gauntlet related puzzles. While these, like other dungeon puzzles are creative and require the player to ponder a solution, the actual execution of the solution is tedious and often require precise timing and movement lest you fall into a pit and have to start the puzzle all over again. Then, there is the ancient observatory with puzzles requiring use of the dash (think, modified hover boots) technique, which I just never really got a good grasp on. It seemed to me like the dash was difficult to control, or at least, too difficult to time inputs correctly, in such a way that I was almost flailing at the controller blindly to try to execute the technique.

The bosses in SS are another example of excessive. I'm just not a fan of grandiose boss fights in general and don't like difficult bosses. I'd rather be exploring instead of faced with some road-blocking, gate keeper of a boss that I have to learn how to overcome. If you love sperging out on tough bosses, learning their movement and attack patterns and compartmentalizing this knowledge before you can even really hope to have a hope to mount an effective attack against said bosses, then the boss fights in SS are for you. To their credit, the quest makers probably realized that the bosses can be excessive and there is a very welcome option to reduce difficulty when you lose repeatedly to a boss. I took advantage of this option on the tunnel-borer sub boss, the first Selet fight, and Blood Moon. Honestly, if there wasn't the option to reduce difficulty for these bosses, I would have quit way sooner.

However, the second Selet Igorevich fight is just too much for me and drags on and on and on enough to make me say "too long; didn't play." Obviously the final boss fight is supposed to be epic, but this fight is more like a marathon that you need to train for before you have a fighting chance to complete. Even on the "reduce difficulty" mode, after having lost repeatedly to both phases of the boss, there are just too many chaotic magical attacks going around, that are difficult (if not impossible) to dodge outside of dumb luck, that you really need to play as perfectly as possible in the less-chaotic parts. Those chaotic parts of the final boss will grind your characters down, quickly, especially combined with the fact that your characters don't have a whole lot of health or defense to start with. Just when I thought maybe the final boss is finally going down, surprise, no, there's yet another repeat of the same patterns that grind me down and ultimately result in my losing and wasting yet another 5-10 minutes of time.

With that off my chest, I did enjoy the story line, for the most part, and found it to be both novel and well conceived. One of the strong points is that I found the dialogue actually pretty well written and believable that these particular characters would actually say such things. Most of the time, dialogue in fan games is silly at best and, often, cliched and cringe worthy. My hypothesis is that the sort of cognitive processes that are necessary to focus, master technical quirks, and churn out a fan game are almost always opposed or mutually exclusive from the sort of cognitive processes that can create a compelling work of fictional writing. It takes a rare breed indeed to make a fan game that has great gameplay and a good story, but somehow those two things came together with SS. The musical choices are also interesting and fit the particular scenes that they pair with.

So while I wanted some more of what the quest had to offer, I guess I feel complete from my partial play through of SS. I spent around 24 hours to get up to the "final" boss and had a good amount of fun to offset the frustration.

Great Quest Sadly i Couldnt Beat it but I Hope Torrin and Asher find Together somehow They Sure are a Cute Couple The Quest can be Realy Hard at Times Specialy The Bosses and i Found some Errors to but nothing to Gamebreaking Like Luckily The Last Fusion Golem was Way to Hard for me but I Could beat it At last Trough Quickly Switching Charakters Which Gave me The Invisibility To Avoid The Though Parts Sadly I Couldnt Record That one As It Gave an Error trough this Record but The Other Parts Til The Golem are Up on My New Youtube Channel if You want see The Errors I Found

I might not be great at writing reviews, but hell, this was one ride of a quest. It didn't even feel like Zelda anymore; this was in its own world. The music is one of my favorite parts of the game, it gave the quest an entirely new atmosphere. (Which game is Selet's theme and near final boss theme from?) The party system, I was reclutant at first, but I saw it was well implemented as I was exploring new corners and islands. Kudos for making it so smoothly. As for the story, I enjoyed it every minute, and I did get surprised by a few plot twists here and there. Like Ether mentioned, the only quirk I have is there was no warp system or something similar, walking back to the dock on the main islands to travel did get a little boring.

So, this brings me to another question. Will there be a sequel?

You don't see much DoR these days. The screens are gorgeous and the game is pretty good at rewarding you for poking around. Being DoR, there's some visibility issues. Sometimes enemies randomly spawn behind trees and lie in wait to ambush you.

The party system is really clever and unique. You can swap between characters at will, and the game makes sure that you have to--sometimes for puzzles, sure, but mostly just because each of them has has a separate HP pool with a very low cap, and you'll get them killed if you lean on one too hard. (Incidentally, if one has full HP and picks up a heart then it'll transfer. The game doesn't say this but it's nice quality of life.) Each character has some unique weapons that make for distinctive fighting styles, augments that can be set to give passive upgrades, along with a few items and passive augments that anyone can equip.

There's a whole lot of unique scripted items, between the three of them. This is a bit of a mixed bag; by the midgame there's some very fun and powerful stuff that still does a good job of not feeling too overpowered because each of your characters is individually so fragile. There's also more puzzley items, but, like...the kind that still require good reflexes and execution skills. It makes for some pretty unique dungeons, but I did have a hard time with some of those. Especially since they tend to have quirks that are easy to forget. Joystick controls might have hurt me here?

Speaking of quirks, there's one item that can instantly kill your entire party. I thought it was pretty funny.

The game is pretty story-heavy, and I am...very neutral on the story. None of the characters or plot beats or setting elements ever really managed to grab me. (I do like the general islands aesthetic and the way that NPCs are moving between islands too, not just the heroes.) But it's not, like, bad? It gets the job done and I feel like I was kind of setting my expectations in the wrong place here.

Since everything is on islands, you don't have to trek too far if you die or F6. (If you die in a boss fight, you can choose to continue from that screen. On a psychological level I think this made dying to bosses less frustrating, so that was nice.) I wish the game had a warp system, but just getting to a dock and sailing where you need to go isn't too bad.

Anyway, Stellar Seas is neat and you should play it. It's polished in so many little ways.

I have the latest version of ZC, but the quest file will not run. Every time I try it shuts ZC down.

Enjoying this so far! I'm stuck because I accidentally skipped the dialogue explaining how to use batteries, and even though I have some in my passive inventory, I can't figure out how to use them.

This looks amazing, I need to play this quick! Sadly I'm slower than a tortoise when it comes to playing quests

I need to smash the stellar golem. Where is it?

Too Bad Another Great Looking Quest i cant Play Is There a Change it Would work on 2.55 Alpha 92 ???