You know when you see trailers or images for a game and you think that it looks too good or too nice to be true? That’s kind of where I landed when I first saw Sea of Remnants showcased. I immediately was suspicious of what was being shown off, how much was gameplay versus animation, and whether what I was seeing was gen-AI or not.
After NetEase and Joker Studio granted us access to spend a few hours within a test build of the game, I can say that, yes actually, this game is just as gorgeous and lively and impressive as its trailers would lead you to believe. In fact, its style is easily part of its biggest charm. But then things started to slide a bit downhill – at least in the version I had access to.
If you’ve played games like Honkai Star Rail or especially Zenless Zone Zero, you can very easily visualize how this game animates. Or you can watch the aforementioned trailers and take solace in the fact that the fluidity, the bounciness, and the absolute charm and character is all over the place in this game. The whole game manages to somehow blend Age of Sail, graffiti tag art, and wood-carved puppet character design into a mash-up that is immediately appealing.
The opening story beats of Remnants are intriguing as well. You start as a character who is rowing through a vast, calm ocean, finds a magical rudder or something, and then ends up washed ashore at the central hub island of Orbtopia without any memory of what happened or who you are. This, in turn, leads to the character creation screen, where I was purely limited to a male-presenting character; we assume there will be feminine forms available eventually too.
The story of the game kicks into some pretty high gear as it sets the tone of the world and tutorializes you along the way, teaching a wide assortment of basics all the way up to some more complex layers of the gameplay loop (at least as much as I was allowed to experience). On top of moving from highlighted point to highlighted point to move the story along, there’s cooking that must be done in order to successfully rest and recover at checkpoint camp fires, little pop-up gatherables and interactable items, and smaller boss encounters dotted around the few island areas that I explored.
On the subject of encounters, I also have to absolutely praise the game’s turn-based combat while on foot. Layers pile on over the course of playing the opening beats, but ultimately there are ways to earn advantage before the fight by striking an enemy with active sword swings while running around, there are dice that can be used to power up individual attacks and engage a chance at an extra round for a character, and there are weaknesses to exploit based on ability damage types. It’s surprisingly deep dish.
I’ve only had one encounter while sailing, but that was fun enough as well; it’s arcade-y ship movement with WASD and then using the mouse to aim cannons and fire at need. The closest analogue I can come up with is something like a simpler version of the ship-to-ship combat found in Skull and Bones.
Last but not least, there’s a whole roguelike kind of wrinkle that weaves through the whole experience. If your party dies or your ship is sunk, then the stuff that’s not in a waterproof bag is completely lost, and you’ll have to repair your ship. Luckily there are ways to send valuable materials and currencies back to Orbtopia safely via a courier, and there’s also another NPC that lets you cash in the various gubbins found around islands for added rewards. It’s an interesting little wrinkle that puts a wee bit of risk into what would otherwise be a far too routine RPG.
Unfortunately, this is about where my glowing feelings for Sea of Remnants end. While the visuals bear a huge amount of load and the base gameplay loops hold my interest even past the point where I’m required to not talk about things (yes, I was limited to a halting point in what I could write about), there were some much bigger problems that otherwise took the wind out of my enjoyment sails. And almost all of them are related to localization.
I’m not going to act like translating things from Chinese to English is easy. I suspect the two languages, their meanings, and their turns of phrase couldn’t be any more different if they tried. But this is some of the worst translation I have ever witnessed in a video game ever, seconded only by Chimeraland. The voice acting was also all in Chinese, and I assume that will change eventually, but at it stands, it further took me out of the plot, and the translations moved from confusing to unintentionally comedic to actively incorrect.
For example, at one point in the tutorial, the on-screen instructions said to hit the “S” key to aim my ship’s cannons when instead it was right-click of the mouse. There were also a few instances when the instructions during a tutorial slide or battle didn’t fully show all of the English letters, leaving me to wonder what instructions I was supposed to absorb (remember when NetEase’s HPMA had this exact same problem?). Inconsistencies, redundancies, and wildly missed words or phrases peppered every step.
This, to me, is inexcusable for a NetEase-published game because we all know this corporation has money. I’m begging anyone who might be reading this and has access to NetEase directly: Don’t ask Joker Studio to run Chinese through Google Translate and call it a day. Give your devs the money to hire a localization team. A human. Localization. Team. Humans who know the intricacies and characteristics of both English and Chinese. Hire people. Spend money. I know you’ve got some.
Piss-poor translation wasn’t the only problem I was experiencing. There are also a couple of mechanical problems I’d be remiss to not bring up. For one thing, healing is done purely by cooking skewers at a camp fire and then using that camp fire to rest up, which ends up being an exercise in tedium and more of a chore as I held down the “F” key to roast items until they were cooked correctly.
There was also a point when I was instructed how to grind my characters up in order to take on a harder boss, which is not really that ideal and kind of boring after a time. And on the subject of leveling up characters, once they hit a certain level threshold, they have to have earned some sort of smaller achievements or learned some skills by learning sea shanties – again done at the camp fires – in order to both open up more levels and unlock new advanced classes. It’s deeply confusing and overly fussy, though that once again might be rooted in a lack of understanding what the hell the borky English translations were telling me to do.
I also have to point out that I do not know what this game is like in multiplayer (supposedly, it does, or will, as Steam calls it an MMO). Again, I had to stop my impressions at a certain determined point, but I suspect that’s maybe the point when other players are or will be around. I also still don’t know whether this is a gacha game as we have been assuming, but considering at one point before I made my first sea voyage that I was handed several other characters, I suspect it is. I just couldn’t find how to roll on banners. Which is really weird if this is a gacha game; usually that button is glowing, blinking, screaming at you.
Finally, I couldn’t snap my own screenshots for some reason, hence the press material pieces scattered through this write-up. The few screenshots that did manage to get saved were thumbnail-sized, and my usual capture program did not function for this game.
Many of these complaints are hopefully a result of the fact that this Sea of Remnants build isn’t fully finished yet. I desperately hope so because there is something deeply engaging and interesting and truly unique in this game. It needs some tightening in a few areas, polishing in some others, and a whole lot of attention paid to clearing the word salad fog that exists right now, but even if this game ends up being a single-player affair, I honestly might dive in more.
Massively Overpowered skips scored reviews; they’re outdated in a genre whose games evolve daily. Instead, our veteran reporters immerse themselves in MMOs to present their experiences as hands-on articles, impressions pieces, and previews of games yet to come. First impressions matter, but MMOs change, so why shouldn’t our opinions?
