Sea of Stars has been the subject of a vast amount of hype. Whether it’s sincere or astroturfed, I can’t say. However, after watching a couple reviews from respected members of the JRPG community, I decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did, but there’s a caveat I need to apply: I effectively had to force myself to finish the game and I have no desire to complete all of the achievements. Because underneath it all, Sea of Stars is a tragically flawed masterpiece.
I took a week off of work for my birthday, and as can probably be expected, I spent much of that playing games.
Being in a cat-like mood, I started with Stray.
Meow
It’s a relatively short 7-10 hour game where you control a cat on a quest to rejoin its friends after being separated from them. Like any cat, you can’t talk and must interact with objects using only your mouth and claws. And of course there’s an achievement for meowing at least 100 times. Meow.
I finally found a way to get Final Fantasy 14 working again thanks to a GitHub gist. The author essentially replaces the Final Fantasy 14 Protonfixes launcher script with one that installs FFXIVLauncher into the same Wine instance Steam uses to invoke the game itself. It then uses this launcher instead of the broken one Square-Enix demands. Since Steam invokes the script within Proton, the replacement launcher passes the expected steam account ID to Square and everything magically works.
Final-est Fantasy
Last weekend, I went to try and play Final Fantasy 14 like I normally do, and ran into a nasty surprise. I’ve been playing on Linux this entire time after jumping through a few hoops, and while the game works just fine, the launcher is another matter.