I applaud this gacha game for ditching anime characters for puppets, but it still can't escape the pitfalls of a post-Genshin Impact world

The fight against the gorilla inexplicably piloting a boat was the moment Sea of Remnants got me. I've never played a gacha game so bizarre and committed to creating a world so much different than most of the other popular games in the genre. But for as much as it ditches the anime conventions and aesthetic of games like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves, it's still hard for me not to imagine what it might be like if it wasn't a gacha game at all.

Everyone is a puppet made out of wood in Sea of Remnants, an artistic choice that is so distinct I almost didn't believe it was a game where you grind for currency to gamble for new characters. It sure doesn't look like a gacha game and doesn't do anything to make that clear in its opening hours. I just wish it could've stayed that way.

The game opens on a vast sea at twilight with luminescent creatures and coral just below the surface. A great wall of water rises up and touches the sky, giving you no choice but to face it head on in your rickety little boat. There's no dialogue or exposition in this dreamy intro sequence, but it's mighty effective at giving an otherwise zany adventure an undercurrent of melancholy without hitting you over the head with it.

That Sea of Remnants can pull that off and then basically smash cut to a scene where a quirky inventor with his sculpted messy hair and broken glasses asks you Fallout 3-style personality questions is impressive. I kind of love not knowing a lick of what's going on and being thrust right into a community of weirdo pirates eager to teach you how to sail and scavenge effectively.

Who is the blonde girl who starts a bar fight and then helps you in a turn-based battle against the owner? I have no idea, but she's far less annoying than Genshin Impact's earsplitting toddler fairy, so I'll keep her around. The entire fight sequence plays out like a comic book with loads of visual gags and onomatopoeias, which helps set up how over-the-top the combat is when you're finally in control.

In the few hours I played, nothing convinced me Sea of Remnants is doing anything particularly ground-breaking with its turn-based action. It's all pretty standard stuff: You attack, you defend, and you try to match your skills against the enemy's weakness. I've played a lot of Honkai: Star Rail, however, so I know it's very possible things get turned on their head as soon as you pick up other characters who can do more than slash at enemies with their swords.

But the battles are dazzling from the start. Activating an ultimate attack coats the screen in bright red as your character unsheathes their sword and slices through enemies with a swift strike. A simple buff ability makes them combust into a rage and let out an amusing little battle cry. Your partner can toss bombs that bounce and go off with a satisfying pop. And if you're lucky with your dice rolls, a bright smear of pink will cover the screen to indicate you've earned a surprise bonus turn. Even though the mechanics of it all are pretty simple, the way it's presented had me happy to be along for the ride.

Writing on the wall

What really sets Sea of Remnants apart from similar games, though, is everything around the combat. Exploring the city and sailing on the open sea to different islands reminded me of going to the Lego Land theme park as a kid and marveling at all the familiar real world things made out of plastic bricks. Sea of Remnants' has no stop-motion and yet it still feels like a miniature playground where pigs roam around with drawn-on faces and chiseled (literally!) gorillas hop into their comically small boats. It's all charming to look at in a way that made me almost forget I was playing a game with an overwhelming amount of upgrades and items and currency hiding behind pages and pages of menus.

Nothing sucks the joy out of a game bursting with this much artistic creativity than layers and layers of incremental meta progression. Although I didn't reach the point in the beta, I dread the moment Sea of Remnants comes to a stop and forces me on a treadmill to level up all the right things so I can continue the story. It's hard not to assume the worst when there are hidden chests around the world that fill your bags with currency for leveling various things up that will no doubt become annoyingly scarce unless you turn the game into a daily routine. I dream of a world where a game like this is made to be played and not lived in.

To Sea of Remnants' credit, very little of that infringes on the experience in the game's early hours, and you really can play it like a conventional RPG. But all the hooks are clearly there: I recruited a free nun character and saw how her abilities were much flashier than the main character and their sidekick's. I was asked to level up my character's stats and could see plenty of things I either couldn't afford or required currency I had never even seen yet. I claimed a daily log-in bonus. The gacha game is in there, hiding in the grass, waiting to strike the moment you're lulled into thinking this one might be different.

I've always said HoYoverse games, like Honkai: Star Rail or Zenless Zone Zero, would be outstanding if you ripped out all the gacha nonsense. Characters are lovingly animated, expressive, and exist in imaginative worlds I'd love to explore without feeling like I have to constantly keep up with updates and accruing powerful new characters. Everything about them is designed to keep you in an endless loop where the only escape is a price tag.

Sea of Remnants remixes a lot of those pieces with an aesthetic that goes a long way to differentiate it from the flood of anime gacha games. The problem is I've also played a lot of gacha games in beta and know how much changes once you've put in enough time for the intentionally tedious bits to infiltrate everything that was fun about the game in the first place. Sea of Remnants proves how stale the genre has gotten in the last decade as everyone tries to make their own Genshin Impact. It also proves how tragic it is that a game like this is chained to a business model that makes me extremely skeptical that it'll be worth recommending when it's fully released.

That said, I'll be keeping an eye on it when it releases on Steam later this year.