Coming off the fan-favorite retro-style 2D action game The Messenger, Sabotage Studio's follow-up Sea of Stars was another game paying homage to the 2D era, this time focusing on JRPGs. At the recent Golden Joystick Awards 2024, 12DOVE caught up with game director Thierry Boulanger to catch up about the game and learn their references for making an original 2D-style JRPG.
Simply put, Boulanger stated that Nintendo was one of their biggest influences in their retro throwbacks and how the team learns something from "every single game ever."
"I mean, in a word, I think it's probably Nintendo, and just about everything they did in the '80s and '90s, and still to this day, to be fair," said Boulanger about Sabotage Studio's core influences. "As we were sort of growing and developing and understanding, [we realized that] that's going to be what we want to do for a living."
It's very common for indie developers to cite Nintendo as a core influence, given that many creatives grew up with the classic consoles like the NES, the SNES, and N64 – an era of gaming that effectively shaped the aesthetic and formula of core Nintendo games. However, the games from Sabotage Studio are not just homage to a particular era of gaming but also add modern flourishes to them.
For instance, The Messenger is a Ninja Gaiden-style action game with elements of a Metroidvania experience, but its biggest twist is that it allows players to shift between 8-bit and 16-bit realms seamlessly, leaning into the best of different eras of gaming. As for Seas of Stars – which is a direct prequel to their previous game – it's a game that pays homage to classic JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana but allows players to engage in combat and adventuring with co-op play.
"[For Nintendo], it's just the motherlode of everything you can learn and all the teachings that [come with it]," the director said. "For example, you can replay Super Mario Brothers 3, and you can still have takeaways on controls and level design and pacing and even difficulty and music and sound design and form-following functions And the way enemies are presented. And that still applies to this day. [Nintendo] really nails, like, all the core tenets that make a game kind of resonate and sing. But yeah, and then, other than that, every single game, too, because we play a lot of them."
If you want to play other games like Sea of Stars that are deeply rooted in the optimism of a JRPG, check out our list of the best games to play right now.
