Sea Fantasy Review: Fish the World!

There are many fishing minigames in the wonderful world of JRPGs. You can fish in Final Fantasy XV, a minigame so deep, fun, and engaging they spun it off into its own game. In Nier: Automata, you just toss your robot friend into the water; maybe you get something, maybe you don’t. Not quite so engaging, but a diversion nonetheless. In Stardew Valley, you attempt to keep the bobber within a bar until you catch the fish. Many people have no love for this one, but it’s always been a personal favorite of mine, particularly as a means to start the game and get some early cash.

The developers of Sea Fantasy asked a simple question: What if the fishing minigame… was the game?

That’s really all there is to it. Let me be clear: Sea Fantasy is not an all-time great JRPG. I’d be hard-pressed to honestly even say it’s very good in that department. The story is bland and mediocre, the characters could hardly be described as even one-dimensional, exploration is simple and short (you could travel from one side of the full map to the other in a handful of minutes), and there aren’t really any incredible set-pieces or moments outside of the final boss. Your friend Axel can traverse 2D dungeons, but they universally suck, last about five minutes, can never be explored again, and there’s only three or four of them in the entire game. So what are you left with?

Well, you’re left with one of the best fishing games I’ve ever played. It’s incredibly simple on the surface. You play as Rod, who loves to fish. Rod casts his rod into the water where a fish shadow is. Two bars will appear, blue (which constantly shrinks) and yellow, with a cursor bouncing back and forth. Hit the button while the cursor is over a bar, and you deal damage, with the yellow being a critical hit. Fail to hit the bar, let the blue bar collapse, or take too long to catch the fish, and you take damage.

That’s really it. There are a variety of special fish that add twists to the formula, such as turning your cursor into a fast-moving tornado or making the blue bar poison that damages you, requiring you to hit the critical bar, but otherwise, on your journey to catch the over 100 fish in the game, you will be hitting a button over a yellow or blue bar for about 10 hours. And it’s perfect.

I truly mean that. I need nothing else from this game, even if it would be appreciated. When I played the game, the translation was terrible bordering on unintelligible at times (they’ve recently updated the translation, so I’m not sure if that continues to be the case). The story, meager as it was, meant nothing to me, and the characters meant less. As the game world kept expanding as I got better ships, I expected exploration to become more interesting, but nothing ever topped the poison gas labyrinth of the first area. There is nothing but fishing to truly grasp your attention. And that is as it should be.

They’ve made a fantastically engaging fishing game that kept me hooked. I’d run into a challenge and start looking for the materials to build a new rod or hook that would help me to overcome it. When the game was over, I came back after a few weeks and built the rod that slightly increases the chance of catching a crown fish (basically the game recognizing you’ve caught the largest possible fish of that species; there’s a 5% chance of any fish you catch being crown, with the rod I built amplifying that to all of 8%). It was entirely luck-based, but I enjoyed the game so much that I did it just to have a reason to return.

Is this game for everyone? Absolutely not; fishing minigames create enough division among players as it is. If you don’t like fishing in Stardew Valley, you probably won’t enjoy Sea Fantasy. But I thought it rocked. I only wish there were more of it. And if there ever is, a decent story and characters wouldn’t be the worst thing they could add.

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