My favorite JRPG pastime is turned into the main combat system in Sea Fantasy, a new open-world action-RPG where you literally cast a line and reel in fish "to save the world."
In case I wasn't clear enough, the elevator pitch for Sea Fantasy is simple and effective: you take a pretty standard fishing minigame, in this case one pretty similar to Stardew Valley's, and make it the primary gameplay mechanic in a bite-sized open-world RPG. "This is not a peaceful fishing game. The destruction of the world is imminent," warns the game's Steam description.
Sea Fantasy is the debut project from developer and publisher Metasla, but you wouldn't know it from an artistic or gameplay perspective. The visuals are pixel-perfect, the RPG mechanics are deep and approachable, and most importantly, the fishing minigame is fun and challenging, if not a tad bit derivative. The fish can and do fight back, which makes Sea Fantasy's fishing refreshingly unique, but mechanically it's nothing new.
The main gameplay loop is: catch fish, use materials to craft new gear with better stats and the occasional bonus effect, catch rarer and more challenging fish, rinse and repeat. That said, there's a surprising amount of gameplay variety across different areas of the game. For such a short game (I beat it in about seven hours), I wasn't expecting to find so many different puzzles, mini-games, boss types, and random stealth and bullet-hell sequences.
In retrospect, Sea Fantasy is a deeply weird game, and that whole vibe is compounded by some really rough English translation and a borderline suspiciously generic story. It sure as heck ain't perfect, but there's really nothing else like it, and for that reason alone it gets a recommend from me.
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