During Sony's State of Play presentation this past June, NetEase Games released a trailer for Sea of Remnants. The publisher is still riding the highs of a very successful launch of Marvel Rivals, but releasing a pirate-themed game when the success rate of other pirate-themed games have been spotty still seems like a risky move, especially when the development studio only has an asymmetric multiplayer title in its portfolio. We got a chance to take a very early look at the game, and while the snippet was still very small compared to the anticipated scope of the game, the demo was strong enough to keep us very intrigued about how the title will progress.

The story starts off with an air of mystery. You begin as a nameless person in tattered rags and traveling the ocean in a simple rowboat. You reach a large chasm in the ocean when you witness one side of it rise, revealing the wheel of a sunken ship. You travel to that wheel, and a large ghostly vessel appears, passes through you, and knocks you unconscious. You awaken in the home of a watchkeeper, and you have some foggy memories and a hint to go to the tavern to get a lockbox to jog your memories. Upon your arrival and retrieval of said lockbox, you run across a woman who looks like someone you'd seen at the watchkeeper's place. A stack of mysteries unfolds as you try to discover why the items in the lockbox are so important, why the two women you meet are doppelgangers, and what was the mystery you sought to uncover in the ocean.

The presentation is one of the more striking things about the game, as it feels like a mash-up of styles that should work against one another. For the audio, this means that you're getting a wider variety of genres playing in any given situation. The opening gives off a sorrowful but operatic feel, but you soon get into some English K-Pop-inspired stuff for the cut scene in the tavern. Sometimes you'll get a silly ditty during a humorous cut scene followed by rock for a fight and something akin to a superhero fight song in the next moment.

Equally as jarring are the visuals. The game may seem like your typical 3D-rendered world until you notice that everyone is done in a wooden marionette style. Clothes may seem like typical pirate garb, but there's a pop graffiti style overlaid on things like your overcoat. The same is applied to the environment, where you'll find random scribbles in bright colors on doors, walls and even ships. The menus apply this as well but mix it up with a bit of glitchpunk. Text can shift around for a second or two, and you'll also see this applied to the names of new areas when you discover them. These kinds of things give the game a distinct identity, making it memorable even if the full release is at least a year away.

From a gameplay standpoint, Sea of Remnants is a traditional turn-based RPG. You can expect standard menu-based battles where turn order is set, but it looks like everyone's energy meters sit at some very high numbers early on compared to other RPGs of this style. The overworld has you walking around and using your attacks to open crates to obtain items. You can see enemies beforehand, and while you can get hit by an enemy to give them first attack rights in the turn order, you can also attack them to get that advantage for yourself.

This is where you see your first tweak to the combat system compared to the contemporaries in the genre. Hitting an enemy requires you to land a three-hit combo to gain the first attack advantage. It means a bit of button-mashing and can feel unnecessary when the enemy only needs one hit to gain an advantage on you. On top of that, initiating a combo brings up a random number generator, and scoring a number higher than what your opponent draws means that your first attack can deliver more damage than usual.

The game takes party size into account when it comes to your attacks, as you can modify them. Not all attacks and abilities can be modified, but the basic ones can, and those modifications result in things like added damage on an enemy. One thing that we didn't quite understand is why you can have three extra modification steps on your first attack but only one extra boost for every subsequent attack when you initially get into a fight as a two-person team. This may be due to the game's rough translation at the moment, but it is perplexing.

The next change comes from the importance of iconography. Your attacks come with special icons, and enemies may also occasionally sport these same icons. If you perform an attack that specifically targets those creatures with icons that match, you'll land your hit, but you'll also be given a second turn with your selected party member immediately afterward. Creature icons are never permanent, but their presence is a nice bonus when they show up.

Then there's the presence of special attacks. Every attack you do builds a meter, and initiating a special attack lets you unleash some very cinematic attacks. Some are standard, such as adding fire to your sword and unleashing a big multi-hit combo, while others are silly, such as your character setting up a miniature playset of your enemies in a circus and watching them play before blowing it all up with a cannon. What makes this more fascinating is that these meter-powered moves don't count as attacks on their own, so you're essentially getting in free hits when you decide to drain that meter. It makes the combat system feel more weighted toward you, with a preference for more offense compared to some recent RPGs that provide more defensive abilities instead.

The game seems to throw all of these things at you in a relatively quick fashion, making it feel quite overwhelming. In practice, everything feels rather natural, since those aforementioned things feel more like bonuses rather than primary statistics to track. You can survive by just using the basic turn-based menu system that has been around for decades. Ignoring everything else might mean that you need an extra turn or two to defeat a foe. This may change later on in the game, but by that time, you should have come to grips with the gameplay mechanics.

Aside from on-foot combat, there's ship combat, and the mechanics are more action-oriented rather than turn-based. Sailing is easy enough, as you just turn the ship and push forward without needing to account for wind or other ship mechanics. While the preview build didn't give us a hint of more advanced techniques like ship ramming or boarding, you can fire cannons, and all attacks happen in real time with numbers floating up for each hit. As expected, you need to fire from the side of your ship, and while you can pivot the cannons, the range remains limited. You'll do plenty of switching between steering and shooting, but the process isn't complicated, especially if you've played other pirate-themed games that feature ship combat. Overall, the combat feels nice due to its easy-to-pick-up nature.

Sea of Remnants is still a year away from release, but there seems to be a lot of protection in place that is hopefully specific to the preview build. The game can only be played on one PC. If you try to run the game on another PC or change enough hardware to make the game think that you've changed PCs, you can get your account banned from playing. We got hit with an account ban during our preview period, since we wanted to see how the game would perform under different hardware configurations. This might not be a feature that continues to the final build, but it's something to note.

There's around a year to go before Sea of Remnants gets a public release, but what we've seen thus far gives us reason to think that the wait will be worth it. The mashed-up aesthetic gives the game a distinct vibe, and the story is both very familiar and intriguing. The combat system seems like it has a good amount of depth but remains simple enough that you can get by with some basic knowledge of JRPG mechanics. This is a game worth looking out for, especially once they reveal how a completely free JRPG of this scope is going to work from a monetary standpoint.