The Sun Never Sets

I want to like a pirate RPG. I genuinely do. Give me a salty crew, a cursed treasure map, some faction politics between smugglers and the crown, and I am there. The Sun Never Sets has all of those ingredients written on the label. What the jar actually contains is a fairly bare RPGMaker experience that even sympathetic players have found hard to defend, sitting at a coin-flip Mixed rating from its small community of reviewers. The setup has Captain Eldon assembling a ragtag crew to crack open four crystal seals protecting a dead Pirate King's hidden fortune. On paper that is a solid premise. You get a ship that doubles as a traveling hub between islands, and the party roster includes some personalities that at least gesture toward character variety: Doctor Maquiz, a physician cut loose by his former crew; Alex, a young pirate trying to prove himself; Gorak, an Orcish chef with a chip on his shoulder. Secret recruitable characters are also dangled as a reward for thorough exploration. The faction conflict, rival pirates on one side and a government hunting down pirates on the other, hints at the kind of political tension that makes a good RPG crackle. Hints at it. Whether the writing actually follows through is where the experience starts to fray. Combat is turn-based with random encounters spread across the island chain. If you grew up on classic JRPG structures, the loop is immediately familiar: walk a corridor, get pulled into a fight, repeat. The problem is that a median playtime hovering around four hours suggests the game burns through its content before any of those systems get room to breathe. There is no build variety to discover at hour 40 because most players are watching credits long before then. Filler content is my nemesis in RPGs, but a game this short has the opposite problem: there is barely enough game here for the premise to pay off, let alone for the characters to earn the moments the story seems to be reaching for. For players who specifically want RPGMaker titles, the pirate island-hopping framing is at least a fresher coat of paint than the default medieval village setup the engine is known for. The ship hub is a decent structural idea and the enemy variety across different islands could give the world some texture. But the near-even split in community reception, roughly half positive and half negative from a modest review count, signals that even the audience most inclined to forgive budget RPGs found this one a tough sell at full price. At deep discount territory it becomes a different conversation, but temper expectations: this is a short, mechanically lean RPG that does not have the writing chops or the combat depth to compensate for its brevity. Monika, Scout Team