Sea of Thieves: Volume 1 Review

 

Sea of Thieves is one of my favorite multiplayer games. It boasts fantastical, colorful, lighthearted, swashbuckling adventures in the spirit of the novel On Stranger Tides, the Pirates of the Caribbean film series and the Monkey Island video game franchise. Pirates team up online to engage in treasure hunts, naval battles and exploration in an action-packed and merry experience, that is incredibly fun, though noticeably lacking much of a story. The world feels lore-filled, with intriguing characters and settlements, forts, shacks, ruins and encampments scattered across the titular Sea of Thieves, yet beyond some flavor text, there really isn't plot to sink your teeth into. It doesn't help that the game doesn't have a campaign. 

 

Rare, the developers of Sea of Thieves, did however enlist a team to create a limited run comic book series that released close to the game's launch. The story was written by Jeremy Whitley and Rhoald Marcellius did the artwork, with Titan Comics serving as the publisher of this series. Succinctly titled Sea of Thieves, the four issue story basically served as a jumping on point for the tone and style of the game's universe, while introducing readers to a few faces that players will recognize when they play the game.

 

I won't beat around the bush. These four issues aren't great and don't tell a very compelling story. The obvious goal of this short story was to showcase what exactly Sea of Thieves is. From the moment to moment activities, the potential dynamics that you might share with your teammates and rival crews and what the world of the game is like. The story is framed around a brother and sister who are rival captains of two crews of pirates: DeMarco and Lesedi Singh. DeMarco is a brash, womanizing braggart, and Lesedi is an extremely driven, ambitious woman who wants to be the greatest pirate who has ever lived, following in the Singh siblings' legendary father's footsteps. Their ultimate goal is to find the buried treasure of their father. Neither Singh is a particularly interesting person, feeling more or less like modern pop cultural stereotypes. Our two protagonists having somewhat annoying personalities makes them very difficult to root for, or even enjoy reading about their trials and tribulations.

Their crews are also unremarkable. They are a comically diverse crowd too, given that Sea of Thieves is set roughly during the Golden Age of Piracy. Obviously it's a fantasy setting, so it's not like real world diversity means anything in the titular Sea of Thieves, but, this comic does establish that these two pirate crews entered the Sea of Thieves from the real seas of our world. So somehow multiple Indian people, a French lesbian, a Polynesian lesbian, a Japanese woman and a hulking, violent British man all somehow came together. Birds of a feather flock together, I reckon. But to look past their surface level traits and attempt to dive deeper into who exactly each of these characters are, you'll come back wanting. The writer attempted to create some charming characteristics, like the French pirate, Alessia, likes to dress up in disguises. And the giant British pirate, Seamark, has a certain Ron Swanson-esque, Laissez-faire attitude of "leave me alone and I'll leave you alone." But, he holds a short temper and speaks vaguely of violent acts that he committed in past wars, so that "leave me alone" attitude, comes across more as a warning than a suggestion.

I know that I've been largely negative about the story thus far. While I do think that the characters are severely lacking in interesting qualities, I believe that the core issue with the story lies in its structure. If I had to guess Rare probably gave some guidance that the activities with which players can participate need to be in this story, because I swear this comic feels like it just goes down the list of in-game features of Sea of Thieves and tries to bounce around to each of them. From the adventure starting in a small port town, to picking your crew in the tavern, interacting with the faction representatives in town, buying your treasure map, to getting into naval battles and squabbles with rival teams, to camping out on an island and drinking and eating and battling skeletons, to me it feels like the writer was told to hit a sequence of checkmarks to include in the story. 

While those are all interesting activities and quite fun in the game itself, it's noticeably peculiar in this story. And between this feeling of these various activities needing to be showcased, and the actual nature of the competitive treasure hunt between the Singh siblings, the four issues in this story move at a breakneck pace. Even if the characters were more interesting, you wouldn't have had time to spend with them in any meaningful way. And perhaps if the story was structured differently or wasn't limited to four issues, we could've seen characters blossom into more realized people.

To hit on a few positive notes, the art by Rhoald Marcellius is excellent. Each of the characters have a distinctive design and appearance, though I would've loved for them to fit more into the game's cartoonish, exaggerated aesthetic, that I feel suits the tone of this universe more appropriately. Also, the action is done very well. The naval battles and the clashes with the skeletons are brief, but genuinely entertaining and exhilarating. I also just can't get enough of the design of the skeletons. They look so good; just the right amount of cartoonish charm with a dash of spooky, macabre malice that I love.

I don't really have much more to say. The plot and characters don't demand much of a critical examination to really sink your teeth into or analyze in a deeper way. To my understanding, last year this story was continued in Sea of Thieves: Sea Dog's Search. Jeremy Whitley and Rhoald Marcellius came together again, bringing the Singh siblings back into the limelight for another tale. While this story didn't necessarily make me want to read more about these two characters, I enjoy Sea of Thieves enough that I will eventually give Sea Dog's Search a chance. Maybe without having to coordinate their story's release with the launch of the game, the sequel will have more room to breathe and be fleshed out in a more satisfying, thorough way.