Sailing Era

Introduction

For a very specific kind of player, Sailing Era arrives thirty years late and is still one of the best things to happen to their favourite genre in a decade. Released 11 January 2023 by GY Games and published by bilibili, it sets its sights directly on KOEI's Uncharted Waters series — a franchise of age-of-exploration sailing RPGs that never got a proper, fully-localised successor after its SNES and Genesis heyday. Reading through this game's English-language review sample, which sits at a genuinely strong 83% Very Positive across 441 reviews, that specific nostalgia does most of the heavy lifting, and it's earned: reviewer after reviewer independently describes finally getting an itch scratched that Sid Meier's Pirates! and years of pretenders never quite managed.

Four captains, one very large ocean

The pitch is straightforward: pick one of four playable captains, each with their own starting circumstances and personal story, and sail a real-world-scale ocean trading goods, hunting treasure, fighting pirates and building a merchant guild. One reviewer with 8,169 hours logged still describes finding new things to explore after completing all four campaigns; several others specifically credit the game with letting you lean into whichever part appeals — pure trading, combat-focused piracy, or exploration-driven treasure hunting — without forcing a single playstyle. The 2D character art and full-screen story illustrations come up unprompted across dozens of reviews as a genuine highlight, distinct from the more workmanlike 3D ocean visuals used for actual sailing. A single paid DLC, "Edge of the World," adds a fifth captain and a new Northern European campaign; a second, free crossover DLC adds bilibili's own mascot characters as a lighter bonus.

The interface everyone complains about

Set against that goodwill, one specific complaint recurs constantly and specifically enough to take seriously: the interface makes routine actions unnecessarily slow. One reviewer counts the exact toll of leaving port — two menu pages, two loading screens, three separate clicks — and argues that when departure is something the game asks you to do constantly, that overhead stops being a minor annoyance and starts actively working against the loop it's attached to. A second, related complaint concerns supply management: ships burn through provisions quickly relative to how sluggishly they can manoeuvre or resupply, which one detailed review calls "unsustainable" for anyone attempting a longer voyage exactly as the genre's trading fantasy usually invites. A handful of reviewers who know the wider trading-sim space well — citing Port Royale, Eve Online and the Anno series by name — make a sharper structural critique: the in-game economy doesn't really evolve. A profitable trade route discovered early tends to stay profitable indefinitely, without the market shocks or war-driven shifts that give those other games their long-term tension.

A thinner story than the games it's chasing

Several reviewers, independently, describe the story and its four leads as noticeably thin — one calls them "four less than likable characters with 1-dimensional goals," each defined by little more than a single stated ambition. One unusually well-informed English-language review goes further and offers a genuinely useful explanation for why the game's Chinese-language reception runs measurably more critical than its English one: Chinese players had legal, localised access to Uncharted Waters 2, 3 and 4, including the fourth entry's much-loved, story-heavy design, while English-speaking players historically only ever got the second game translated. Judged against UW4's storytelling specifically, this reviewer argues, Sailing Era can only come up short — a comparison English-speaking reviewers, lacking that same baseline, mostly aren't making. It's a rare case of a review sample's regional split having a concrete, checkable explanation rather than being a mystery.

Not everyone bounces off the same things

It's worth noting how much the negative reviews in this sample disagree with each other about where the problems actually lie, which is itself a useful signal about how personal a fit this genre is. One reviewer who tried and disliked the game specifically calls out the naval combat as below average, with escort captains locked into fixed strategies you can't adjust mid-fight; a different, more positive reviewer describes the same combat system as "roughly the same" as Sid Meier's Pirates! and treats that as a compliment rather than a shortcoming. Several reviewers recommend trying the free demo before buying precisely because of this split — one states plainly that many of the negative reviews look like they came from people who skipped the demo, which covers a genuine, representative slice of the early game. On the technical side, multiple reviewers independently confirm solid performance on Steam Deck and full controller support throughout, details worth knowing for anyone hoping to play this away from a desk.

Final Verdict

Sailing Era earns its Very Positive reception honestly: it is, by the account of dozens of reviewers who have been waiting decades for exactly this, a real and mostly successful spiritual successor to a genre that's had almost nothing new added to it since the 1990s. The 2D art is genuinely lovely, four separate campaigns give it real legs, and the sailing-trading-treasure loop lands for almost everyone who tries it. What keeps it from a higher score is equally consistent across the sample: an interface that fights the pacing of its own core loop, a trading economy that doesn't evolve the way the genre's best examples do, and a story that comes up short next to the specific entry in its own inspiration series that many of its most disappointed reviewers grew up on. Try the free demo first if you're new to the format; if you've been waiting for this game since the SNES era, it's very likely already exactly what you hoped for.