Companions are the deepest system in Sea of Remnants and the one the numbers describe most clearly. At the June 2025 reveal the game had 300+ companions; by Summer Game Fest 2026 in June, that figure had become 400+. Doubling in a year is not a content schedule, it is a statement about where the game's depth lives.
The important thing about how companions are obtained is the source. You do not buy crew from a shop or summon them from a gacha banner — you recruit them from rival factions. The people who would be your enemies have crew you need, and the factions are, in the game's own framing, opposed to one another. Recruiting across those lines is the point: your crew is assembled out of people with competing loyalties, which is a materially different proposition from hiring specialists.
The official description puts it as "bonding with 300+ companions" — the verb is bonding, and the count is companions rather than units. That is a relationship system, not a roster. Your crew, your ship and your decisions feed back into progression, which is why the fleet you can field is a consequence of how you treated people rather than of a resource total.
The closed beta that opened on December 3, 2026 shipped with 21 playable characters and two new regions. That is a meaningful sample of the full roster and the first real evidence about how the companion systems hold up in a build that reaches every platform.
Consider what the game is asking you to do. It asks you to assemble a crew from people who oppose each other, sail an ocean that will damage your ship if you are careless, fight in two different combat systems depending on where you are, and then live with the consequences in a city that changes shape because of your decisions. In a design like that, three hundred companions are not padding — they are the substance. The ocean is the setting; the crew is the game.