Before I start, I just want to say that it’s going to sound more negative than it is. I don’t consider it a good game, but I don’t consider it a terrible game either. Just very disappointing for a Star Ocean game and a lower budget title than it should have been. Probably released way too early as well.
The story for the most part is pretty standard fare, however I feel some changes should have been made. First I think they should have taken the current story and smashed it together a bit to shorten it (plus give you fast travel sooner) and then opened up to what is the current end of the game for a second planet with new areas/enemies. I believe this would have greatly improved the overall feel and pacing of the game to put in more in line with what we want from a Star Ocean game. It also would address issues you have with the enemy of the game, allowing them to properly expand on them.
There is one thing that really bothered me with the story. I can’t really go into detail on it, but I just want to say that they never really address the elephant in the room AT ALL which bugs the hell out of me. They make brief mentions of it and then brush it aside with the MC saying shit like “I totally trust them, it’s ok guys.” which is pretty terrible. If they went Jean-Luc Picard and done some light diplomacy instead of James T. Kirk’ing worse than Kirk himself
s up, I think it would have resolved any of the angry sentiment I have towards the story itself.
Next are the environments, which do look pretty good in general. They fit the aesthetic of the theme/world which is good, however they also fail by giving a false sense of world size by making it feel smaller than it actually is supposed to be. This ties in to another issue, which is lack of fast travel for most of the game. Because of this, sidequests require insane amounts of running around/backtracking that feels horribly grindy and not particularly fun.
To expand on sidequests, they are basically 95% kill and fetch quests. The couple that aren’t, you’re tracking down some dude by running all over the god damned world only to find out the asshole is basically back where you started from. Simply put, this is not fun. However, there are a number of specialties and skill books tied to quests which makes many of them hard to skip.
Tied into sidequests you have enemies. Some require unique enemies that show up only when you have the quest in certain areas. That itself is fine, but what really irks me is when I get sidequests that require work-a-rounds because of insanely low drop rates (Empyrea Fish) or are impossible to get any other way (Sandfish) because enemies change world-wide two times through the entirely of the game or because an enemy with 100% drop rate didn’t drop it due to you not having the quest during another quest and thus the enemy no longer shows up.
If that wasn’t bad enough, you also have the Private Action system. It basically boils down to you going to a town, running to a circle with a whistle on it and then your party splits up. Some of them you can go talk to and then once done either leave town or re-enter the PA circle. Now the bad part sets in that when you transition into the nearby inn and then back out the PA circle is active again (most likely) and more PA’s are available. Repeat this probably around a dozen times taking 30 minutes every visit to a new town after a story event.
That’s only half of the issue of it though. The other half are the passive PA’s you get when you start running from a map and then your party members start talking and you have no idea how many there are for that map or when they are supposed to trigger during the story. On top of that there are active and passive PA’s that have roles you earn through them for characters. Many of those gained are actually quite useful too, which makes it feel even worse. Oh and if you get into battle, the passive PA will also stop and there is no way to re-view them, which is a shame because some of the ones that were skipped I did want to listen to the entire thing. It would have really benefited by trying to be like skits in the Tales series honestly.
Now for the battle system which is the meat and potatoes of the game. Going through the main story, you won’t have many skills on your physical attackers for the vast majority of it which sucks because they don’t really get that many skills compared to the two casters. On top of that, you can only hotkey two for close range and two for long range. Skills don’t combo well into other skills and you often have issues hitting enemies that are knocked down. Plus, in the latter game the spell effects are so over-the-top that you can’t even see anything else on the screen except for that spell effect which is a little dumb. So usually in the end you end up picking one skill and just spamming it, constantly. For me, controlling the main character, that was his very first skill Double Slash. Everything else he has just is not as useful honestly even after leveling them up.
Then you have roles and AI. Your roles determine your characters AI and you can have 4 or 5 equipped at once per character. Leveling them only increases their bonuses and doesn’t mess with their AI. Them being tied together is unfortunate because I can sit there with a boss attacking me and then suddenly most of my ranged characters will run somewhat close behind me and start using abilities instead of spreading out far from the boss. This will cause them to all end up taking massive damage and getting hit multiple times from the boss while it attacks me. The same thing happens with the melee characters as I try to put myself on a different side of the enemy or boss and they just mosey on up next to my controlled character. It is
very infuriating and gets AI killed all the damned time.
After that you have a few battles that are HORRIBLY designed mechanically. Three or four where you need to protect a certain person and if you don’t, it’s game over. The first time you may get a game over simply because you didn’t hear the audio cue mention that you need to protect said person, but that battle isn’t bad. The second one is the pain in the ass because there are mobs that spawn which can use a very destructive skill, but I still don’t think is particularly hard. I did receive a game over the first time because when the character hit half health I went to use an item but another enemy used a move that took the remaining half of their health before I could get an item or heal off. These should have been changed to a progress bar and when they die, no progress can be made until revived. It’s an easy thing to get around and makes you say ‘What the
were they thinking?’. The remaining ‘protect’ battles like this aren’t bad. (You can level up Killer roles to get the Humanoid/Mechanical Killer roles to make this completely trivial as leveling only provides some HP/MP)
Now the other horrible designed battle mechanic you’ll come across a few times is where they start talking in the battle and then one of your characters has to use an ability. I don’t know if they died to cause this or if it was a bug, but the dialogue literally cut off at a certain point and I could no longer progress with the fight. The only way for me to continue was to reset the game at that point and reload to my latest save point. This is of course worse because you can’t really skip long dialogue scenes in the game which is another stupid decision.
The last thing I want to touch on is the body language of characters in the game. In Japanese games, you get very exaggerated body language with characters flinging their arms and legs around. I’m used to this and don’t really mind it. In this game however, I feel it takes it to an insane level that really takes away from the game. An example would be Welch who you go to gain your crafting specialties. Her dialogue is fine and very Welch when compared to the rest of the series, but her body actions are so off beat, over-the-top and just downright terrible that it made me dislike her character. If the game would have done some light mocap for characters, it would have made the presentation of dialogue and character interaction so much better. Sadly through, the game was pretty obviously low budget (or at least I hope it was).
Despite all this I did somewhat enjoy the game, though it was only a minimal amount sadly. If they could have fixed the story like I said early on, provided fast travel sooner, fixed the overly egregious character body language and separated out AI with actual customization options it would have been
significantly better I think.
Tl;dr
Like
- It still has some things that make it Star Ocean? Specializations and such. I'm kind of stretching it to find something to write here.
- General aesthetic. It's not great nor has many environments but the ones it did have were kind of nice.
Ehhh
- Miki's character model is a bit out of place and Anne's costume felt out of place to me as well.
- Battle system.
- Roles. Like the idea for boosts and such, but hate how it determines a characters AI.
Dislike
- Private Action System. It's not player friendly and has rewards (Roles) tied to it.
- The quest system and the games lack of fast travel for most of the game.
- The extreme body language of characters that I felt went far beyond typical very Japanese games and made it feel pretty bad.
- AI system and how its tied to Roles (This can't be overstated)
- Stupid battle decisions. Ones to protect someone that can result in game overs and others that result in something not happening due to either the person being dead or a bug and forcing you to reset.
- Post-game dungeon is pretty boring compared to past titles in the series. Caused me to stop running it because of how repetitive it was.
Recommendation: Rent it if you really want to play it. It's about 35 hours long with all sidequests (Significantly shorter without). If you're doing trophies, then you're probably looking at around 50 hours. I can't really recommend buying it even at a discount.
