HELLO I JUST SPENT 130 HOURS ON THIS IN ALMOST TWO WEEKS. I still can’t decide if I like this game or not. There are so many things wrong with it and so many thing right with it that I just can’t decide, so… extremely long and spoiler-filled rant ahead.
I was introduced to the Star Ocean series through SO3–yes, the one with the ridiculous 4D plot twist. I didn’t think that was that horrible, obviously, since I went on to buy the PSP remakes of SO1 and 2 when they came out. I enjoyed all three games in the series (though Claude and Rena annoyed the heck outta me), but to be honest, the Star Ocean games have never really had stellar storytelling and well-developed casts. What they do have is some really good gameplay, namely, the battle system and item creation system. SO4, the prequel of the entire series, shares both of these traits–except in an extremely amplified form, so in the end we have a game with really addicting gameplay, but really bad cutscenes and characters.
For someone who enjoys good story and character development, this game is… kind of a nightmare. The underlying plot isn’t really horrible–it’s mediocre and kind of ridiculous at times, but it’s not really anything we haven’t seen happen before in jRPGs. Earth is on the brink of destruction after World War 3; people are forced to explore space for an alternative living space. The protagonists, Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, are part of a group chosen and formed for this purpose. As they journey through space and explore different worlds, they discover a group called Grigori working in the background, escalating the evolution and destruction of entire planets, and ultimately, the entire universe. Sounds like standard RPG fare, right? And it is, so the plot isn’t the problem. The problem is that the cutscenes telling this story are so badly-written that I actually facepalmed and wandered off to do other things whenever they showed up. I have never done this before, not even with FF13′s cheesy romantic scenes or Xenosaga’s Shion-being-an-airhead scenes. And I don’t really have the skill to correctly describe how bad the cutscenes are, so I guess I’ll give some examples:
Typical cutscene before the last four boss fights:
BOSS: ONE AND ALL AND ALL AND ONE AND-
EDGE: WHAT.
BOSS: We are going to destroy the world so no one feels suffering. If you join our collective being, you will never feel pain.
EDGE: NO. YOU ARE WRONG!!!!111!!1!1!!!!!!!!!
BOSS: SILLY PEOPLES DO YOU NOT SEE HOW POWERFUL WE ARE [cast random spell at party!]
PARTY: AAAAH
EDGE: ADFAGAKLFJ YOU ARE STILL WRONG HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT WE WOULD BE HAPPY LIKE THIS
BOSS: LET’S SPOUT SOME MORE STUFF ABOUT SUFFERING AND PAIN AND BEING ONE AND ALL
EDGE: NO STILL WRONG LET ME SPOUT SOME MORE SELF-RIGHTEOUS NONSENSE AT YOU EVEN THOUGH IT WILL ACCOMPLISH NOTHING
BOSS: TALK TALK TALK SUFFERING SADNESS TALK TALK TALK TALK VOID TALK TALK TALK
EDGE: TALK JUSTICE TALK TALK HAPPINESS TALK TALK TALK KILLING PLANETS IS WRONG TALK TALK TALK
BOSS: ARGH YOU TALK TOO MUCH SO I WILL TALK BACK AT YOU
EDGE: TALK TALK TALK TALK TALK
PARTY MEMBERS: EVERYONE GETS A LINE!
EDGE: YEAH!
BOSS: YOU PEOPLE ARE DUMB.
Five minutes later, the boss fight begins.
The above exchange happens at least four times. I am not exaggerating; they have the same conversation every time they meet a new boss near/at endgame. And then there is this other gem that I am quite fond of:
Edge and party ends up on an alternate Earth 100 years before their time. Reimi gets captured; Edge walks into the military base to find her:
VAGUELY EVIL LOOKING WOMAN: Hello there, people. Your friend is safe with us!
EDGE: Oh cool! That’s a relief! What a nice woman you are.
WOMAN: Yeah. She “told” us about your advanced technology. Give it to us so we can save this Earth!
EDGE: Er… Sure! Never mind that it could be potentially dangerous and cause all kinds of problems since this Earth is, you know, at least 100 years backwards in time and technology. Never mind that I just walked through an entire institution focused on questionable “research” of things and people from other planets! I’ll just hand over this crystal that powers my ship so I can save the Earth! Yeah!
Woman proceeds to throw them in prison and blows up Alternate Earth.
… Yeah, facepalm-worthy cutscenes. The characters are very facepalm-worthy themselves too; it’s like Tri-Ace focused on making the characters’ “quirky” sides as quirky as possible, which also makes them as irritating/stereotypical as they could possibly be. It’s… amazing, in a way, and definitely needs to be experienced–just to see how horrifyingly bad they end up being. (Imagine a character who constantly adds “‘kay”/”nano yo” to the end of her sentences for an entire game. And then imagine an airhead who is 100x more annoying than a girl who adds a “cute” phrase at the end of all her sentences.) It doesn’t help that Lymle is the only character in the cast who gets any development; the Private Actions don’t even give much development, except for reestablishing things that have already been established–with two exceptions: Arumat gets some much needed background, and Edge and Reimi get relationship development. (On a side note, I am quite disappointed that only the female characters get actual cutscenes during Private Actions. What the heck, Tri-Ace? You have space and time to make two different Reimi shower scenes but not two final PAs for the two male members of the cast? Not to mention that these two are actually the non-irritating members of the party; they deserve at least a non-dialogue-box PA. ARGH.)
Onto the “good” parts of the game, I guess – the battle system. The SO series has always used a real-time battling system; the trend continues here, with some new side additions like Blindsides, where you get a chance to land a bunch of criticals if you “dodge” at a correct time, and the Bonus Board, where you get certain bonus tiles that multiplies your EXP/Fol/SP/regen gains if you defeat enemies in a certain manner. The AIs, with the exception of Myuria’s, are actually pretty decent too, so the battles are enjoyable. Item Creation is still a pretty large part of the game, though it’s actually quite a bit easier here since there’s no chance to fail. The one thing I kind of have a beef with is the Battle Trophies. In SO4, you need to get 50/100 trophies for a single character in order to remove the level cap for said character. Most of the Battle Trophies aren’t that difficult–I’d say about a fourth of it happens naturally as you play the game and another half isn’t all that hard to manipulate–but there are some that are just plain ridiculous. (Defeat 30k enemies on one single character? Time-consuming and adds nothing to the game, except for maybe 100 hours of mindless slaughtering.) Other than that though, the gameplay is great, and as with other Star Oceans, there’s a huge amount of postgame content.
Graphics and music-wise, I have no complaints, except that Reimi’s eyes are too big and close together and I can’t stop thinking about how strange she looks whenever she shows up on screen.
This post is getting way too long, so I will stop here.
TL;DR: Cutscenes and characters = ARGH; gameplay = great.
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