I’ve always been a huge fan of RPGs but I played them mostly for the plot development and secondly for the storyline. It’s not that I can’t bear to read 50 million lines of text, it’s just that most RPGs suffer from poor character development. Luckily Star Ocean is able to avoid this pitfall by providing gamers with characters that they can relate and empathize with. When the vacationing protagonist, Fayt, would rather stay in the hotel and play video games instead of go to the beach with his friend you can say, “Yea! I’ve been there before. That’s me!” Furthermore, the characters have genuine feelings and they behave as we would expect them to in real life. This is a huge positive for the game because it’s amazingly storyline heavy. To put into perspective you’ll go more than an hour before you get into your first fight. Most of the key dialogue is spoken but the secondary dialogue, such as the boxes that pop up when you speak to villagers, appears as written text.
Storyline is huge, but the most well-developed aspect of
Star Ocean is its combat system. Instead of utilizing the traditional turn-based system the game opts for a real-time system that pans out more like a hack’n’slasher. Instead of random encounters, combat is initiated whenever players run into a monster in a dungeon. Afterwards the game transports the combatants into a square battlefield where they can roam and attack freely. Here you have two attack buttons at your disposal as well as a plethora of special moves. Major damage is done by chaining together attacks while defense comes in the form of a dodging maneuver. There are charge attacks, special attacks and magical attacks (called symobology here) at your disposal as well. You can have up to three characters in your party at one time and since combat takes place in real-time, the AI takes control of the other two while you fight. Surprisingly the computer is pretty adept as it’ll support you and heal itself whenever needed.
From a visual standpoint we’ve been seriously spoiled by anything that has a Square moniker on it. While that logo usually excites gamers, it just might be damning to anyone who picks up a copy of Star Ocean. Most of the people this game caters to probably weren’t fans of the original (which was released only in Japan) and its PSOne sequel. Since they have no grounding in the franchise they probably see the Square Enix tag and immediately expect a graphical blockbuster. That’s where the problem lies; the game looks severely weak when compared to the other heavy hitters in the Square Enix lineup. The animation is pretty weak, the backgrounds look generic and the effects are far short of being special. The animation just doesn’t sync up properly with the action that’s happening on the screen. Characters seem to warp across the environment as if they’re floating on clouds. On the upside, the characters run really fast so if you’re one of those people who hated the running speed in
Final Fantasy X, this is a major bonus.
One of Star Ocean’s most interesting graphical touches arises during the game’s in-game cutscenes. As the characters talk the camera shifts focus squarely onto the characters while putting a soft hue on the surrounding environment. What happens is that everything insignificant to the conversation becomes blurred which gives the conversation even more meaning. It’s a neat effect that’s used in Hollywood Cinema from time-to-time, but rarely in video games. Other than that the game is pretty standard fare, even sometimes falling below the center line. Textures are horrifically bland and all of the little details that we’ve come to expect from RPGs were missing. When a character sits on a bed the sheet and mattress remain perfectly still, giving the impression that they’re merely floating on a box. Other games would have added wrinkles and a depression which gives the game more dimension. Most of the texture work is pretty bland and low quality as well. When trudging through a dungeon it’s easy to get lost because most of it looks so similar. There are no defining details in the architecture and the objects often look blurred and muddled.
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