Imagine Star Wars in Anime style, add everything you love about RPGs and you've got Rogue Galaxy, Level 5's latest. hit
In Rogue Galaxy you take the role of Jaster Rogue, a young hunter, who always dreamed of leaving his home planet Rosa which is an issue of dispute between two warring nations. One day he gets mistaken as a famous hunter named: Desert Claw, which gets him recruited on a space pirate ship owned by Dorgengoa, who is planning on finding the hidden planet Eden to get his hands on all the treasures that he heard that it exists there. Along the way Jaster moves from one planet to another meeting new and interesting characters and recruiting some of them to your crew, and going through all sorts of adventures. An industrial corporation is set to use ancient artifacts in order to make use of it's vast power to control the world and it's president will stop at nothing to get to his goal. And all of this is somehow connected to Jasters past, but I won't spoil any of the story, so you'll have to find out by yourself.
Game play wise the game is an action-RPG with a boy goes into space setting and the theme of space travel. You'll play as jaster and with a couple of friends with you, you'll engage in random battles and gain experience points as you win them, but the action here is pretty obvious as the game lets you bash buttons to attack enemies just like in an action game while you can open the menu at any time and use items, for healing and stuff like that and trust me when I say that you'll be healing your party most of the time since the enemies here are very hard and some of the bosses will finish off your party with a few weak attacks. As for in-battle interactivity you can switch your weapons during the fight. A nice feature is the fact that when you receive experience points, these are distributed between all your characters, and NOT just the active party members, this allows all your party members to level up at the same time. As for weapons, there must be tons of weapons in this game. Each character has a main weapon and a sub weapon, and you can actually see which weapons each of your characters has equipped. Another nice feature is the special attacks performed by all your characters, which are called Burning Strike which will have you pressing on screen button prompts resulting in a powerful combo which inflicts a nice amount of damage and looks cool at the same time. All the characters will gain different kinds of abilities some are defensive, others offensive and there's the Burning Strike attack mentioned before, you'll acquire these abilities by placing different items in designated slots in a chart called the Revelation Flow, which is the character development system for this game.
Traveling can get a bit tiresome for although it is fun the areas are really vast and big, but thankfully you'll be able to move around easily via the Transporters at which you'll be able to warp from one place to another on the same planet (provided that you activated them in the first place), store excess items, exchange hunter points(more on that later), and of course the most important function: save your progress.
As mentioned before the graphics in this game are in cartoon style, so you'll feel like you're watching an anime movie, just like in Level 5's previous games. All in all it looks really good specially that you'll spend a lot of time playing this game, not that it's really long, actually it's a short game for an RPG, but that's just the main game, if you consider going through the side quests your play time will be almost tripled.
Speaking of side quests, there's a load full of side quests to complete, first there's the hunting game similar to Final Fantasy XII where you'll find and defeat all sorts of monsters to gain hunter points and exchange them at the transporter and gain rank and see where you stand among the best hunters around. Another side quest is the Insectron Tournament, where you are required to capture, feed, train and raise little creatures called Insectors and then compete in fights against other Insector trainers in a special tournament. Another side quest is the Factory, a surprisingly complicated assembly mini game that lets you build an assembly line, and make all sorts of items and weapons. All of these games are fun and add a lot of value to an already enjoyable game.
A few point worth mentioning are the fact that the story although being nice and enjoyable yet it suffers from the same flaw that other Level 5 titles suffer from, which is poor story telling, for even if the story is beautiful it is not well written, even the characters are so clichéd, all of them are somehow familiar and you'll feel that you've seen them all before (almost!), Fortunately the whole thing is saved by a well done voice acting, nice music and sound effects, and dramatic cut scenes. the leveling up system will get very annoyingly slow after you're characters reach level 50, but you won't need to level up beyond that to finish the game. All of these minor faults are really insignificant compared to the grandness of this game though, and can easily be forgiven.
The Playstation 2 is very rich in RPG games right now and rogue galaxy is a very welcome addition to them, it's an enjoyable game, very well done with great graphics, sound and story, with tons of side quests and a huge terrain to explore. If it only had more monsters and areas it would be much appreciated but all in all it's still a great RPG game that will satisfy every fan of the genre and attract more people to it, so you should definitely check it out.