Tri-Ace shows RPG fans another great entry to its Star Ocean (SO) series, one that most definitely will not disappoint. For those of you unfamiliar with the series but interested in an action RPG that offers a lot than look no further. Battle System: The battle system is where the previous entries to the SO have shined, and this one shines just as well. There are no random battles, all enemies are presented on the field and require that you touch them to initiate a battle scene. You control one to three characters, although most people will choose to take control of one while allowing the others to the AI, of course you may find yourself rotating mid battle to gain an advantage or something along those lines. The AI for your characters does the job, it doesn’t excel of course so don’t expect it to pull of the cancels (combos) you do when you use the character, but it will be there for the most part to help you when you need it. Your characters have weak and strong attacks for both short and long ranges. They also have set abilities for each attack strength at both distances, which you can get and set as you level up or use items on your characters. Each ability takes a certain point value to set and you only have fifteen in total to split among each character’s skills so you will need to choose wisely. To execute these moves you will need to hold down a button that the skill has been set to, which will use up a specified amount of hit points or magic points depending on the skill and where it was set to as an attack. You can link your attacks and skills to perform “cancels”, which is basically a combo resulting in higher damage percentage for each additional cancel that is performed. The characters also have fury bars, which allows you to perform moves during combat, each action, and damage taken removes fury points. When the bar is empty your character will slouch down, and will be unable to do another action until his fury is back up, which can be done automatically by standing in place. A full fury bar allows a defense move, but more often than not this move is too difficult to be pulled off and can be shattered by a strong attack from an opponent, and vice versa for you and your opponents. You can manage the rest of the battle by pulling up a menu and choosing specific attack, items you would like to use, AI preferences, etc. One final note that’s unique for this game would be that your characters will die when either their hit points or their magic points reach zero, of course this can also be an important strategy to use against your opponents as well. These melees are being done on three-dimensional free roaming battlefields, but even though it sounds like you’ll be button mashing you won’t. The fury gauge and way the skills are designed requires that you plan your moves to some extent and also a plan to gain your used fury. Something that is battle related not directly but as more of a result is the bonus battle gauge. This feature fills a bar on the right hand side during battle and carries over from battles, once full it adds a specific bonus after the battle. These bonuses include triple experience bonus, double fol (the currency), increased recovery post battle, and increased likelihood to obtain an item. You can have all of these at one time if you go enough battles without losing the bonus. To lose the bonus your controlled character will either need to take a critical hit or will need to die during combat, thus starting from the beginning again. Depending on your strength in comparison to your enemy’s current strength gauges how much percentage the bar will increase during any given battle. So it is possible to have it fill up at 200% during some battles but later some time have it fill up at 0% (that’s not really filling up though). A neat trick the developers did was that they only have the data for the gauge available while the current save file is open, once you reset, turn to power off, or even load a save file the gauge is lost and starts from the beginning again. Keeps the leveling up fanatics on their toes. Another indirect battle related feature is the trophy system. As you do special things in combat you will earn trophies, which are then added to your memory card right after that battle and can be viewed on the start up screen before loading any game files. These trophies can be earned by doing the following, but not limited to the following, beat boss x in less than one minute, beat boss x without taking damage, do x number of cancels, survive on fury x number of times, do x amount of damage, battle x number of times, etc. Collecting trophies allows your characters to obtain different character model designs and opens up two new difficulties as well. I have three main complaints. The first of which is why only three characters? The second of which is since I can only use three characters why are my other characters not leveling up with my core group? See the problem is once you choose a core group the other characters become useless, because their levels will be too low to use if you actually wanted to with out some serious leveling up. The last of which is why does the camera not pan out and in with the battle? You’ll find yourself attacking enemies you can’t see. Which is very dangerous if they have full fury and you only use a weak attack, therefor releasing a counter, which if you’re unlucky could be a homing type counter attack that does some serious damage or could possibly even kill you character(s). These complaints, at least the first two, don’t really distract from the excellent battle system though and should only be taken as a minor rant for an otherwise great design. Development System(s): This game like most RPG has your typical gain experience level up, rinse and repeat all the way up to level 255 if you wish to do so. At each level you are awarded a set amount of points for four specific categories, which include attack, defense, hit points, and magic points. The later two will increase those stats, while the first two will determine how the AI controls the characters during auto battle. However, there will be a point in the game when having some extremely high-level group will not be enough to guarantee a success in every battle. This is where the invention and specification system comes into play. The system is pretty deep, and I’ll leave the finer details to FAQ’s and strategy guides. However I will mention that what seems like a small amount of products near the beginning of the game will grow to a rather large list of products via the invention system, and this happens whether you participate or not. Of course participating has its rewards and if you invent or sign an inventor, then the items created by either you or them can be purchased at a cheaper rate. The specification system is where the game allows each gamer to create their team’s weapons how they see fit. To sum it up shortly you can take attributes from other items and place them onto to a weapon of your choice. I spent many hours creating my ultimate of ultimate weapons, which are the regular ultimate weapons with my specific tweaks, for my core group of three. Story: The story starts off fairly slow, especially after a few of the initial events. I don’t like spoiling story lines so I’ll just say that the later portion of disk one and on features quite a few plot twists that really flesh out and expand upon the somewhat slow start. This title like past SO games gives the choice on which characters you want and which you do not. On top of this there is also a system that tracks your parties feelings toward the main character through optional plot events, which is how the multiple endings in the game are controlled. I’ll leave this section short; I don’t really care for reviews that delve into the story all that much. I will say it is good, and it has quite a bit of surprises to keep you interested. My one gripe with the title would be some scenes do not match well with my actual character strengths. In one case my main character was attacked and the scene made it seem like if got hit by this attack he would die, however, I then entered a battle scene and took zero damage from this supposedly dangerous attack. In another instance the game makes a character seem like he can dodge anything, not even bullets can strike him, but as soon as the battles began he was hit multiple times by the same weapons he just dodged. Those were minor complaints, and my guess is most gamers won’t even put that much thought into it. Side Quests and Mini games: A place in the game called Gemity, which is near the beginning of the second disk, is where you’ll find majority of the mini games this game has to offer. The bunny races are pretty pointless and are randomly based for determining the winner. This beginning said its advantageous to just choose the same bunny each time, which then leads to hours of clicking one button over and over to confirm text boxes. The chess mini game is completely automated; you just choose what you think would do best against what the opponent shows on his side of the board. It is basically rock-paper-scissors on a chessboard. The battle arena mini game is the best of the mini games department. It offers the best rewards in terms of items and experience gaining opportunities. The game includes single character battles, group battles, and a ranking battle that allows you to move up fifty tiers to become the number one ranking. This is pretty much all you’ll find in terms of mini games, which is not all that much and can be completed fairly fast, save for the bunny race which would require many hours to complete even if you were cheating. Where this game really shines is in its offering of post final boss dungeons. These are for the more “hardcore” RPG fans, and most of you will probably pass on these challenges. There are three extra dungeons each offering more challenge then the final boss offered. The most difficult of these dungeons offers a chance to have a bout with some of Tri-Ace’s previous game characters, and it is these characters that will most likely provide one of the more difficult challenges RPGs in general have to offer. If you’re looking to take your RPG that extra step, then look no farther than this game, because it definitely gives you that opportunity. Difficulty: This is the same for all RPGs. The difficulty is inversely proportional to your level. In other words, if you over level up, then the game will be very easy. If you rush the game and hardly level up, then the game will be somewhat hard. For those of you who level up a lot, you’ll be able to test you skill in the bonus dungeons so it’s not a complete waste to max out your levels or build better weapons. Graphics: The game may not have the smoothest edges, or the largest polygon counts but it still has plenty of charm and great design to work past the limitations of its hardware. The character models are really well done in both the sense of visual prowess and artistic design, but there are some scenes when the lower grade models are obviously being used. The environments are huge, feature a lot of activity, and have a large amount of objects. To put it simply this title looks as though the people in it actually live there and have lives, hence the clutter of objects all over their households and such. My biggest complaint is that while on the field there are times when the enemy count is too large and the particle effects being done cause the frame rate to slow done to levels that it should never reach. An example of this is found in between two towns early on in the game, and especially later when the initial enemies are replaced with larger scale models, in which the snow effect really affects the frame rate. Actually that’s one of the only examples, but it sticks out in my mind because otherwise the game looked and ran really well. Sound: The voice acting is fairly solid, almost all the character have good or great presentations in this category. What is nice is that the character models’ expressions and the emotions portrayed in the voices match up fairly well, which makes the voice acting better in a more general sense. However, it would be a lie to say there are not at least a couple bad apples in the bunch. One of these is during the beginning of the first disk; it’s a female character that sounds like she was voice acted badly on purpose in all honesty. The second of these can be found near the end of disk one and the beginning of disk two; it’s a male character that over exaggerates every line that he has. These are two of the worst that I found while playing the game, and while their parts are minor they’re still enough to distract from the story. The music in the game is pretty well done. It’s not the kind of music you’ll be humming to later on down the road while you drive to work, but it’s also not the kind where you put the game on mute or wish that it had a custom soundtrack. Having said this it falls into a comfortably good category. The following is a minor rant from a gamer who plays mostly RPGs, which has nothing really to do with this game specifically, although does have relation to this game. Developers would it really be that difficult to have a larger selection of music for battles? It would be nice to enter a battle and not be able to hum the music before it even begins. Conclusion: + Very well done battle system will keep you wanting more. + No random battles. + The game allows for gamers to decide how deep they wish the development system to be. + Solid story unfolds more in later portions of the game. + The graphics are well done despite being on dated hardware. + Solid voice acting overall. - Why only three members on the battle field at once? - Hello, cameraman the action is over there! - Story fails to get up to speed at first. - Stu-stu-stuttering frame rates when too much action is going on while on the field. - Who in the hell gave the helium to that voice actress?
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