Good story, great gameplay. Square Enix hasn't surprised me like this in quite a while.
First, the gameplay. It was just simply fun and somewhat addicting. It was fun killing enemies and not completely boring when you had to kill enemies just for the sake of leveling up. However, the game did start out hard. You're going to have to level up multiple times before you go to the next area.. or planet, if you don't, expect extremely hard enemies. Other than the difficulty, fighting any enemy was pretty fun, especially when you had multiple characters to use and combo your attacks with. The moves and magic were pretty good and well animated. My favorite thing has to be the Blindside technique, since it had a pretty cool and different animation for each character. It was also extremely helpful in some cases. There were also skill points, battle tactics for players not controlled by you, equipment, etc. Anything you'd expect in an RPG.
The graphics were pretty awesome, although some of the features for the characters were very shiny, or.. porcelain like, or something like that. But aside from that, the environmental design was outstanding. Each planet you visited was great to explore and discover its secrets. I did not find any flaw in the graphics besides some small details in the characters. The enemy design was also pretty good, some enemies made me stare in awe. But there were some enemies that just looked.. meh. The boss battles were also great, but like I said before, level up... alot, or you're sure to die at a boss.
The story.. I'm not so sure how I feel about this. Many people say the story was bad, but I don't see how the story was so bad. It was a pretty decent story, but it lacked... uniqueness. During the whole game, there weren't many parts in the story that amazed me or surprised me, only a few moments did this happen. Regardless, the story was pretty interesting and good at the most. Don't come playing this game though, expecting some uber great story or something like that. One thing that I somewhat liked but didn't like at some points, were the character interactions when traveling from one planet to another. When going to a different planet, you had to "wait" till you got there. So during this time, you were free to roam your ship and activate small cut-scenes or moments with a certain character. It was pretty interesting and entertaining at first, but sometimes it seemed completely unnecessary and boring. Not bad, but not that good either. These interactions also allow you to activate a sort of ending scene for that character depending on how many times you interact with them, so if you like this, you might want to replay the game just for the sake of this, but not very likely.
Overall, if you like RPG's, most likely you won't be disappointed playing Star Ocean. Great battle system, good story, and amazing designs and bosses and battles will leave you satisfied.