Its trendy right now to hate on j-rpg's, but this game is quality from start to finish.
The game design is very similar to Till the end of time, and thats not nessarily always a good thing. But there are improvements in almost every area. The story is simple and straight forward, but the charcter developement is excellent. I truly enjoyed the story right to the end and loved the cast of charcters. Ill admit there are some cliche arc types, but hey... Its Star Ocean!!! And it far from hurt the story telling. The voice acting is good but some of the voices simply dont match the charcters. And the acting seemed uninspired. FFXII for example (to make the inevitable comparision) had stellar voice actors where here, its a bit blah.
The battle system is mostly the same as the last SO, but the addition of jumping and Blindsides is awesome. The combat improvements are great and I thought it made the fighting alot more fun.
All and all this is an awesome rpg. If you hate j-rpgs theres alot here to hate, but if you love them, man are you gonna love this one!
Star Ocean games have always been solid rpg's but have always lacked the polish and shine of Final Fantasy titles. They simply havent had the production values or epic story lines to compete with FF. But this one is diffrent. This game is wicked. They cut corners here and there, you'll see it. But they delivered a great story with awesome cinamatics, next gen graphics, likeable charcters and an interesting world to explore. For all the other Star Oceans have done well, this one far excedes. Its a shame a game like this comes out at a time when money is tight and its cool to hate this type of game. But let me say it agian, this is easily the best j-rpg to hit since FFXII and fact is, I think it blows XII away! This games is awesome!