SquareEnix is getting back on track.
But i' must say this Star Ocean gets really addictive after a couple hours. Don't let the somewhat bad voice acting fools you at first. Well, some says the acting is bad, I would say the voices are good but the tone of voice used is really awkward. For example: the main character here is Edge Maverick, the one you'll be controlling most of the game. You might notice a lot of over reacting for nothing in what he is saying. Oftenly yelling or repeating the name of the person he's having a dialogue with. Example again: Reimi says: "You know it's sad" Edge says: "Reimi?" that kind of things. Like can't you just understand what the other is feeling about what they are saying already? Or something bad is happening and instead of being troubled by the events he sounds like he is getting a seizure by yelling while the other characters are just astonished silently.
But there's positive aspects of the voice acting as well. While at some parts of the game it feels weird as hell at others it's done very well, especially at the end - Reimi (Edge best friend-girlfriend-wannabe) is yelling at Edge to come back to safety but the way she yells really sound like a normal person would do when traumatised - about to lose beloved person thing. I was really impressed by that part. Some other characters like Lymle (15 years old char that sounds like 7 and is probably 7 - damn you game manual!) sounds annoying at first with her 'kay?(s) but it gets charming after a while when you get into the plot of the game.
The best voice in that game is the one from the same woman who did Meryl in Metal Gear Solid (the caster elf I forgot her name) and Bacchus (Robo I'd like to call him - somehow there's a cast of characters really looking alike Chrono Trigger here. A sword wielding hero (Crono)- a girl that uses bow in love with the hero (Marle)- another sword wielding seeking for revenge guy which makes some water typed magic (Frog)- a robotic one that uses ranged attacks (Robo)- a scythe carrying elf that does all element types of magic as soon as you get him (Magus)- a fire magic caster (Lucca) and a cat girls that uses her fist to attack and delivers serious damage (Ayla)
Other than the voice acting that, for me, was a let down at some place, I also realised when you encounter a battle the resolution of the graphics goes relatively blurred and edgy for no reason. In every aspect of the game the graphics are amazing / landscape are colorful , graphics are sharp and the camera angles in cutscenes are really well done, lightings and so on. But in battles, it's like going from 1080p to 480p in term of resolution. The battle scenes are edgy and pixelated / not as well rendered as the cut scenes. Still the battles are really fun tho. You just don't see time passing by when you decide to grind a little for some level ups and to get new abilities.
I finished the game in 41 hours at level 66 and I barely managed to kill the last boss, I thought at the very last second I was done and had to go to level up somewhere to be able to beat the boss cause I had 1 char standing with like 10% HP I managed to rez Edge and deliver some combo attacks with near no hp and I killed it - that was epic :P There's some boss fights that are not well design cause you got to control mainly Edge to do what's called Blindsides only if you want to hit these 2 bosses. You cannot really adopt other strategy than that cause you have to attack those bosses from behind (one of those looks really like that mechanical spider on the bridge in FF7 at the beggining of the game if you know what i'm saying) anyway...
But now the game is over there's still plenty of things to do, there's 2 secret dungeons to explore and an arena to compete in for gear. Also the max level you can reach with your characters is 255 so there's still a lot to do. In total if you're looking for at least 50% of the achievements for this game you might spend a good 60-70hours in this game.
Well worth it's price.
So PROS are:
-Battle system is awesome - you actually want to encounter to level up as there's a ton of abilities.
- Story is well written as you don't know who's the main enemy until the very end of the game which is pretty unusual.
- You can invent weapons and armor and there's ton of em but bad side about it it's the fact items you need to craft are too rare and you can't really craft something awesome if you just follow the story
- Lot of stuff to do once the game is done
- Meryl's voice is in here and personify a sexy pink elf that seduces you (heh?)
CONS are:
- Weird voice acting at some moments in the game that leaves you laughing instead of supposely crying.
- Somewhat low rez battle idk why
- When you want to explore once the game is done you have to swap in disk 2 and disk 3 to access the different places in the universe which is totally annoying. Too bad I don't have a 60 gig or 120 gig HDD to install all 3 disks (duh?)