This is a great addition to the Star Ocean series, and shouldn't be passed up.
The game has a good story, and it provides good explanation of most things in this game. It is "save the world" theme, but it is not a cliche game thankfully, you will be quite surprised to some events that fold out, all in all, story is not Star Oceans weak point.
The combat is what you would expect from a Star Ocean game, which is good. The combat is in real-time, and you can only attack enemies that you have targeted, which can get to be a little frustrating, but no big deal. you attack with the X button, and you also have Killer Moves, learned as you level up, assigned to the L1 and R1 buttons (default) there are a variety of them too, at least 10 per character. Combat is smooth in this game and it won't get boring to fast.
Audio, as always, is great. RPG audio is almost always good, and this is no exception. It has the audio to match every situation, and the World-map, dungeons, battles and boss battles have awesome music.
The gameplay is good too, not tried and boring, and boy oh boy, is there a lot to explore, this game could keep anyone entertained for a month, or possibly even the whole summer. The game is also very customizable and item creation is pretty fun, there are a ton of skills to be learned, plenty of side quests, hidden bosses that are very, very, very hard.
The Graphics are great. The characters don't have the best graphics, but my god do the backgrounds rock!!! Links helped work on this game with Tri-Ace and Enix, and their work is clear, and the CGs are good too, I think this game pays a lot of attention to detail, which is good, because you can see how hard they worked to bring you these amazing backgrounds.
The Characters evolve nicely throughout the story, but, you have to recruit all of your characters, which presents a nice little challenge, ironically, you could go through the whole game with just Claude and Rena, if you do, have fun....And when you get your characters, the game does a good job of explaining their backgrounds, so by the end of the game, you can know a good amount of information of each character
All in all, Star Ocean is an engaging experience, and it will keep you hooked, I have played for about 250 hours and counting, you will play through countless times to divulge all of the secrets this game has to offer.