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Finally. This game was mostly awful, and just plain retarded at points.

I was thinking about putting it down at around 30 hours, but I decided there couldn't be much left, so I stuck with it. Little did I know that it would not be until another 30 hours later that I would be wrapping up the game. Usually, my biggest complaint is that RPGs nowadays are too short, but this one was way too long. It really just felt like a huge waste of time. I would not recommend this game to anyone.

Star Ocean

First, the story doesn't pick up until about 80% of the way through the game, and even when it does, it's still really stupid, predictable, and cliche. The voice acting and cut scene presentation are also the worst I have ever seen in a modern RPG. Characters (who look like they belong on the PSX) take very long pauses between sentences, and often have no mouth movement to go along with their terrible delivery of the dialogue. There's no music in the background during most of these voice scenes, upping the boring level from yawning to napping. You also can't skip the cut scenes by default. The first random one that you come across in the game lasts for about 15 minutes and it has nothing to do with anything. I play RPGs for rich stories that I can't wait to get more of. But Star Ocean was just tedious. I am so glad that it's over.

The gameplay does get more interesting in the later part of the game, but it's really not worth the 45 hours it'll take to get there. There's also this bad mechanic where you can simply walk past normal enemies in any dungeon, which seems convenient, until 5 dungeons later you get to a boss that utterly destroys you because you're 10 levels below where you should be. Then, you'll be purposefully bumping into those enemies you avoided just to get high enough to beat the boss. It's an awkward, lurching way to set up an RPG.

I picked up Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (which is the third installment of the series) because I loved Star Ocean: The Second Story so much. It was one of my favorite PSX RPGs. It had a really cool visual style, engaging story, good characters, and a great leveling/combat system. Till the End of Time retained none of that. Like I said before, I'm just happy that I'm done with it. Finally.

Comments

says

I love Star Ocean! I bought it because I'm huge on the Final Fantasy series of games and when I irst saw this one, it really caught me off gaurd. I bought the game like in late 2004 and its to this day a game that I can play and actually enjoy. I was not able to join the fanatic list of game players who were able to join the series from game one, but picking up with this one, I can say that I really do enjoy it a lot. Curently I have restarted playing the game as I have yet to beat it and rather start over then continue after not playing it for so long but the graphics, the story, very enjoyable. Square-Enix always delivers and I am a fan 'Till the End of Time!' =D

(post author) says

I have to sya the point where I really disagree with you is the story. It is the driving part of any RPG, and I think that both in concept and execution it is where Star Ocean: Till the End of Time fails. As for concept, it sets itself up to be this engaging space odyssey, but just strands you on a boring planet for the majority of the game. With execution, as I stated above, the presentation of the story was actually terrible - to repeat myself: the characters were drawn and animated poorly, the voice acting was bad and unnatural, and cut scenes that had many blank pauses and had no background music could not be skipped without going into the options screen beforehand. If you can put up with all of that and still claim that this game has a story that makes it worth playing, I applaud you, but I however, cannot. If you're looking for a truly deep story-driven RPG on the PS2 that actually pulls off being a space odyssey, go pick up Xenosaga. It's light years ahead of this game.