Rogue Galaxy is a PS2 rpg where you play as Jaster, a random guy who is picked up by space pirates and thereafter becomes one. The game is based around his journey as the "Desert Claw" to recruit a party whilst finding some pirate booty. In this review I will tell you more about the game concerning aesthetics and game play.
(Aesthetics)
Story: If you have read other reviews of Rogue Galaxy, then it's clear concerning plot that this game very much resembles Star Wars from the get go. Orphaned boy on a desert planet in the middle of a galactic space war? A small garbage-can-like robot and a tall quirky polite robot? Jack Sparrow in role of Han Solo? The list goes on. In fact, it was so painfully obvious what the game was like in the beginning that I was wondering what I actually spooled my money on. However, and most thankfully, the story diverts off of the course of that specific plot and takes on a life of its own not too long after leaving Planet Rosa. From there it follows the classic rpg guide of 'go to planet, complete quest, move to next planet.' and so on. The actual story was watered down in parts, but overall pleasant to deal with.
Characters: The characters of Rogue Galaxy are your usual mishmash of colorful people, most being classic/cliche and the rest being on the edge of weird. As the game progresses, each main character has their own unique subplot to keep them from being too 2d.
Music: It was okay; it could have been far worse, but it was no masterpiece. Most tunes consist of a repeated five note harmony and a melody improvised over it; it's something that a teenager could write. Every piece of music in the game existed only for towns, dungeons, and repeats of that voice composition you hear in the opening theme. There were no major character melodies and no real mood melodies. Nothing was really memorable.
Design: The art of the main characters and cut-scenes was a gem in the game. It reminded me of certain CG Canadian cartoons in terms of style. However everything else lacked. There was very little variation in the looks of townsfolk, and there was even less variation in monsters you fought. It all dwindles down to fighting the same monsters with marginally different color schemes and talking to the same people with different names. The towns were nice and different per planet, but when you're walking around them, the art becomes repeated and tedious.
Voices: They were tolerable to an extent. Each character talks openly while you play the game to tell you where you are, where you're supposed to be going, and useless information. This is good on paper, but after a certain amount of hours put into the game, you seriously want certain characters to shut up. I have switched characters for the purpose of not having to listen to their voice repeating the same garbage. Jupis is by far the worst voice in the game, however his dialogue is the most colorful later on.
(Game Play)
Fighting: You fight with a selected three of several characters. Jaster is permanently in your party and cannot be changed out at all. The battles basically come down to hitting the X button repeatedly until the enemy falls or opening the menu to use an ability. You also have a button to jump, a button to defend, and a button to shoot a gun, but you'll mostly be either mashing X or using your abilities*. During the game, excluding some bosses, most enemies have a certain approach: some you simply swing at, some you jump and swing at, some you charge (hold down X) and swing at, and others have a barrier you have to shoot down before you can swing at them**. Since you're attacked every five feet, you can become quite annoyed when an enemy has a barrier or you have to jump to hit them.
*Abilities: The abilities (or special moves/magic attacks) of the game are in actuality the whole of the fighting. They make the fighting so easy that you can breeze through attacks in a matter of ten or less seconds. There are some special abilities that use all three characters in the fight, but since some single-character abilities (like Jaster's "Desert Slash" or Deego's howl attack) are so godly that they take out all enemies in one strike, there's no point in using the amped up three-character ones. Each ability has a short animation (that you can thankfully skip), and half of the time the animation isn't worth watching. For example: there is a special ability with Jaster and Kisala where their expressed love for one another kills the enemies. Who on earth would want to watch that repeatedly every time they battle?
**A Note on Barriers and Guns: There is only one special gun in the game that shoots out barriers in front of certain monsters that I'm presently aware of. The gun is all out useless otherwise and there are barrier monsters put into some levels with such voracity that I honestly felt like they were some punishment. You can't get past them without shooting down the barrier, and you can't shoot down the barrier without going through two or three sub menus during the fight to get the barrier gun. You then have to re-equip your other, more useful gun if you ever hope to get exp on it at the end of the battle.
Items: The items were used for many things in the game, from assisting your characters in battle to two or three mini games. They give you enough space to put everything, so you never have to worry about cleaning your inventory. The downside to the items is that every time you collect the limit to one, and a monster drops that item, the menu is opened at the end of the battle and you're asked if you want to keep the item. This is, once again, a great idea on paper. But after a while - especially towards the end - I felt like someone hated me when the menu opened itself at the end of every single battle and antagonized me about some antidote I didn't care about.
Dungeons: Aside from maybe Planet Juraika, the dungeons were long, repeated, and extremely tedious. The atmosphere is great when you enter each one, I definitely knew I was in a jungle when I was put on a jungle planet. The monsters in each dungeon were built for their individual correct environments, so felt fitting. However after you walked past the same repeated lava pit or go under the fifteenth identical arch, you get the feeling that they only made these dungeons longer because if they didn't, the game would be very short. In lieu of this, they added small games to make you want to fight so many of one enemy, or collect so many of one dropped item, so in most cases you forget how ridiculously long and boring your quest from point A to point B was.
Mini-Games: This is, to me, the life of the game. There are countless mini-games to play while you quest around from planet to planet, and at one point I wanted control of the ship again so I could go back and complete one of them. Most are small ones consisting of killing an enemy N'th times to get a bounty reward to leveling up your weapons by feeding them to a frog in your backpack. Two major mini-games are "Factory" and "Insectron". Factory is menu accessible, where you get information for blueprints from random people in town. From there you put together large pieces of equipment and random items from your journey to build better items, weapons, and junk. Insectron is a mini-game much like Pokemon, where you collect bugs, feed them items in your bag, and go to a certain planet to enter them into a tournament. The Insectron tournaments play like chess: you make one of five bugs a king and try to kill the other member's king to win.
(Case in Point)
Overall, I believe Rogue Galaxy is a nice enough game to have in your collection if you like rpgs and own a PS2. While there are some bad and annoying aspects to the game, it doesn't outdo the general fun you would have questing around space, fighting monsters, and playing mini-games. The game is short enough to complete in roughly two to three weeks if you play nonstop, and charming enough to keep you involved so you wont put it down. This is definitely not a game to take too seriously. While it's a balanced game in general, I really wish they would have expanded on the design of the dungeons as well as gave the game an option to be much harder, but you can't have everything. If you find it on the shelves at a reduced price, pick it up.
[And if you're one of those rpg pirate fanatics who only want to play the best of the best, then skip this game and go get Skies of Arcadia for the Gamecube.]
(Aesthetics)
Story: If you have read other reviews of Rogue Galaxy, then it's clear concerning plot that this game very much resembles Star Wars from the get go. Orphaned boy on a desert planet in the middle of a galactic space war? A small garbage-can-like robot and a tall quirky polite robot? Jack Sparrow in role of Han Solo? The list goes on. In fact, it was so painfully obvious what the game was like in the beginning that I was wondering what I actually spooled my money on. However, and most thankfully, the story diverts off of the course of that specific plot and takes on a life of its own not too long after leaving Planet Rosa. From there it follows the classic rpg guide of 'go to planet, complete quest, move to next planet.' and so on. The actual story was watered down in parts, but overall pleasant to deal with.
Characters: The characters of Rogue Galaxy are your usual mishmash of colorful people, most being classic/cliche and the rest being on the edge of weird. As the game progresses, each main character has their own unique subplot to keep them from being too 2d.
Music: It was okay; it could have been far worse, but it was no masterpiece. Most tunes consist of a repeated five note harmony and a melody improvised over it; it's something that a teenager could write. Every piece of music in the game existed only for towns, dungeons, and repeats of that voice composition you hear in the opening theme. There were no major character melodies and no real mood melodies. Nothing was really memorable.
Design: The art of the main characters and cut-scenes was a gem in the game. It reminded me of certain CG Canadian cartoons in terms of style. However everything else lacked. There was very little variation in the looks of townsfolk, and there was even less variation in monsters you fought. It all dwindles down to fighting the same monsters with marginally different color schemes and talking to the same people with different names. The towns were nice and different per planet, but when you're walking around them, the art becomes repeated and tedious.
Voices: They were tolerable to an extent. Each character talks openly while you play the game to tell you where you are, where you're supposed to be going, and useless information. This is good on paper, but after a certain amount of hours put into the game, you seriously want certain characters to shut up. I have switched characters for the purpose of not having to listen to their voice repeating the same garbage. Jupis is by far the worst voice in the game, however his dialogue is the most colorful later on.
(Game Play)
Fighting: You fight with a selected three of several characters. Jaster is permanently in your party and cannot be changed out at all. The battles basically come down to hitting the X button repeatedly until the enemy falls or opening the menu to use an ability. You also have a button to jump, a button to defend, and a button to shoot a gun, but you'll mostly be either mashing X or using your abilities*. During the game, excluding some bosses, most enemies have a certain approach: some you simply swing at, some you jump and swing at, some you charge (hold down X) and swing at, and others have a barrier you have to shoot down before you can swing at them**. Since you're attacked every five feet, you can become quite annoyed when an enemy has a barrier or you have to jump to hit them.
*Abilities: The abilities (or special moves/magic attacks) of the game are in actuality the whole of the fighting. They make the fighting so easy that you can breeze through attacks in a matter of ten or less seconds. There are some special abilities that use all three characters in the fight, but since some single-character abilities (like Jaster's "Desert Slash" or Deego's howl attack) are so godly that they take out all enemies in one strike, there's no point in using the amped up three-character ones. Each ability has a short animation (that you can thankfully skip), and half of the time the animation isn't worth watching. For example: there is a special ability with Jaster and Kisala where their expressed love for one another kills the enemies. Who on earth would want to watch that repeatedly every time they battle?
**A Note on Barriers and Guns: There is only one special gun in the game that shoots out barriers in front of certain monsters that I'm presently aware of. The gun is all out useless otherwise and there are barrier monsters put into some levels with such voracity that I honestly felt like they were some punishment. You can't get past them without shooting down the barrier, and you can't shoot down the barrier without going through two or three sub menus during the fight to get the barrier gun. You then have to re-equip your other, more useful gun if you ever hope to get exp on it at the end of the battle.
Items: The items were used for many things in the game, from assisting your characters in battle to two or three mini games. They give you enough space to put everything, so you never have to worry about cleaning your inventory. The downside to the items is that every time you collect the limit to one, and a monster drops that item, the menu is opened at the end of the battle and you're asked if you want to keep the item. This is, once again, a great idea on paper. But after a while - especially towards the end - I felt like someone hated me when the menu opened itself at the end of every single battle and antagonized me about some antidote I didn't care about.
Dungeons: Aside from maybe Planet Juraika, the dungeons were long, repeated, and extremely tedious. The atmosphere is great when you enter each one, I definitely knew I was in a jungle when I was put on a jungle planet. The monsters in each dungeon were built for their individual correct environments, so felt fitting. However after you walked past the same repeated lava pit or go under the fifteenth identical arch, you get the feeling that they only made these dungeons longer because if they didn't, the game would be very short. In lieu of this, they added small games to make you want to fight so many of one enemy, or collect so many of one dropped item, so in most cases you forget how ridiculously long and boring your quest from point A to point B was.
Mini-Games: This is, to me, the life of the game. There are countless mini-games to play while you quest around from planet to planet, and at one point I wanted control of the ship again so I could go back and complete one of them. Most are small ones consisting of killing an enemy N'th times to get a bounty reward to leveling up your weapons by feeding them to a frog in your backpack. Two major mini-games are "Factory" and "Insectron". Factory is menu accessible, where you get information for blueprints from random people in town. From there you put together large pieces of equipment and random items from your journey to build better items, weapons, and junk. Insectron is a mini-game much like Pokemon, where you collect bugs, feed them items in your bag, and go to a certain planet to enter them into a tournament. The Insectron tournaments play like chess: you make one of five bugs a king and try to kill the other member's king to win.
(Case in Point)
Overall, I believe Rogue Galaxy is a nice enough game to have in your collection if you like rpgs and own a PS2. While there are some bad and annoying aspects to the game, it doesn't outdo the general fun you would have questing around space, fighting monsters, and playing mini-games. The game is short enough to complete in roughly two to three weeks if you play nonstop, and charming enough to keep you involved so you wont put it down. This is definitely not a game to take too seriously. While it's a balanced game in general, I really wish they would have expanded on the design of the dungeons as well as gave the game an option to be much harder, but you can't have everything. If you find it on the shelves at a reduced price, pick it up.
[And if you're one of those rpg pirate fanatics who only want to play the best of the best, then skip this game and go get Skies of Arcadia for the Gamecube.]
