Star Ocean: A Long Overhaul
Star Ocean is a recurring series with now 4 titles to its name. And as such, it has had its ups and downs in the series so I thought I would do a quick review of all 4 titles from 1 to 4, and see how they line up.
Star Ocean: (First Departure)
Ok, considering Star Ocean 1 was never released into North America, I have only had the chance to play the re-release for the PSP. Anyway here?s the synopsis for that:
The game starts you off as a young blue haired youth named Roddick, in his small humble village with his friends Millie and Dorne. They are in fact the defenders of this village and you get to do a few small fights with them and all seems good UNTIL > > > A mysterious disease starts to spread throughout the land. Millie's father, the village healer, decides to go off and try to fight the disease. When he doesn't return, Roddick and company go off to see what happened. As it turns out, the healer was infected, and so the stalwart heroes must climb Mount Metorx, to get a special herb that cures any disease. When they reach the top, they meet a pair of people named Ronyx and Iliya. It is eventually revealed that these people are from another planet and they take Roddick and company on a unimaginable space adventure "to the great star ocean".
This game is the basic starting point for the game. As with all star oceans, it has a very basic item creation system in which MANY many items can be made, as well as the most playable characters of any star ocean. The game is also just riddled with side missions and the bonus Private actions, which raise (or lower) the bond between the main character and whoever he's talking to. This helps in battle because if a person who is close to you dies, then your power is vastly increased for a while. When the characters enter a battle, the screen blurs out and you are moved to an arena where the player must fight in real time against the enemies. All physical attacks and skills are real time, but the spells stop the flow of the battle for a bit and you get to watch the spell take effect. While helpful for getting the spell to hit, it can be annoying to break the flow of the game to watch a simple haste spell...
All in all, SO1 is a rather simple game being from an earlier generation. The story is kind of deep but still easy to understand. The battle system is rather intuitive for such an early system and is actually quite fun to play, an interesting way to make a 3D game out of 2D sprites.
Anyways, Star Ocean the Second Story / Evolution
Quick note, I did play the PS1 version a ways back but that has sunk deep into the foggy reaches of my memories so ill be citing more from the PSP remake.
The Second part of the Star Ocean is a rather different story as you can start as 2 people, either the blonde haired hero Claude, or the young blue haired maiden Rena. Both stories cross paths at many points but also diverge and change along the way. Claude's story starts him off on a mission through space with his father Ronyx, out to explore deep and unknown space. They land on a planet to investigate and find some ancient ruins. Claude is given a gun to defend himself and promptly walks a few paces and ends up being teleported to some unknown planet. Here he finds a girl being attacked by a monster (Rena) and saves her using his gun. And so the story goes on with Rena believing Claude is some chosen hero. Rena's story basically starts out with her being saved by Claude. The story doesn't change a whole lot between the two different characters but there are some noticeable changes, such as different characters being used and slightly different points of view at certain scenes.
Not a whole lot changed from first to second game play wise. The private actions make the same appearance with the guise of increasing your bond with other characters. But the change in this game is that not only do the bonds between your characters affect the battle abilities of your units, but will affect the endings as well. There are as many as 86 different endings in this game, each basically about different characters ending up either with another character or alone. As such it can really increase the re-play value if only to see a new ending or try out the story of the different character. Battle on the other hand is almost exactly the same as SO 1. The only real change is the new characters having a couple different skills. Magic still stops the game, forcing you to stop the battle and watch the spell do its magical effect, thus breaking the flow of the game and slightly infuriating the player, although it's not enough to really hate the game.
Star Ocean 2 is a simple upgrade from 1. They didn't mess with any of the stuff that was good, but they didn?t really fix most of the stuff that was bad about it. The story was improved though, and they added so many endings, so it?s defiantly worth playing.
Star Ocean till the End of Time
This Star Ocean came out for the PS2 and really changed a lot of things from the first two. While keeping a fairly similar storyline of exploring under developed planets, it did have some new twists to it that were mostly for the better.
The story starts off on a beach resort with the main character, Fayt Leingod, getting chastised by his childhood friend Sophia Esteed, for playing too many video games. After a little bit of commentary and a fairly intuitive battle tutorial, the resort ends up being invaded by some alien race and all the citizens including Fayt and Sophia are ferried out to the safety of a space ship. While the ship is trying to escape, the aliens manage to catch up and assault their transporter. Fayt and Sophia must escape in separate escape pods and are launched into deep space. Fayt eventually lands one the underdeveloped planet of Vanguard III where, after a couple small battles to help the locals, meets the tough talking Cliff Fitter. Cliff tells Fayt that the leader of his group, Quark, wants to talk to him and he takes Fayt away to go see this leader, and a great deal of adventures follow them.
Although I can't say too much more on the story without giving away to many spoilers, the story is probably the best out of all the star ocean games. It's pretty original and exciting and almost all the characters are likeable. Star Ocean 3 pretty much chopped off a lot of the elements from earlier ones that was hurting the series (you don't even have to stop the game to watch a spell being cast anymore). But for all the steps forward it made, it also gave up a few of the more interesting features of the originals. For example, you can only pair Fayt with one of the other 9 characters in the game for an alternate ending so it loses the interesting appeal of SO2 with its diverse amount of endings with so many different characters. Also, there are only 10 characters to use, and 6 of them must be used, so you are left to choose 2 out of the 4 remaining to join your party of 8. This also loses out to 1 and 2, where you could have a large party of anyone you really wanted, or a small party consisting of maybe 5 or 6 people. And finally, my biggest complaint of star ocean 3: the item creation system. The original two had the simple system of use a few materials to quickly make an item, and the higher your skill level in a certain craft, the better items you could make. In SO3, materials go out the window. Now money is the only item creation tool and boy do you usually need a lot of it. Not only that, but it also takes time to make items, and usually the player is left to simply stare at the screen and watch as the bar slowly fills up, and find out if they created anything, or just wasted 1000 fol, while cheesy 80's music plays in the background. To add a final blow, not every character can make every item, so you must hire inventors to help you by any number of means. The amount of complex work that goes into figuring out how much money must be spent using which characters for how long... really gets annoying and makes one question why they are even bothering.
But aside from that, the game really is great. The battle system is interesting and actually very fun. Every character learns a wide variety of their own fancy skills, which allow for some surprisingly epic visuals. The actual battle system is basically the same as the original two, just in full 3D. All characters have a "fury" bar at the bottom of the characters status, which when at 100 provides a shield (which deflects light attacks but can be broken by heavy attacks), and when at 0, prevents the character from doing attacks until it recharges. Battle is fast paced but still pretty easy to follow and flows together very well. You even can get bonus damage from stringing skills together, which takes a bit of planning to get done but can be very rewarding. Also, as kind of mentioned above, there are two kinds of attacks, heavy and light. Strong breaks shields and does more damage but is slower, and light quickly hits the opponent but can be deflected by opponents. Skills also can be put into these categories when you assign them, and when assigned as a heavy attack it does more damage, breaks shields, but you must use more HP or MP (depending on the skill) for this.
Star Ocean 3 was pretty much an upgrade from 1 and 2, and is probably the best game in the series. A varied and interesting story, backed by an amazing battle system and a group of different and useful characters makes this game defiantly worth trying.
Star Ocean the Last Hope
This is the latest Star Ocean game out for the Xbox 360. This game reminds me a lot of 2 actually, it's a simple change from 3, adding a few components, changing the story, but overall not really changing it much, (also the transition of hair colour for main characters is the same as 1 - 2, blue to blonde).
We open the game seeing a look back at history talking about how nuclear fallout basically destroyed the earth and so the people of earth look to space for a place to colonize. And so we turn to the hero of our story, Edge Maverick, and his childhood friend / co-worker Reimi Saionji, getting ready to enter their first space exploration mission. After a couple exposition scenes, in which we meet Edge?s best friend / rival Crowe F. Almedio who is a captain of the sister ship of Reimi and Edge's ship, the small space exploration crew launches. As they are flying through subspace, an invisible asteroid crosses their path, throwing off all the ships and forcing them to crash land. When our hero's awaken, they find themselves on an unidentified planet, and to their greater horror they are separated from all the other ships and can?t locate Crowe's. The crew unloads, and surveys the area, to find a fairly dense jungle area. After only a few minutes, the crew is assailed by a couple of enormous bugs, which are apparently immune to bullets. Edge, in a desperate bid to save Reimi and the rest of the crew, grabs a cutter (shaped very nicely like a sword) and attacks one of the beasts to find that all that exoskeleton isn't immune to a good laser blade. After this feat, the captain of their vessel tells Edge to go out and search the surrounding area and contact the other ship that landed nearby, and of course Reimi must go along too. The story on this planet continues for quite a while and eventually leads to Edge becoming a captain of his own and ordered to search nearby planets for a habitable location to colonize. As you could guess, they meet many different characters and have many adventures.
The battle system is pretty similar to Star Ocean three only changed slightly to accommodate an xbox controller, and improved graphics quality. One of the more interesting additions to Star Ocean 4 is the rush guage and blindside features, which allow the character to charge up for a small amount of time, and when targeted by the enemy, perform a back attack on them in a very visual and epic little animation. Another addition to battle is the bonus bar, which was present in 3, but was a lot less intuitive and harder to keep going than this. The bonus bar consists of a column of honey comb shaped tokens, which can be filled with different ?bonuses? if you do a special thing to earn them. The bonuses are 10% more EXP (killing enemy with a critical), 10% more Fol (killing 2 enemies at once), 1% HP/MP recovery after battle (kill using only skills), or 1 SP (whenever an extra battle is added on to the first). One final improvement that Star Ocean 4 had over three was actually returning to basics. To make you skills the most powerful, you must use SP to power them up, whereas in 3 one simply levelled up a skill by using it in battle. Now usually I would say the system used in 3 is better but not in this case. While one must only level up a skill 10 times to master it in both games, it takes many thousands of times to actually level up skills in SO3, and only a easy to obtain amount of SP in SO4.
Aside from battle, the basic out of battle gamely is very similar. The only real improvement is the item creation system, which got out of that damned annoying item creation time to allow for the old way of gathering materials for items. They did throw in a fairly pointless recipe creation section, but it is pretty quick and easy to do; not a huge annoyance. Oh and you can ride pink energizer bunnies, which.... IS DAMN AWESOME.
So overall Star Ocean 4 is a hit and miss kind of game. The battle is only an improvement, but the story is a bit poorly told. It seems that Square decided to sell originality in place of marketability. Whatever, the story is still playable, and there is a lot worse than Star Ocean, the Last Hope, just not expect to be overly amazed. The characters aren't a very great design either, and most are held back by pretty bad voice acting as well (Be warned: Sarah = probably the most annoying voice to hit a modern consol), but that's balanced by the fact that you can ride a pink furry bunny..... As I wrap up this review of SO4, ill finally just point out that if you do not see who the final boss is going to be by half way through the second disk, then seriously you shouldn't be playing this game.
So that pretty much sums up the series that is Star Ocean. It's a rather interesting game series, and if they took all the good parts out of each individual game and put them together into a Star Ocean 5, it would turn into a great gaming experience. But the world doesn't work like that, and I'm pretty sure if they did remake this game into a 5th instalment, then it would be rather poorly done and wouldn't live up to my high expectations. As such, I hope they kill the series here and just leave us with a few good memories.
P.S: One of the funniest things about this series is how ridiculous the reasons are for the main character to keep using a sword instead of a gun. They seem to get less credible as the games go on. Take a look:
SO1: Roddick is from an underdeveloped planet so guns aren't readily available...
SO2: Claude has a gun in the beginning but it breaks and must use a sword, but for some reason can't pick up a gun when they return to normal civilization.
SO3: Fayt keeps whining about that damn UP3, so he can't bring an advanced weapon to an underdeveloped planet, as such he won't touch the damn thing...
SO4: Because the first bugs where immune to bullets, he can't use a gun EVER AGAIN... even against soft meaty humans.... I can understand for the first planet but after that why didn't he bring both?
Star Ocean is a recurring series with now 4 titles to its name. And as such, it has had its ups and downs in the series so I thought I would do a quick review of all 4 titles from 1 to 4, and see how they line up.
Star Ocean: (First Departure)
Ok, considering Star Ocean 1 was never released into North America, I have only had the chance to play the re-release for the PSP. Anyway here?s the synopsis for that:
The game starts you off as a young blue haired youth named Roddick, in his small humble village with his friends Millie and Dorne. They are in fact the defenders of this village and you get to do a few small fights with them and all seems good UNTIL > > > A mysterious disease starts to spread throughout the land. Millie's father, the village healer, decides to go off and try to fight the disease. When he doesn't return, Roddick and company go off to see what happened. As it turns out, the healer was infected, and so the stalwart heroes must climb Mount Metorx, to get a special herb that cures any disease. When they reach the top, they meet a pair of people named Ronyx and Iliya. It is eventually revealed that these people are from another planet and they take Roddick and company on a unimaginable space adventure "to the great star ocean".
This game is the basic starting point for the game. As with all star oceans, it has a very basic item creation system in which MANY many items can be made, as well as the most playable characters of any star ocean. The game is also just riddled with side missions and the bonus Private actions, which raise (or lower) the bond between the main character and whoever he's talking to. This helps in battle because if a person who is close to you dies, then your power is vastly increased for a while. When the characters enter a battle, the screen blurs out and you are moved to an arena where the player must fight in real time against the enemies. All physical attacks and skills are real time, but the spells stop the flow of the battle for a bit and you get to watch the spell take effect. While helpful for getting the spell to hit, it can be annoying to break the flow of the game to watch a simple haste spell...
All in all, SO1 is a rather simple game being from an earlier generation. The story is kind of deep but still easy to understand. The battle system is rather intuitive for such an early system and is actually quite fun to play, an interesting way to make a 3D game out of 2D sprites.
Anyways, Star Ocean the Second Story / Evolution
Quick note, I did play the PS1 version a ways back but that has sunk deep into the foggy reaches of my memories so ill be citing more from the PSP remake.
The Second part of the Star Ocean is a rather different story as you can start as 2 people, either the blonde haired hero Claude, or the young blue haired maiden Rena. Both stories cross paths at many points but also diverge and change along the way. Claude's story starts him off on a mission through space with his father Ronyx, out to explore deep and unknown space. They land on a planet to investigate and find some ancient ruins. Claude is given a gun to defend himself and promptly walks a few paces and ends up being teleported to some unknown planet. Here he finds a girl being attacked by a monster (Rena) and saves her using his gun. And so the story goes on with Rena believing Claude is some chosen hero. Rena's story basically starts out with her being saved by Claude. The story doesn't change a whole lot between the two different characters but there are some noticeable changes, such as different characters being used and slightly different points of view at certain scenes.
Not a whole lot changed from first to second game play wise. The private actions make the same appearance with the guise of increasing your bond with other characters. But the change in this game is that not only do the bonds between your characters affect the battle abilities of your units, but will affect the endings as well. There are as many as 86 different endings in this game, each basically about different characters ending up either with another character or alone. As such it can really increase the re-play value if only to see a new ending or try out the story of the different character. Battle on the other hand is almost exactly the same as SO 1. The only real change is the new characters having a couple different skills. Magic still stops the game, forcing you to stop the battle and watch the spell do its magical effect, thus breaking the flow of the game and slightly infuriating the player, although it's not enough to really hate the game.
Star Ocean 2 is a simple upgrade from 1. They didn't mess with any of the stuff that was good, but they didn?t really fix most of the stuff that was bad about it. The story was improved though, and they added so many endings, so it?s defiantly worth playing.
Star Ocean till the End of Time
This Star Ocean came out for the PS2 and really changed a lot of things from the first two. While keeping a fairly similar storyline of exploring under developed planets, it did have some new twists to it that were mostly for the better.
The story starts off on a beach resort with the main character, Fayt Leingod, getting chastised by his childhood friend Sophia Esteed, for playing too many video games. After a little bit of commentary and a fairly intuitive battle tutorial, the resort ends up being invaded by some alien race and all the citizens including Fayt and Sophia are ferried out to the safety of a space ship. While the ship is trying to escape, the aliens manage to catch up and assault their transporter. Fayt and Sophia must escape in separate escape pods and are launched into deep space. Fayt eventually lands one the underdeveloped planet of Vanguard III where, after a couple small battles to help the locals, meets the tough talking Cliff Fitter. Cliff tells Fayt that the leader of his group, Quark, wants to talk to him and he takes Fayt away to go see this leader, and a great deal of adventures follow them.
Although I can't say too much more on the story without giving away to many spoilers, the story is probably the best out of all the star ocean games. It's pretty original and exciting and almost all the characters are likeable. Star Ocean 3 pretty much chopped off a lot of the elements from earlier ones that was hurting the series (you don't even have to stop the game to watch a spell being cast anymore). But for all the steps forward it made, it also gave up a few of the more interesting features of the originals. For example, you can only pair Fayt with one of the other 9 characters in the game for an alternate ending so it loses the interesting appeal of SO2 with its diverse amount of endings with so many different characters. Also, there are only 10 characters to use, and 6 of them must be used, so you are left to choose 2 out of the 4 remaining to join your party of 8. This also loses out to 1 and 2, where you could have a large party of anyone you really wanted, or a small party consisting of maybe 5 or 6 people. And finally, my biggest complaint of star ocean 3: the item creation system. The original two had the simple system of use a few materials to quickly make an item, and the higher your skill level in a certain craft, the better items you could make. In SO3, materials go out the window. Now money is the only item creation tool and boy do you usually need a lot of it. Not only that, but it also takes time to make items, and usually the player is left to simply stare at the screen and watch as the bar slowly fills up, and find out if they created anything, or just wasted 1000 fol, while cheesy 80's music plays in the background. To add a final blow, not every character can make every item, so you must hire inventors to help you by any number of means. The amount of complex work that goes into figuring out how much money must be spent using which characters for how long... really gets annoying and makes one question why they are even bothering.
But aside from that, the game really is great. The battle system is interesting and actually very fun. Every character learns a wide variety of their own fancy skills, which allow for some surprisingly epic visuals. The actual battle system is basically the same as the original two, just in full 3D. All characters have a "fury" bar at the bottom of the characters status, which when at 100 provides a shield (which deflects light attacks but can be broken by heavy attacks), and when at 0, prevents the character from doing attacks until it recharges. Battle is fast paced but still pretty easy to follow and flows together very well. You even can get bonus damage from stringing skills together, which takes a bit of planning to get done but can be very rewarding. Also, as kind of mentioned above, there are two kinds of attacks, heavy and light. Strong breaks shields and does more damage but is slower, and light quickly hits the opponent but can be deflected by opponents. Skills also can be put into these categories when you assign them, and when assigned as a heavy attack it does more damage, breaks shields, but you must use more HP or MP (depending on the skill) for this.
Star Ocean 3 was pretty much an upgrade from 1 and 2, and is probably the best game in the series. A varied and interesting story, backed by an amazing battle system and a group of different and useful characters makes this game defiantly worth trying.
Star Ocean the Last Hope
This is the latest Star Ocean game out for the Xbox 360. This game reminds me a lot of 2 actually, it's a simple change from 3, adding a few components, changing the story, but overall not really changing it much, (also the transition of hair colour for main characters is the same as 1 - 2, blue to blonde).
We open the game seeing a look back at history talking about how nuclear fallout basically destroyed the earth and so the people of earth look to space for a place to colonize. And so we turn to the hero of our story, Edge Maverick, and his childhood friend / co-worker Reimi Saionji, getting ready to enter their first space exploration mission. After a couple exposition scenes, in which we meet Edge?s best friend / rival Crowe F. Almedio who is a captain of the sister ship of Reimi and Edge's ship, the small space exploration crew launches. As they are flying through subspace, an invisible asteroid crosses their path, throwing off all the ships and forcing them to crash land. When our hero's awaken, they find themselves on an unidentified planet, and to their greater horror they are separated from all the other ships and can?t locate Crowe's. The crew unloads, and surveys the area, to find a fairly dense jungle area. After only a few minutes, the crew is assailed by a couple of enormous bugs, which are apparently immune to bullets. Edge, in a desperate bid to save Reimi and the rest of the crew, grabs a cutter (shaped very nicely like a sword) and attacks one of the beasts to find that all that exoskeleton isn't immune to a good laser blade. After this feat, the captain of their vessel tells Edge to go out and search the surrounding area and contact the other ship that landed nearby, and of course Reimi must go along too. The story on this planet continues for quite a while and eventually leads to Edge becoming a captain of his own and ordered to search nearby planets for a habitable location to colonize. As you could guess, they meet many different characters and have many adventures.
The battle system is pretty similar to Star Ocean three only changed slightly to accommodate an xbox controller, and improved graphics quality. One of the more interesting additions to Star Ocean 4 is the rush guage and blindside features, which allow the character to charge up for a small amount of time, and when targeted by the enemy, perform a back attack on them in a very visual and epic little animation. Another addition to battle is the bonus bar, which was present in 3, but was a lot less intuitive and harder to keep going than this. The bonus bar consists of a column of honey comb shaped tokens, which can be filled with different ?bonuses? if you do a special thing to earn them. The bonuses are 10% more EXP (killing enemy with a critical), 10% more Fol (killing 2 enemies at once), 1% HP/MP recovery after battle (kill using only skills), or 1 SP (whenever an extra battle is added on to the first). One final improvement that Star Ocean 4 had over three was actually returning to basics. To make you skills the most powerful, you must use SP to power them up, whereas in 3 one simply levelled up a skill by using it in battle. Now usually I would say the system used in 3 is better but not in this case. While one must only level up a skill 10 times to master it in both games, it takes many thousands of times to actually level up skills in SO3, and only a easy to obtain amount of SP in SO4.
Aside from battle, the basic out of battle gamely is very similar. The only real improvement is the item creation system, which got out of that damned annoying item creation time to allow for the old way of gathering materials for items. They did throw in a fairly pointless recipe creation section, but it is pretty quick and easy to do; not a huge annoyance. Oh and you can ride pink energizer bunnies, which.... IS DAMN AWESOME.
So overall Star Ocean 4 is a hit and miss kind of game. The battle is only an improvement, but the story is a bit poorly told. It seems that Square decided to sell originality in place of marketability. Whatever, the story is still playable, and there is a lot worse than Star Ocean, the Last Hope, just not expect to be overly amazed. The characters aren't a very great design either, and most are held back by pretty bad voice acting as well (Be warned: Sarah = probably the most annoying voice to hit a modern consol), but that's balanced by the fact that you can ride a pink furry bunny..... As I wrap up this review of SO4, ill finally just point out that if you do not see who the final boss is going to be by half way through the second disk, then seriously you shouldn't be playing this game.
So that pretty much sums up the series that is Star Ocean. It's a rather interesting game series, and if they took all the good parts out of each individual game and put them together into a Star Ocean 5, it would turn into a great gaming experience. But the world doesn't work like that, and I'm pretty sure if they did remake this game into a 5th instalment, then it would be rather poorly done and wouldn't live up to my high expectations. As such, I hope they kill the series here and just leave us with a few good memories.
P.S: One of the funniest things about this series is how ridiculous the reasons are for the main character to keep using a sword instead of a gun. They seem to get less credible as the games go on. Take a look:
SO1: Roddick is from an underdeveloped planet so guns aren't readily available...
SO2: Claude has a gun in the beginning but it breaks and must use a sword, but for some reason can't pick up a gun when they return to normal civilization.
SO3: Fayt keeps whining about that damn UP3, so he can't bring an advanced weapon to an underdeveloped planet, as such he won't touch the damn thing...
SO4: Because the first bugs where immune to bullets, he can't use a gun EVER AGAIN... even against soft meaty humans.... I can understand for the first planet but after that why didn't he bring both?
