Star Ocean: The Divine Force (2022)

Going into this knowing its gonna be crap.

But Star oceans feel so cozy to me.

I love the sci-fi meets fantasy

And I've been playing them so long they feel cozy

(And if its even a % better than the last one I see that as a win b/C.... the last one was pretty dire....) from memory in the last one you don't leave the planet for 90% of the game, instead the world's blandest cast climb up and down mountains

Played as Raymond and ended up with the Malkyia ending. I was hoping for the Marielle ending, and after watching all the endings on YouTube, that was probably the best one. But Malkyia's was totally fine.

The guy who voices Kazuma Kiryu was JJ in this and I could not help but imagine this space samurai as a noble yakuza. His voice is too ingrained in my head for him to be anyone else.

Oh, and the endings I watched on YouTube were with the English Dub and ooooh boy do I not regret switching to Jap voices. Some of those casting choices just made no sense. And the translation did not get better. Laeticia is probably the worst offender. In Jap she's formal and polite, but speaks perfectly normal Japanese. But as is the trend, in English she speaks like she was plucked out of a Shakespearean play or something. So over the top to the point it's obnoxious.

I don't play many JRPGs and this is my first Star Ocean game. I liked the mix of fantasy and SciFi. The large world is fun to explore. The each of the characters are individually well defined, even if some of the voice acting is obnoxious.

The story is fine for this type of game. The side questing is pointless but the main quest is okay other then some unnecessary running back and forth between locations.

There are some interesting leveling up mechanics that took me a while to learn, but I often didn't need them at all.

The biggest issue is the pacing. The game seems designed for you to run the world as fast as possible, the battles are a quick mess of effects, and then you are slowed down by drawn out extended cut scenes. You can't speed through and quickly read the text of the cut scenes. You either have to listen to the entire voice conversation or skip it entirely.

Hmm, at the beginning this game was really attracting me, both for the gameplay and also for the story, but after a while it became very boring....

Why? Well simply because of the oversized maps, the game forces you to take VERY LONG WAYS to get from point A to point B, just to see a cutscene.... And then you have to start all over again for another cutscene...

In short, the game is really full of cutscenes, I repeat cutscenes, because I saw more cutscenes than gameplay.

If I wanted to watch all these cutscenes, I would have watched a good anime or movie.

In the end the story didn't even interest me that much, I found it boring.

Too bad, the characters are well done, the skills, the moves, just as good.

But in the end I was also in a hurry to want to finish it right away and then discard it. Because it was too boring. Amen.