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If there is ever a sign that a game has probably not had a sufficient amount of time to cook in the oven of quality production, being given barely a year of development time from the money hemorrhaging Square Enix is definitely up there. And if you’ve been following along with it you’ll have seen that the reception for the new Star Ocean game has been...eh, not great. While it hasn’t been critically panned or anything, the general consensus seems to be the final product has turned out rather ho-hum at best. So being the apparent attention-seeking hipster I am, do I think Star Ocean 5 is indeed as mediocre as the masses seem to think it is? Well if I’m gonna be honest...personally...these critics? They’ve been way to freaking nice.
Star Ocean Integrity & Faithlessness is really bad.
Where do I even begin. Well being a modern Square Enix RPG, let’s dump on the plot for a bit. The story centers around a young swordsman & his childhood lady friend who, while trying to request help to protect their hometown from a group of raiders, stumble across a mysterious amnesic little girl with mysterious special powers being chased by a bunch of well dressed hooligans. They then inexplicably decide to help this girl find her parents, as they discover a much larger world threatening plot and I’m getting bored just describing this.
The common issue with many Square Enix RPG stories up to know have been the fact they they’ve just gotten so needlessly convoluted. With that in mind, Star Ocean 5’s plot is surprisingly really straightforward. In fact it’s TOO straightforward. Almost immediately the game starts throwing a millions cliche plot points at you all within the span of the first hour or so. Bland heroes from a humble happy town, nations at war with intricate politics An inexplicably overpowered little girl with an evil mysterious organization after he, and keep in mind this is all before the game turns into Star Trek First Contact just a few hours later. Normally I’d applauded a game that doesn’t mess around and gets right to the meat of the story, but the problem is that Star Ocean’s pacing is so sporadic that it never gives its characters or the player enough time to let anything sink in or process their new information before shooing them off to the next town or dungeon, as if they’re just as eager to get the game over with as quickly as I was.
lost count of the number of times in Star Ocean I would arrive at a town or city only to have the characters go “well here’s some pointless backstory about this place we’re at now. Oh, but our princess/mcguffin seems to be in another castle, let’s mosey onto the next dungeon.” This is what I mean by sporadic pacing. Even when they game inexplicably throws scene of melodrama at you, it has no impact because it comes out of nowhere without any prior proper set up.
That and the characters are about as interesting as a stack of rice cakes.
Even ignoring the fact that all the character designs are as attractive as butt and lack any cohesive art direction, the biggest downside of the sporadically paced plot is that none of the characters are ever given the time needed to be fleshed out. Everyone gets little more than a single sentence description for their character introduction before joining the party and nobody ever develops much beyond that, leaving us with a cast that’s as stale & cardboard-like at the end of the plot as they are at the beginning.
It might have helped things if they had bothered to get together a decent localization team. If X-Seed has proved anything it’s that even a tired formula can be given some life and personality under the right set of translators. Unfortunately good localization have never been at the top of Square Enix’s priority list, and the English translation and dub is just as bad as you’d expect from them at this point. And it’s a real shame too, because this is is a really talented bunch of voice actors they’ve got here. Crispin Freeman could voice an Oogielove with dialogue written by George Lucas and still sound badass, and they somehow even managed to make him sound like a dullard. Granted this is the same series that in the last game somehow managed to find some way to make Mathew Mercer & Laura Bailey insufferably grating, so I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, but it just makes spending time with this motley crew of rice cakes even more in groan inducing.
Even the gameplay is little more than a poor-man’s watered down Tales combat system. Battles happen in real time with you using a combination of light & strong attacks and blocking in a pseudo-rock-paper-scissors formula to fight enemies. The problem is that in battle your entire party joins the fight, and everything becomes so chaotic and mindless that it is literally impossible to tell what on earth is happening more than half the time. This means you can’t play in any meaningful tactical way, as you are hardly able to see when the enemy is prepare to use a specific kind of attack or block so you can respond appropriately within the given amount of time. And the whole thing ends up boiling down to good old fashioned button mashing.
The only thing that doesn’t completely suck is the “Role” system. This allows you to set each character with specific roles and priorities in combat that will modify their behavior and stats so you can don’t have to worry about constantly micromanaging each battle. In theory it works pretty well, the only problem is that the AI has about as much common sense as the characters as written. In other words, the AI is dumb as balls and doesn’t seems to understand that when an enemy is firing a space gun at you, the best course of action is probably not to just stand thinking about how much you’d rather be playing God Eater Resurrection right now, (as much as I can relate to that sentiment.)
The more I think about it, the more I realize that there isn’t really a single part of the game that I actually like. I think the biggest reason Star Ocean 5 fails as hard as it does is because the every aspect of the game is so horrendously unpolished. I typically hate using terms like this because no one but the developers can obviously say whether or not this was really the case, but the positively reeks of being a slapped together cash-in on the Star Ocean title. And while I can’t prove this, I think the obviously cobbled together “story” the watered down combat the poor-production values, and most glaring eye raiser, the fact that the game was announced in development barely a year ago, from Square Enix, the company notorious for announcing games they plan on completing sometime within the next 3 or 4 decades give or take; none of it seems to do anything to put my suspicions at ease.
Call it cynical speculation on my part, but it seems pretty clear that Integrity & Faithlessness was cranked out in minimum development time to squeeze some extra cash from the Star Ocean fans due t the lack of being thrown a bone in the last seven years. Oh well, at least we only have a week until I Am Setsuna arrives and steamrolls over this turd.
