Tag: star ocean

Posted on

How’d It Age #8 – Star Ocean: The Second Story R

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch, Windows

In a year of wonderful remasters and remakes I’m finishing the year on another wonderful remake. This one is very similar to Super Mario RPG in that it left the gameplay largely intact while overhauling the visuals, but it took a decidedly more retro approach. Luckily, like SMRPG, it is also similarly still a ton of fun.

Having somewhat recently played some Star Ocean I apparoached this kind of knowing what kind of game I was getting into. I knew that combat wasn’t going to be overly complicated, but I knew it was going to be fun. What surprised me was how well this one scaled between low and high enemy counts, which is something that newer entries don’t necessarily do.

One of the big things that separates this entry is that there’s a very well telegraphed attack tell, which you can combine with a dodge button to knock away at a stun meter. You can also do that through normal attacks, but the dodge is way more effective. In a one-on-one or party-on-one situation, this is INCREDIBLY effective at knocking down the meter and stunning an enemy. However, you can also play a game of prioritizing attack cancels and just preventing the enemy from attacking nearly wholesale. This works great in multi-enemy fights as you can spread your party to focus on individual one-on-one fights. However, there are some fights that really penalize this and force you to set the party into full focus. Figuring out the fights with different strategies really works well to push some variety and keep combat from getting stale. It’s surprising to see how well this is achieved in such an old title, as the newer Star Ocean games really failed in this regard.

However, you start to see the age of the game when it comes to balance. It happens sort of slowly throughout the game, but over time the game’s intended balance of what you’re fighting and the practical balance of the bosses got clearly off. I never really narrowed it down to what I was doing wrong, but to not be one-shot by the end game bosses, I was ending up about 15-20 levels higher than the game was telling me was “appropriate” for my party, but it got me through. Luckily the game compensates – intentionally or not – with some grind reduction systems. Once an enemy icon changes from red to green, there’s a system to auto complete the fight in the overworld. This basically runs stretches of getting a level from minutes to 30 seconds or less, so the time to actually level up and move up is pretty forgiving. If you aren’t at the right spot in power, you just run around and auto battle a bit, adjust strategy a bit, and good to go.

This was ultimately probably a problem of me not digging deeper into the underlying crafting systems, partly because I’m lazy and partly because they are just too deep. There’s a three-page menu of crafting and helper-style stuff that you can level up per party member. It runs the gamut from actual equipment crafting to item creation to cooking to buff creation to stat up creation and more. It’s just so deep that unless I had time to really invest in a strategy to min/max my party, I was always going to fail on doing it right. As it stood I did it well enough to get decently high end items, but I think there was a clear path for me to do better and get more out of it to make my overall path through the game far more efficient.

The rest of the remake from a visual and audio perspective is extremely impressive. It’s obvious that Square is really leaning into the HD2D style that they started pushing in Octopath Traveler, but this one is a bit different. The environments are still pretty low-tech, but they’re a lot more traditional 3D with really good 2D character sprites to create a fairly interesting mix in styles. From an audio perspective it’s still the pieces you’d want with modern orchestration and voice acting. Where HD2D feels like a fun idea that can be a bit kitschy at full scale, this feels like a more practical middle ground that allows for them to be a bit separated from the environmental restrictions of the full HD2D titles. This is mixed with some modern UX touches (thank you wonderful maps) that really feel like they’re pointing at a way to do a SNES/PS1 style sprite RPG in a modern wrapping.

I guess if nothing else I’m glad this exists and I’m glad that it’s good. Star Ocean has had a pretty rough draw since the 360 era (and I know some people would also tell me that Star Ocean 3 was garbage). This one proves that there’s a place that the series should maybe go that’s a bit lower budget and a bit lower scope and really just make a fun sci-fi story that isn’t trying to reach to AAA status. The Divine Force felt like it was moving in that direction, but in full 3D. This title perhaps offers another path they could go. It feels like a game that is still worth playing despite being 25 years old, and that’s something to celebrate.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #165 – Star Ocean: The Divine Force

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

This is a very particular type of game in that I don’t think it’s necessarily a good game, but it was a generally fun game. It doesn’t really do anything all that well. It’s generally a pretty absurd experience. But despite that, it’s never really a huge issue to play, at least until the end. However, that’s tri-Ace in a nutshell over the past few decades, so I guess I can’t really say I was that surprised.

I say until the end up there because I never actually finished this game. Per my PS5 tiles, I finished at around 94%. What this ended up suffering from was really a case of “but wait, there’s more!” Not that it’s unusual for a JRPG, but this had too many false endings. I’m pretty sure I’ve killed the main baddy three times already and was lining up for another. However, I hit another surprise dungeon that involved my two least-favorite JRPG tropes – removing your party and making you re-fight bosses as unnecessarily tanky versions.

It’s one thing to do either of those, but both at once is obnoxious. After spending 30 or so hours getting a party setup I want with skills that I want, the last thing I want to do is have to figure out how to fight with a now weaker party or one with different mechanical pros and cons. What I really don’t want to do is then redo fights I’ve already done. Not harder mind you, just longer. Not more interesting, just more boring.

Of course, that gets us to where I don’t really think the game is good. One of the bosses in this section is a great example. It has a mechanic where it splits into four around a target, then attacks toward center. As the player, I can dodge out of it fairly easily, regardless of taking some damage. If you aren’t the target, you just….have to stand around waiting to avoid damage. The AI really loved just pulling a Leroy Jenkins here and getting themselves killed in super tanky refight variant. So what’s the easiest strategy? Let them die and be just me and a healer, because the healer will always stay back and I will always be targeted, and there’s nobody left to die. So in this case, bad AI with bad tendencies and lack of situational awareness just makes for a draining fight.

Outside of situations like this though, the game is fun despite the jank. Combat is extraordinarily fast in a way that even the Tales games don’t approach. Is it pretty button mashy? Sure is! Does that make it fun? Sure does! This is backed by some skill tree and skill strengthening that does enough to make sure you remember there’s a JRPG in here somewhere, while also giving you some flexibility in steering your party’s play style. Traversal is largely the same. You sprint like a fucking psychopath through an environment that is far larger than it needs to be, then you’re given the ability to fly like a super hero. Does it make any sense? Nope! Is it fun? Yup!

So, this game exists in a weird dichotomy. It’s not particularly good. It’s incredibly janky. It has a really bad ending sequence. But despite that all, it manages to be fun. I guess in that respect I can’t really recommend it but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that it exists. It may not be a home run, and certainly doesn’t have the life of better supported mainline Square-Enix series, but it at least gives me some hope that the series isn’t just abandoned, and within the quality bar the series usually sets it doesn’t even end up being that bad. It’s a strange one.

Posted on

How’d It Age #2 – Star Ocean: First Departure

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PSP
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch
  • Originally On: Super Famicom

This is definitely one of those games that kind of got away. It didn’t come out in the US until the PSP, and I completely missed the boat on that. It coming out again a couple years ago on modern consoles reminded me of its gap in my library, but it still took until now for me to finally get around to picking it up.

It’s been almost 6 years since the last Star Ocean in my playlist, and the benefit of hindsight shows so much of how that game ended up where it was. My likes playing that one basically read like a laundry list of my likes here.

This is a relatively short game, clocking in at under 15 hours. Because I finished around level 75, you can get a good guess about how quickly I was leveling up. The other benefit is that this allowed me to power through the skill list extremely fast. That in particular is one of my favorite things about leveling in this game. Ya, you get your leveling stats, but the skills are key. Want to load all in to offense with random armor breaks and offensive boosts? Go nuts, load into those skills. Want your healer to just spam heals to support your glass cannon shenanigans? Go ahead and load into skills that reduce cast and cooldown times. Take all of that and load into skills that reduce your point usage and increase your EXP gain and you’re just flying through the game. The customization possibilities there are a lot of fun and really end up being the focal point of a core metagame that still really works well 25 years later.

The combat also still manages to be fun, despite its relative simplicity. There’s definitely been games that have done it better in the years since, not the least of which are newer SO titles let alone series like Tales Of. However, this works well enough to allow me to just forget about how modern action-focused JRPGs have gone. The simplicity of having movement, an attack button with a fixed chain, and a couple of skill hotkeys is such an easy thing to fall into. I’m not remembering combos and weaknesses and anything extraneous. I’m just watching out for attacks, dodging them when I can, then spamming the hell outta my attack button to kill things. It combines with some of the skill stuff above (hell ya random dodge chance!) and the short length of the game to really just be enough to keep me going.

The things I do end up missing though are some of the little modern features that just aren’t here. The first of these is really just a lack of direction, and I don’t mean that quite so literally. Every story cutscene ends with a point where you’ve kind of got a random chance that they actually tell you something useful about where to go. More often than not I was just aimlessly wandering. Sure, people will complain about being handheld, but having a blip of like just generally go around here goes a long way to letting me explore and check things out while still eventually knowing the right way to head. I also just severely miss autosaves. Again, I think a lot of people will go “well, they make the game too easy” but I would argue just the opposite. Autosaves allow games to be much harder without wasting the players time. Save often, make individual combat situations difficult, and let players die without time loss. Modern JRPGs have started leaning into this a lot and I much prefer having a quick retry / reset to just before the fight to regroup option because a lot of the general fights in this game were just needlessly easy.

This is stupid, but I also just hate the town layouts. Why are the shops and inn so far apart from each other in pretty much every town? Why are the layouts all mazes without central squares? This was made more frustrating by the fact that you run faster in straight lines than diagonals, so navigating towns was just a slow process.

So then the question is less of a did it age well, because it did. It becomes more of a is it worth playing now? I think it’s a yes, perhaps with a bit of hesitation. If you’re kind of on the edge for the genre, I’d perhaps steer you to something modern likes Tales of Arise. If you’re a heavy JRPG fan, absolutely. There’s enough here to be fun, it’s short so it won’t waste a bunch of time, and it’s still entirely modern enough in combat feel to not be distracting. I may recommend waiting a bit for a sale, but even at its current price of $21 on PSN/Nintendo eShop, that’s not too bad of a deal for a pretty solid piece of gaming history.