Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (PS4)

[James]

Well, it's the best one in the series, so why not?

I think I gave up on it after the first 90 minutes. Cut-scene, Talk to people, talk to people, talk to more people, cut-scene! Play with the battle sequence a tiny little bit, just enough to know it's there but not to really learn much of anything, then cut-scene and more talking again. Nope, I'm done.

[Frogacuda]

I always liked the space opera feel of this series, plus it's kind of a sci fi kid brother of the Tales series. I'm down.

[Opaque]

He wants to take cues from Star Ocean 3? Like, on purpose?

It was the last good one, so there's that.

[Space Pirate Roberts]

Pretty much this.

2 was one of my favorite PS1 JRPGs. 3 was great--some loved it in spite of the Big Reveal. I loved it because of it. Ballsy move at a time when the genre was starting to feel stale.

Wasn't its solution to that staleness "let's rip off The Matrix", though?

[MechDeus]

Kind of not really.

[Yoshi]

Taito Eidos is out of control.

[dog$]

I've put in about 11 hours so far, and the single word I'd use to describe the experience is "slick".

There's no real slowdown in pace until it's at the point where I've just reached. The very first thing you do in the game is enter a sparring match as a means for a battle tutorial and the game rolls right on from there. In towns, speech balloons appear on their own, so you can get that kind of feedback and story padding without ever stopping for it. During storyline exposition, there are no prompts to press a button to have the next line be spoken - it just keeps going. When characters level up, there's no prompts for you to press to verify it had happened, nor any text to read to tell you what statistical values were increased.

The combat system might be a bit too hectic and simple for its own good, but it still keeps the game's tempo at a high rate.

The most glaring flaw are character animations and poses.

I've read a lot of reports saying that the game is short, but I think that it's a game which would otherwise be twice as long if it had the pacing and structure of any other JRPG.

Looking forward to more this upcoming weekend.

[dog$]

Done with the first play through at 31 hours.

I took the time to hit a lot of the optional Personal Actions and kept grinding to a minimum. There was only a touch of backtracking I did to buy item creation ingredients and clear out whatever missions I had cleared on the various job boards in the towns, but otherwise I tried to press forward as quickly as I could.

As far as the story exposition goes, the character animations and poses are still bad, but once you reach the end portion of the game it is not the most glaring flaw. Instead, that title goes to the rock dead dumb party member AI you have to work with. In most enemy encounters you will only have a quantity of four to six targets against you at maximum, and I suppose there were hardware limitations against increasing that amount. I also suppose that they wanted to have the player you control feel like it is contributing to the overall battle, as opposed to the player AI doing all the work for you. The result of their design, however, has most of the non-magic casters being very inactive during most of the fights. When you play as a healer and watch the AI do all the work, you will see the characters actually standing still and doing nothing for ten to twenty seconds at a time. The reason that I felt compelled to play as a healer is because the AI will not have her move from being cornered and attacked, and will gladly stand still and attempt casting something while being killed.

The game allows Roles to be assigned to characters, which give passive abilities and statistic alterations. One role is called "Deadman", and grants the player immortality at the cost of always losing HP. Only by putting this ability on the healer was I able to finish the game, because without it, I never would have been able to kill everything fast enough to keep her alive, nor would I have been able to play as her and keep the party alive while they would attempt to defeat the enemies on their own.

It is just aggravating to see how this game turned out, because the good qualities which I mentioned earlier are still indeed admirable, and there's still plenty to it which did stay consistently good throughout. The characters are fine, the writing is OK enough, the party skill and Role concepts are good, the environments (sparse as they are) are decent, the limited story and content scope suits everything well. Yet despite all of that and other small touches of class (concurrent dialogue, non-static head and eye positioning during idle moments), the game is nearly ruined by these two fundamental flaws. It's a shame.

[James]

Played 2 hours at PAX and was really impressed. The game started off strong, didn't get bogged down in story, let me actually get to playing with a minimum of fuss, and the battle engine is both surprisingly simple and really complex.

I definitely agree the character "acting" in the poses is overdone to the point of pure scenery-chewing, and the US voices are of varying quality, but I still enjoyed it overall. I had to switch the targeting over to semi-auto almost immediately, so it would switch to the closest enemy rather than sticking on one I'd left behind to deal with a problem elsewhere, but otherwise combat flowed really nicely. Four attacks per button divided between regular by tapping, magic if you hold down, and ranged or nearby for each, plus the rock-paper-scissors of regular and strong attacks plus block looked like it would fun to learn once I was more familiar with what each individual skill did. It's not that surprising to hear the dumb, passive NPC AI makes the later battles a pain, though.

[Xero_Kaiser]

The reason that I felt compelled to play as a healer is because the AI will not have her move from being cornered and attacked, and will gladly stand still and attempt casting something while being killed..

I remember this exact same shit pissing me off back in Star Ocean 2. The A.I. hasn't improved at all since then?