Star Ocean is a series. It has games. Some of them are good, namely the first 3, and I remember having fun with the fourth even though that one was rather disliked overall. The fifth, on PS4, is one of the few RPGs I gave up on after less than 5 hours played. I don’t even really remember it, I just didn’t like it.

So this new one was kinda announced out of nowhere, I think in a Playstation Direct, and to basically no hype at all… So I picked it up at launch, finished it weeks ago, started playing and reviewing other things, and now I’m finally reviewing this.

Well, let’s go and talk about this video game!

Developer: Tri-Ace
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: October 27th, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Action RPG

Review

Story… Well, it’s Star Ocean, so it’s about a human from a futuristic space-faring planet, somehow ending up, usually in a crash landing, on a planet where technology is around medieval, with some magic. You choose either Raymond, the space boy, or Laeticia, the medieval princess, as your main character. This has very little effect story-wise, except some parts of the game have them split off and you spend a small amount of time without the other. Laeticia’s kingdom is pretty much about to go into an all-out war against the neighboring empire… who seem to have considerably better weaponry than the kingdom, and also there are these people with horns seemingly on the empire’s side. So Laeticia’s story, at first, is to deal with the empire’s attacks. Raymond, he’s here after his spaceship got attacked and 2 of his crew escaped with him but he needs to find them. He meets Laeticia who agrees to help her, so she helps him too. One of the crew members is an android that joins your party, the other is “Useless McDoesNothing the Pointless”, a character whose name I forgot and literally does nothing. But this is Star Ocean, so it doesn’t stay on the planet forever, heading to space to find out about the aliens that may or may not have an influence on what was happening on Laeticia’s planet and things are way more large scale and the enemy is at a universe-destroying potential and stuff. My biggest complaint with the overarching story is that it feels like it’s done, like, 4 separate times, but it just keeps going and escalating for kinda no reason at all at some point. If the game was shorter, you’d lose basically none of the plot.

As for if the story is good… It’s not bad. It kinda goes with many a Star Trek-inspired tropes, the overall villain, though he does get really annoying, isn’t a bad idea. Where this game completely fails is with characters. Laeticia is important for around half the game, then is basically decoration for the second half. Raymond is basically useless for half the game, and then almost has a role for the second half but is also basically useless. Weirdly the android character, Elena, ends up being somewhat more important than either Raymond or Laeticia. Anyone other than these 3 and the antagonist, the game mostly forgets they exist once their arc is resolved (which happens for most of them at various places in the first half of the game). Oh and there’s DUMA, a floating robot orb thing that does things for you and is probably more important to the actual plot than Laeticia. I didn’t care about anyone here, and then their role is standing in the background, blankly staring into space (sometimes literally).

PC performance, at the time I played it, was pretty rough. Launching the game the first time does something I’ve never seen a game do before. Your game is installed and ready to go… but for SOME reason, it needs to… compile its shaders? Yeah, the graphic shaders aren’t set up when the game is installed, you have to wait about an hour (maybe more on some PCs) waiting for the shaders to compile. For me, it worked out, for some people (based on the Steam forums) some people had to re-do the compiling a few times (and a recent update on the game’s steam profile indicates a solution for people with weird usernames in their OS and NVidia GPUs… yeah I don’t know why this would… cause issues… maybe just have the shaders already compiled?). And then the actual performance is lacking. It was locked to 60fps, when there’s really no reason for it to have a locked framerate. Sure it was consistently 60 and never dropped a single fps for me (though I hear some PC setups had more trouble with it, though re-compiling the shaders would sometimes work), but why not go above? Then the graphics are… oof. Not bad generally, the characters look great, the environments are fine, but the visuals themselves are kinda trash. Really blurry, basically blurring everything that isn’t the focus of a cutscene, and something about the bloom effect or something (I don’t know)

So gameplay… This is an action-RPG, with fairly open areas to run around in and fight enemies, connected by loading areas. You do the usual stuff. Fight things in the world to level up, go to wherever the game tells you to so the story progresses, fight bosses sometimes, explore fairly straightforward dungeons, do some sidequesting if you want. You know the stuff.

Combat is kinda really straightforward. You have 3 attack buttons, you can dodge, and you can jump. The 3 attack buttons have 3 attack slots, so mashing an attack button does the 3 attacks set in that attack button in the order you set them. Attacks require AP, from 1 to 4 (from what I’m seen). You start out with 5 AP, and getting hit while you have more than that reduces your max AP, and it recovers to max pretty quickly on its own while you’re not attacking. In addition to the attacks, each attack button can get something assigned to holding it. I like putting buffs or revival items on there. I will note some of the buffs are a bit meh. Like, 50% attack buff is great, but not if it only lasts 2 attacks.. And there’s a meter that goes up for your entire party called the vatting meter, when that’s full you can get one of your characters to do a super attack. And yeah you can switch characters on-the-fly. I didn’t do much of that, I mained Laeticia. You can have up to 4 characters on your team, the other 3 just kinda do their thing based on some AI, they’re usually way less aggressive than you, but still fine. Do keep the healer on the party at all times though.

The floating robot DUMA does add capabilities to the character you’re controlling. Namely, it gives you a flying dash attack. This is good to initiate surprise battles, but it has a bigger feature. If you’re flying toward an enemy, you can quickly change directions, and, if you end up out of their line of sight, they get blindsided. This stops them from moving for a bit (the higher your VA meter is, the longer it is), and gives you extra max AP. Even enemies you’re not using the dash on might end up blindsided if they’re locked on to you and you dash out of their view, which is nice. Since this is how you get max AP (especially when you get hit), you should do it a lot. Also, some enemies are just too good to get blindsided… and obviously it doesn’t work if the enemies don’t, indeed, have eyes. Later on, you unlock the Estery Cage feature. It gives you extra defense (and other stat boosts), I think it gives stun resistance, and it prevents you from having the dash anymore so… Yeah I didn’t use it too much, but it can be helpful in some boss battles where the bosses hit hard.

So combat ends up being… fine? I find that, unless you’re massively under-leveled, random button mashing will get you the win most times. Dodging isn’t something I ended up doing much beyond just… regular movement to get out of the way. Basically you end up doing lots of that dash attack to initiate blindside and max out your AP, then mash to win when there are no attacks to jump away from. The DUMA features at the big gimmick of this, and it looks cool, but as far as gameplay design, it’s just an attack with a chance to stun. It’s fun but it’s not… special.

Leveling up is pretty straightforward, but also not. There’s the just normal leveling, you gain a level from EXP, gain stats, the usual. You also, through leveling, items, and probably other stuff I’m not thinking about right now because I played this weeks ago, you also get SP. SP can be used for various things. Each character has a grid of nodes. Those give access to stat boosts, as well as attacks, passives, and spells, at various SP costs. These are non-negligible, so it’s worth doing.  You can also use the SP to power up attacks, spells, passive skills, and item creation skills. I think all go up to 10 levels, I might be wrong because I started leveling things outside of the skill trees for

Passive skills are all sorts of stat boosts or healing options, or Laeticia having a thing where her defense goes down by 50% to increase EXP to the party, or Elena having one that has a chance to absorb enemy buffs when attacking… There’s some skills that are common to all characters like First Aid and Auto-healing, while characters will have a few unique ones, like Laeticia being the only one with Stylish Dreamboat (which increases armor effects).

Speaking of skills, you have DUMA, the floating orb robot thing. Getting points for it allows you to learn skills for it to help in battle. There’s one slot for out-of-battle skills, the 2 choices for that one slot are making the scan range bigger, or making it harder for enemies to spot you. There’s 3 skill slots for battle skills. Things like all sorts of things about the VA gauge and increased stun lock when you blindside enemies. There’s also a few boosts to the Estery Cage function, such as extra stat boosts while you’re using it. I feel the best choices are kinda obvious, but mostly because I didn’t find keeping the VA gauge up to be all that important.

And there’s equipment. It’s equipment, it works like in other RPGs.

There’s item creation. I… didn’t pay too much attention to it. Each character has some skills that help with different types of item creation, and you can unlock more ways to create items by doing sidequests for that one NPC with a stick that has a pointing finger at the end of it. You basically take materials you get from monsters and strewn across the environment, and make stuff with it, selecting which character makes it. You’ll get better stuff by using better materials, of course, and by powering up the item creation skills on characters. TBH I really could’ve explored this aspect of the game more, but didn’t. I only unlocked half the item creation categories, so there’s plenty there I didn’t see… and clearly you don’t need to do any of it to beat the game, so eh.

Outside of battle, there’s not much to talk about. Some NPCs give out sidequests. I found the rewards to be pretty underwhelming so I largely gave up on doing them. Walking around the environment, may it be in the towns or open areas, there’s crystals floating around that you can pick up for DUMA upgrades, and there’s chests hidden all over the place that you can find either visually or getting one caught in your scanning ability. I don’t really have much to say about the non-combat stuff. Oh and you can fly around with DUMA outside of battle. Yay.

There’s one thing I really hate, and that’s the conversations characters have while you’re travelling in the big open maps. They’re a bit annoying to follow overall because they subtitle them real small and put the text in a corner, but, more importantly, you can’t do some important functions while they’re happening. No pausing, no going in the camp menu, certain on-field actions don’t work… But you can get into fights, walk around and grab items if you find them. It’s massively annoying overall. Why would they do this? Why does it need to deactivate a bunch of core actions? There’s so many too, especially in the earlier parts of the game. Like… just pause the conversation if I open the menu? Instead of preventing me from opening it? Like, this is really basic.

Overall

This sure was a video game. You press buttons, and things happen on the screen. Wow.

The combat feels super underdeveloped, the story feels long and meandering, and there are a lot of elements that just don’t work or are annoying for kinda no reason (the weird overworld dialogue thing, for example). I was ready for it to end about 8 hours before it did.

It’s a game that I feel very easily could’ve been quite good, but it falls short.

I don’t recommend this one. Not because it’s bad, just because there’s certainly better stuff to waste your time on.