It’s been a while since I played the last Star Ocean title. With this one we get back to the classic days of the series. It’s a great RPG with a lot of quality of life features scattered throughout. Surprisingly the one thing it is missing is quick travel. I gotta admit that it would have been handy to have that around but I suppose it would have definitely sped the game up a great deal. This game is already fairly short compared to other RPGs so you would probably not want to let it get too out of hand.

The general plot starts with a mysterious plague infecting the people of Roak. Roddick needs to figure out what is going on with this plague quickly because everyone is turning to stone. That’s when mysterious beings from a planet called Earth show up. They explain that they are from the future and will need to join Roddick in the past in order to stop the plague. It will mean going up against a demon lord and an army of high powered fighters. Will Roddick and his friend really be enough to stop them? Well, they have an ace up their sleeve in the form of symbology, a kind of magic that defies even the most advanced sciences.

The game did a good job of balancing both sides pretty well. Sometimes in these things you wonder what the old timers can really do against the future. Well, in this case having your swords amped up by magic helps quite a bit. The future folk can still just wipe out the planet but fortunately that’s not their style. Then you have the demon lord who is immune to conventional weaponry but not against magical attacks. So it’s a rather perfect balance there.

The gameplay is not quite turn based. It’s an auto attack system where you continually attack as you wait for the meter to build up on your specials. The strategy comes down to positioning. You always want to be surrounding the opponents and preventing them from doing the same to you. Even if they are considerably lower leveled, a few good shots from both sides will take you down in a flash. So you want to always be moving and it seems to help with accuracy but that could be placebo.

As you level up you will learn more attacks and have to decide which ones to use in battle. You can also switch between characters at will and use their attacks as well so you want to make sure that all of your characters are in good fighting shape. There will be times where some members of your group are not available so you should keep that in mind. Otherwise you may have a situation where your strongest fighters are all gone and your weak ones are too underleveled.

The game can get rather difficult so this one is definitely not a walk in the park. You will need to get stronger at multiple points so you should go ahead and fight a lot of enemies. There is no way to turn off encounters so you will have plenty of chances for that. At times the spawn rate can feel really high but later on you will learn skills to reduce that a bit. You will also learn skills that reduce your stats in order to get more exp and skill points. I highly recommend using these while training.

Also you should level up the skill that reduces the cost for all other skills as your top priority. It makes it possible for you to learn all skills before reaching level 100 with a lot of room to spare while it would take you way longer to do that otherwise. You will have the opportunity to use all skills but this will save you so much time on it. So the game has a lot of little strategy problems for you to deal with like that. You want to really keep these things in mind before just diving in.

The graphics are pretty impressive within the game. You have some fully animated cutscenes in addition to the normal ones. The game also allows you to swap between the modern character portraits or the more retro styled ones. The game is always very clear visually on what’s going to happen next. Then we have the soundtrack which is also pretty good. It’s a little more limited but there was a danger theme that I enjoyed a lot. So that was a good one to listen to.

In terms of replay value you have the trophies to try and obtain. That should take you a very long time because of all the endings. There is also a post game dungeon to try and complete as well. So you’re getting a good amount of content here. The main campaign is probably around 10-12 hours as well so that’s decent. When you combine all of the content, then you’re definitely in good hands here.

The only improvement I’d like the game to have would be a quick travel. It just feels like that should be a necessity for any RPG nowadays. If not, then you at least need a way to turn the random encounters off. Whether you do that directly by turning them all off or only turning them off when they are a certain number of levels below you, both are solid options. I dare say that would make this game even better, but like I said that’s just a minor quirk. Ultimately it’s not a big enough deal that it would significantly hurt the experience for you. There’s also no excuse or you to be underleveled as a result of it. Make a backup save every now and again just in case though.

Overall, Star Ocean is a great game. In some ways you can call it a very basic RPG but it does the job for me. You have enough time to get used to the characters and the story is good. I liked the gameplay and the technical effects were all good. I have no real complaints with this game and in general I just really enjoy RPGs. You can’t really go wrong with the genre and it tends to churn out a lot of the all time best video games. I look forward to seeing what the next Star Ocean adventure will be like.

Overall 8/10