As of the 12th of February this year, Star Ocean 4 was made available in Australia on the PS3, after a long time of remaining an exclusive on XBox360. Personally I was a big fan of Star Ocean 3: Till the End of Time on the PS2 and managed to nearly get what I would consider an 100% on it, except for getting the last inventor for completing 100 bunny races to get a reward (Damn those bunnies annoyed me). Does this game originally released for XBox360 live up to my high expectations of a game in the Star Ocean series? Or did it end up becoming a disappointment? Read more for the full review.
The characters in this game are overall a mix of generic, unique and annoying. The main character is Edge, who shortly after the start of the game is made captain of the Calnus, one of the first spaceships to hit the skies in search for a new planet to colonize after our failed treatment of it has caused Earth’s surface to be uninhabitable. Overall, he goes from cheerful and dependable Edge, to emo Edge and constantly shifts between the two as the game continues. The other main characters are Reimi, who is his first officer and plays the general girlfriend role that Sophia played for Fayt in Star Ocean 3 (Althrough she graces the screens the whole game instead of Sophia who decided to disappear completely off the first disk). Faize is the other main character who you use through the first 2/3rds of the game and generally has the whole “loyalty to race” trait that seems to be common in other RPG’s.
You also get another six characters to use that are unlocked as the game continues. The only character who has any sort of use to the main story is Lymle, a… 15 year old girl who talks, acts and looks like someone who is 6 years old and can summon a giant “doggy”, both of who act badly against Faize in a mini-storyline that is concluded at the end of the story if you fulfill all of the special requirements. Others include Bachus who is a Mecha, Meracle who is a catgirl, Myuria who is after another NPC’s blood, Sarah a featherfolk and Arumat who is Faize’s more epic and less whiney replacement. Other characters who are not playable include Crowe, Edge’s much more talented rival/BFF and Welch who is responsible for item creation.
Character development is done through two means, the general storyline which give bias to certain characters over others and more importantly to people after trophies, personal interactions which is at certain times during the storyline, mostly on the Calnus you have to talk to certain characters or objects at certain times to improve your relationship with them.
If you reach a relationship high enough during the game, then you get to see that characters ending and a trophy with the characters image on it. The endings however are overall disappointing in comparison to SO3 as it has been set so you can get all of them at once, instead of just getting one in So3 and allowing them to have a relationship with just the one character. Of course at the same time, to others it might be considered as a means to get closure for all characters they were able to get close to.
Trophy fans can be glad to find that upon completion of every event in the game, 9 bonus trophies can be earned upon completion. Image taken from my trophy profile on the Australian Playstation Website.
The storyline I feel isnt as epic as the storyline in Star Ocean 3 and occasionally kept me asking if this is even in the same universe as the game, even if it is a prologue. The game focuses on the first space exploration by humans and Edge and Reimi have been chosen to take part on the mission as crew on the Calnus, and when you arrive on your first planet, Aeos…. everyone but you and the captain gets attacked by unidentified creatures. So you get to explore the island, have your first challenging boss fight (Those of you who are new to the series should try and master the battle system before the boss fights since some can get tricky without them). You then get made captain obviously and then get to go on your way with your new buddy Faize and first-officer Reimi. Most planets you visit first are underdeveloped and have had some negative contact by aliens, also including a spaceship which has a link to some weird crystals and an alternative dimension Earth (I feel very Doctor Who here). The storyline however doesnt really kick off for the first dozen hours and the rest of it really does seem to be aimed at the western audience over the Japanese audience, most probably in order to make money from the original console of choice XBox 360 in the western market. I personally prefer the storyline of Star Ocean 3 however, with a more Japanese-targetted background.
The graphics in this game are pretty good for the game it is. There is quite a number of CG movies within the game and whilst none stand out, the quality is there and at least on my TV didnt seemed to have reduced quality. The overworld and town design was all pretty good however a lot of them seemed bland after a short period of time and the glare that occasionally showed in the environment and when you control Edge was quite painful to my eyes until I managed to adjust…. of course having hayfever at that time didnt do me any good at all. Character designs were all very detailed, and they were all designed with consideration to the time period that they came from, however I do think it would have been wise to give some characters a design change after recruiting them on the ship, since Lymle came from a primitive race for example and wearing a flimsy dress would have no protection at all from enemies that are 10x+ higher than her, they did design a new costume for her ending which at least looked like it would protect her from monsters, and also less like a 6 year old. Arumat was most probably my favourite character in terms of character design. NPC design I thought was really good as well, every character design looked like they were not just from a set of 20 generic character designs and instead they looked like the designs actually cared. I especially liked the designs on Roak, they didnt actually forget to put a tail on any character. Oh, finally the bunnies look cuuuuute! As a bonus on the PS3, you can choose the “Classic” menu option which changes all character designs in the menu and on text to look more anime-style, which in my opinion is much nicer than the “Modern” style which is just the CG Art of the character designs.
Motoi Sakuraba is once again the lead artist in this game, and his fast paced music such as in the battle scenes were once again epic, and unlike prior games, the default battle theme changed depending on the planet you were on, allowing it to not get boring after time since you could change planets and enjoy a different track. Blood on the Keys is definately up to the standard of Cutting Blade of Notion in SO3. The other tracks are enjoyable however I will display some bias and say that the slow tracks, no matter how nice they sounded really bored me. Voice acting in english, despite everyones complaints about it was pretty good and I do feel that some people overexaggerated Lymle’s ~Kay. The only voice that really annoyed me was Sarah’s. Whilst her voice might be linked to her personality and is relevant to her personality, I just cannot stand her voic which didnt change much during the whole game. Unlike the XBox360 version, you have the choice to use Japanese voice acting which I thought was also good and I occasionally alternated.
The gameplay is relatively the same as SO3 with a few alterations. First off, the battle system is relatively the same, you have to run into an enemy to start a battle and you go to a separate map to take part in the free moving battle. You can attack almost simultaneously after you finish an attack with relation to your HP/MP and you have the benefit of four characters instead of three to add more complexity to your battle team. The other changes to the system are:
- Reaching 0MP does not cause you to die in battle, however resurrection items still restore x% of MP as well as HP.
- New blindsight system where if you can attack a monster at the right time, you can run behind them and critical hit them multiple times.
- If your RUSH gauge is at 100%, you can perform a big attack which allows multiple attacks to perform their combos at once and do serious damage to them.
- You can have up to 3 attacks per combo assigned to either the L2 or R2 buttons. Neither is more effective than the other however it relies on the skills listed instead.
Besides the battle system, there are several ingame changes and additions which include:
- A bigger quest system comprised of both normal quests that requires you do find or achieve something and Delivery quests which requires you to create or find X amount of an item.
- A new item creation system which is more of an Atelier series style where instead of recruiting inventors and trying to gain dominance in the planets market, you earn a different field each time you recruit a character then must invent and create items manually.
- Bunny races have been improved, this time you can develop and then control your bunny in the races.
- The ability to own your own ship, this isnt a big system however it does have a short-term appeal of trying to get all the characters to accept rooming with each other.
- The Battle Tournment system which is a slightly improved version and is the same make a team and pwn your enemies to score points which you can trade in for rare items.
There are of course, other fun things to do which I shall leave you to find out.
Finally there is the queston of replayability. Overall it took me 35 hours to finish the game, which is quite a significant timeframe in comparison to other games such as Assassins Creed II which I got Platinum for in 10 hours. There is a lot of content to do afterwards. You can run through the two bonus dungeons, collect the 900+ battle trophies which you have to collect, reach #1 rank in the tournments and do as many bunny races as you want. It should give you a dozen plus more hours to enjoy if you are willing to do it.
Personally, this isnt as good a game as Star Ocean 3, however I do think it is a worthy next-gen version of the game and I did really enjoy it. The complexity of the bosses makes you strive to make plans on how to beat monsters, there are a lot of characters you can master, a battle trophy system which has you testing your abilities and luck among many other things. I hope you all give it a shot if you havent already.
Overall Score
Characters: 8/10
There is a quantity of both playable and unplayable characters, with some being considered more important than others, however the game tries to make sure none are forgotten with a Personal Interaction system.
Storyline: 12/15
The storyline is too western to me and I would have preferred that they continue onto the end of Star Ocean 3. There are also a few times where I thought it contradicted certain elements of past games, but that might be me.
Music: 11/15
Decent voice acting and some good tracks…. just wish there was more epic music.
Graphics: 13/15
A worthy upgrade of graphics for the the series. Everything was designed very well except for the occasional bright glare.
Gameplay: 17/20
Many fun systems mixed into one…. just wish the item creation was more interesting.
Replayability: 13/15
Multiple unlockable difficulties, 900 battle trophies to find to unlock all PS3 trophies. Overall approximately 450 hours to platinum.
Personal Opinion: 8.5/10
A rather fun game.
Overall: 82.5/100
This game got a 82.5% in total, giving it an A Grade overall.
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