Its such a wet fart of an ending.Īnyway, like I said it was fine. You are introduced to this big new threat, there's no explanation or development of the conflict or enemy, you are just funneled to the final boss. go to a new planet, get a sliver of an overworld with 2 locations that are basically 1 screen each and a final dungeon location with copy/paste design (typical SO fare, so no points off here). You wrap up what seems to be the main plot, only to discover there is a larger galactic threat. very rarely have I seen a game where the team so blatantly and obviously just ran out of time. To recruit him, head back to Haute and deliver the large doll to Badam to complete the job.
Thats just the battles though, as for the final "act". Normally, he’s a solid pick for first time players since he’s the earliest ally you can recruit. Dragon Roar is SO1's equivalent of Side Kick from SO3. Winning in 99.9% of fights is just spamming abilities. Allowing teammates to use abilities meant that you would hear your teammates constantly call all out their ability names as they completely emptied their MP bar on trash mobs in a game where MP healing outside of towns is painfully difficult and expensive. It was alright, in the end it was really saved by its characters and the PA system.īattles were ridiculously broken, in that if you weren't completely overleveled all it took was a simple stunlock and you would be staring at the game over screen. The sprites look really good, even blown up on a 55 inch TV upscaled to 4K and the character portraits obviously fitted right in.
Square Enix did a wonderful job porting the PSP version to the PS4 and the new character art is such a huge improvement over the PSP ones that the game is no longer off-putting to look at. Overall I had a lot of fun with the game, it was just a nice, easy experience with some decent characters and a straightforward plot without too many embarrassing JRPG tropes. The game also benefited from having no little off-putting humor or crass character designs in it (something that SO3 and onwards couldn't escape). I ended up cheesing the game by creating that item that gives you an instant level up, simply because I didn't have time to die to over-powered enemies at the end of the game (a stable of old JRPGs to me). The music was Motoi Sakuraba doing his thing (in a good way), and the combat system - while being relatively simple compared to the later games - was pretty much straight forward. And it was actually very enjoyable! The story was basically anime Star Trek with some pretty straight-forward themes.
So this was actually my first proper full playthrough of a Star Ocean game.