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Game Ramblings #16 – Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: JRPG

So I’m a bit of a sucker for JRPGs, and the Star Ocean series has never been any different.  However, it’s been a while since The Last Hope, and that one was already a pretty big step down for the series.  The unfortunate thing is that, while SO5 showed some promise in my playthrough, it’s not reversing the slide.

If you’ve played a Star Ocean game before, this one pretty much follows the pattern.  You’ve got a cast of people on a usual nonsense JRPG story.  You’re on a backwater planet that happens to be thrown into the midst of fighting between the advanced civilizations in the galaxy.  The characters themselves are probably an overall step up from The Last Hope, including an often entertaining, but definitely hilariously dressed mage. The battle system is still a solid action battle system, pretty similar to past titles.  In what could have even been an improvement, you get up to 7 active party members at one time, which is one of the larger JRPG parties I’ve seen.  However, the game ended up feeling like it was rushed to shipping, and never really pulls into a very cohesive whole.

On the surface, this is a very short game.  I ended up clocking around 20 hours to completion, though that was admittedly not a 100% run.  What it ends up doing though is progressing the plot extremely quickly, so the story is over as soon as you really feel like you’re growing into the characters.  It also means that leveling is EXTREMELY fast.  I ended the game just short of level 80, so you can imagine the leveling pace as I was actually fighting through the world.  The unfortunate thing is that unlike other Star Ocean games, you’re effectively rooted to one planet.  There’s a few excursions to space stations, but nothing permanent.  To combat this problem, the enemies scale in the world after certain plot points, but traversing the same areas definitely grows dull.

There were also some very distinct points that drew me to annoyance.  In general, the main healer for the party was pretty incapable of staying out of trouble, so I always kept a lot of healing and resurrection items on hand.  There were also a handful of boss fights that were effectively the worst kind of escort mission.  One in particular had me facing waves of enemies while one of my party members was hacking a door.  However, if she alone died, it was a game over.  She also would not defend or heal herself, and the enemies would beeline towards her without being able to be tanked by the rest of my party.  To say it was frustrating would be a massive understatement.

The unfortunate thing in the end is that I did legitimately enjoy playing the game.  Individual fights were just fun, the little side story moments that the series often has were generally just funny, the game generally looked pretty visually solid (if not a bit busy at times).  This is just one of those games that very clearly could have benefited a lot from more cycles of iterating on what they had going, because it’s so close to really being a great RPG.  At this point I’m just hoping that tri-Ace is now setup with the technology they need for the next few years, so they can truly just spend time working on a next-gen game, rather than next-gen technology.

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Game Ramblings #15 – Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir

More Info from Atlus

  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available on: PS3, Vita
  • Originally On: PS2
  • Genre: Action RPG, Platformer

The remakes continue, though in this case a remake of a much more niche title.  Following up on the Wii to Vita remake of Muramasa, Vanillaware and Atlus have now brought the even older PS2 title Odin Sphere to newer consoles.  The question then is whether this game is only for new players to the game, or will players of the original still enjoy the experience a second (or more…) time through.

The original release was great at the time, but suffered from some major performance issues on the PS2.  This is absolutely the first thing returning players are going to notice as an improvement.   Obviously the now 1080p redone visuals are fantastic, and Vanillaware’s art continues to not disappoint, but the framerate is significantly more stable than in its previous life.  There’s still a handful of spots where I noticed the framerate dip a bit, but it was never damaging to the experience, and certainly not to the level of the PS2 original.

For new players, this is definitely a great game to hop into Vanillaware’s games if you haven’t already.  The game takes place over five core books staring different main characters, and two wrap up books to complete the overarching story.  The five characters all have very different play styles, from close-range swords to mid-range chains up to crossbows, giving the 25+ hour experience a nice variety of different gameplay types.  The stories weave characters and locations together, and end with a split ending to wrap up, depending on how the player tackles the sixth book.

Combat takes place within arena-style side-scrolling rooms, typically containing between 4-10 enemies, as well as your occasional mid-boss or end-boss in each chapter.  Generally speaking, combat is extremely fast paced, more similar to fighting games than a typical RPG, with the player trying to do their best to string together high combo counts, and throwing various potions to apply ticking damage to enemies.  Overall, the skills available allow the player to customize their general attack rotation to fit their comfort level, adding a nice touch of depth to the system to bring it back in line with your more typical RPG games.

For returning players, it’s worth noting that there are two options, the Original Mode, which is simply the PS2 version with redone visuals.  There’s also the Leifthrasir mode, which includes additional areas, additional cutscenes, and a generally refined experience. As an example, here are the first few minutes of the Original vs Leifthrasir modes.  In general, I expect most returning players will enjoy the full remake variant, as it generally massages what was already a great experience into something more refined.

Then what’s the verdict on buying it?  Probably.  I suspect fans of fighting or action games will get more out of this than your typical RPG fan.  In general I never got to a point where I felt underleveled, so the fast-paced action is definitely more of the gameplay focus, with the RPG elements serving to enhance the gameplay, rather than being the core progression.  That said, fans of games with great art in general have a lot to love here, with the hand drawn visuals being even more stunning now in 1080p.  If it came down to a choice, I’d probably still play the Muramasa remake over this, but I don’t think you can really go wrong either way.

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Game Ramblings #14 – Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

More Info from EA

  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available on: Xbox One, Windows (Origin)
  • Genre: Action/Platformer

So, it finally happened; we got a new Mirror’s Edge.  Like the original, the core of this game is all about the first-person parkour-inspired platforming, and this prequel/origin story/retcon doesn’t change much about that.  What this one does do is throw away the linear progression in favor of an open world taking place entirely on the rooftops of Glass, which was also the city setting of the original.  So then the question is, did that change work? Did this game improve on some of the shortcomings of the original?

Going to get this out of the way fast.  Yes, the running that covers the core of the game is still fantastic.  Getting into a good flow running across the rooftops is still better in this game than in any other parkour-style game that I’ve played.  The open world nature of the game makes this even better, as learning routes between common hubs pushes you to get faster and faster travelling around the city, making that traversal fun enough to often skip using the fast travel that was available.  Some people have already complained that some of the traversal skills are locked behind an XP wall, but I never hit a point where I felt limited in what I could do, and the new skills that were unlocked pretty seamlessly integrated into how I was playing, as I was learning to use them one at a time and could experiment over extended play running around the city.

That said, the open world nature of the game did suffer from something akin to Assassin’s Creed syndrome.  There are some good side events scattered around.  The time trials of the original came back in the form of Dash events, and are still as good as ever as you continue to improve on your runs to 3 stars.  However, most of the side content is little more than fluff consisting of collecting orbs or doing more normal running segments that you would already be doing to get around the city.  While these do give XP for people grinding out upgrades, I got to the end of the game without needing the XP only incidentally doing these things while getting around between story missions.  For the completionist, this game has a lot, but for the people going straight through the story, these are skippable.

Unfortunately, the combat was still not that great here.  While it’s definitely a game about staying OUT of combat, there’s enough forced combat missions that the poor quality of the combat can be annoying at times.  They did get rid of the poor gun combat from the original, which is a plus, but even the hand to hand combat was not that great.  It basically consists of weak punches that I stopped using about 1/3 through the game, and strong attacks that can be effectively head on or from a side.  While there are some nice possibilities in the side attacks, particularly in causing enemies to stumble into and interrupt each other, the actual pace of the combat is generally slow and clunky.  Given how good the running is, it’s not a huge deal that combat is poor, but giving more possibilities of entirely avoiding the handful of forced combat areas would certainly have gone a good way in improving this situation.

So overall this game was pretty similar in outcome to the original.  The running portion of the game is still fantastic, the combat was still pretty poor, but the game overall is still highly enjoyable and worth playing.  While the open world change to the game flow has some hits and misses, the parts of the game that were still fun about the original are still maintained.  Just don’t expect the story to make any sense when connected to the original.