Can't swim in stars
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 8:48 pm
Star Ocean 2 was a love it or hate it game, which I don't understand, because it sucked. I can't imagine why anyone would've liked it for any reason. When I first heard about Star Ocean 3, I brushed the notion off without a second thought. As screenshots began surfacing, however, I couldn't deny that it looked freaking awesome. It went right up along Xenosaga as one of my most-anticipated RPG's.
I should've trusted my first instinct.
When I posted my first impressions here, I was completely unsure what to think. My final opinion hasn't changed much. There are some things about this game that I really like (really like), and some things that I absolutely hate (absolutely hate).
Let's start with the good. As I believe I mentioned before, the beauty of this game is in the details. It's got a dictionary of terminology that covers fabricated historical figures and events, interplanetary politics, theoretical quantum physics, and on, and on, and on. While most of the information is incidental and does not affect the main flow of the story, the fact that somebody thought about it and tossed it in the game for players to peruse is quite impressive.
Then there are the graphics. I didn't think I'd ever be impressed by PS2 graphics again, which was evidently a stupid assumption on my part. Tri-Ace have juiced out some effects I didn't think this aging hardware was capable of. The environments are outstandingly detailed, and absolutely massive. Whether it's a town, overworld, or even a dungeon, it's big, pretty, and has lots to look at. The lighting is all realtime, complete with dynamic shadows, and it's a sight to behold. In one dungeon, there's even a clever puzzle that requires you to adjust lights to have your shadows fall accordingly. Character animation is gorgeous, and the main cast all have real faces (not just texture maps). Hair sways, clothes sway, eyes move... my only complaint here is that NPC's are very low-poly when compared to the main cast, and it's noticable in cutscenes. The water effects are the flat-fuck best I've ever seen in a game, period. Whether it's a waterfall, fountain, brook, or river, the water flows accordingly and beautifully. It moves around rocks, flows with the contours of cliffsides... I don't even know how they made it appear so dynamic. An outstanding job of texture mapping, maybe, I really don't know, but it's gorgeous. Most amazingly of all, the game flows at a constant 60fps, with nary a kink to speak of. It's baffling, then, that with all the attention put into visual detail and effects, the camera is permanently stuck high and above your character in a very traditional overhead angle. It's distancing and outright frustrating when you're trying to observe. I don't think it's to mask pop-on, all I can imagine is that it was implemented to limit the number of on-screen objects and assure a steady framerate, which is a real shame.
With all this game has going for it, it's really too bad about the combat. This may well be the worst combat engine ever. For starters, it feels completely out of control. There are two auto-lock systems to choose from: crappy and super crappy. Enemies are fast, and there's an aggravating pause after each slash, so if you miss (which happens quite regularly), you have to wait a few moments before your next chance to attack, during which time the enemy will have scuttered away or possibly launched a fatal counterattack. Even if you can manage to connect with the enemy you're trying to slash, actually inflicting damage is a whole other pain in the ass. There are two slash types: weak and strong. Weak slashes are blocked more often than not, and when an attack is blocked, there's a possibility that your player character will be knocked unconscious for a short period of time. Even if it's not fatal, it completely disrupts the action and eventually becomes an insufferable pain in the ass. The other attack type, strong, takes so long to charge up it's nigh useless, and then the recovery time is even longer than for a weak slash, so if you miss (which is usually what happens), you're completely vulnerable for way too long. Don't count on your teammates for any help, because you may as well be fighting with college educated bricks. Even when you set their AI to "act in a well-balanced manner", they resort to one of two extremes: either slashing maniacally and idiotically until they're dead, or standing around not doing a damn thing. Literally. I've yet to determine whether this is a glitch or not. Even if you have a mage to cast much-needed healing spells, by the time they finish chanting, your characters are dead. Especially later on, when enemies attack, it's in vicious combos which are impossible to break free of and will cut through your HP like cool whip.
In addition to the technical problems with the combat, there are some odd quirks that come off as just plain bad ideas. Special moves require HP to use, which makes no sense whatsoever. There's an MP bar, too, but characters will die even if their MP hits 0, so there's essentially no difference at all between using spells and special moves. Plus, since there are enemies who damage only your MP, it requires that you keep even melee attackers levelled-up in the MP department, which is an otherwise entirely useless stat for them. That's just plain bad design. The rolling boulders that appear in combat during certain dungeons are stupid and frustrating. They interrupt combos, and because of the camera, you can never see them coming. It feels more like you're trying to fight in a fucking game of marbles than avoiding falling rocks.
You can never see enough of the action at any time, and quite often your teammates' attacks interrupt your own combos, leaving your character vulnerable while he's recovering. It's especially frustrating when an enemy gets knocked over, because they become invulnerable for a few seconds while they get back on their feet. What the hell? In addition to the fact that that makes no sense whatsoever, it's a total pain in the ass to be stuck in an automatic combo over an invulnerable enemy, because by the time you gain control of your character again, the enemy will already have recovered and will be attacking your ass.
Even the "bonus" system feels flawed. Ultimately it feels less like you're rewarded for doing well and more like you're punished for being victimized by the game's unfair, totally dysfunctional combat engine.
I honestly can't think of a single good thing to say about it. It blows my mind how this load of dreck ever passed the testing department. I guess all their A people were working on the graphics team, but they should've had somebody supervising the interns designing the combat.
One throwback to RPG lore that I could've done without is the return of the mammoth, labyrinthine dungeon. At first it was kind of cool in a retro sort of way, and injected a bit of challenge. However, it turns plain obnoxious way too quickly. I'm talking about long, winding passages that lead into dead ends... no treasure chests, just walls and empty rooms. Since enemies regenerate everytime you walk out of a room, it gets to be an inexcusable annoyance. Dead ends aren't fun, especially not when turning back means you have to re-fight the same enemies you fought going in. Even if you do manage to stumble across treasure chests, most of them contain useless, shit-wad items that can be purchased in town for 3 Fol. How many goddamn Aquaberries do they think you need, especially considering you can only hold 20?
Some dungeons also feature particularly frustrating gimmicks, like the turtle kart riding and the dragon flute dungeon, which requires you to press the circle button with specific pressure and for specific amounts of time, or be punished with a fight. Weak.
There's an item creation system that's basically entirely random. It literally works like this: you choose 1-3 characters, assign them a particular task (cooking, smithing, writing, etc.), then sit around and wait as they spend your money in hopes of eventually coming up with a random item, which may or may not be utterly useless. No skill required, just luck. Again I say: weak.
The story doesn't quite seem to know what it wants to be. The game starts off decidedly sci-fi, and if you read the dictionary during this time, you find all kinds of information about various planets, races, governments, and conflicts, and it's really exciting because it seems to hint that you'll eventually visit all these places, which is a bald-faced lie. Almost the entire game takes place on a fairly generic medieval planet, complete with dragons and castles. And you can't even visit all the exciting-sounding places on this planet, you just travel back and forth between the same 5 towns the whole time. It's not really a bad little story... you find yourself stuck in the politics between two warring nations, but it doesn't nearly deliver on the promises the game hints at early on. When the game does finally get sci-fi again, things pretty much just go downhill. There's this one cool plot twist later on that, without spoiling anything, basically boils down to the big "what if" in-joke that gamers have been thinking about for the past 20 years, and I recommend playing it high, because it'll blow your mind. Unfortunately, the cutscenes and scenario flow around this point get real dodgy, and I can't help but think the writers were either getting bored or the deadline was getting close.
Final qualms: the characters themselves are trite and mostly forgettable. The music is good, but when you've heard the same track looping continually during a 2-hour dungeon crawl, it will having you foaming at the mouth screaming for salvation. Save points are entirely too far apart. There are occasionally some glitches loading menu screens, and once the game even locked-up while I was trying to access the invention menu. Your backup party doesn't level-up at all, and when new characters are added to the team, they start way too low to be of any use, requiring you to level them up if you want to utilize their skills. I'm sure I made a bigger mental list than this, but the rest escape me at the moment.
The game really struggles to be great, and at times you almost think it's going to make it, but ultimately it's a series of empty promises that add up to one great, big empty promise. It starts off decent enough, but from the outset, it's a constant, gradual deterioration, especially once you crash on Elicoor 2 and realize that's basically where the rest of the game is going to take place. I had to force myself to sit down for the last few sittings, and I don't think I'm going to be able to bring myself to finish it up, as close to the end as I am. I think if the combat engine weren't a total load of bullcrap, this would still be a solid, if largely uninspiring game. As it is, it's just a big chunk of wasted potential.
I should've trusted my first instinct.
When I posted my first impressions here, I was completely unsure what to think. My final opinion hasn't changed much. There are some things about this game that I really like (really like), and some things that I absolutely hate (absolutely hate).
Let's start with the good. As I believe I mentioned before, the beauty of this game is in the details. It's got a dictionary of terminology that covers fabricated historical figures and events, interplanetary politics, theoretical quantum physics, and on, and on, and on. While most of the information is incidental and does not affect the main flow of the story, the fact that somebody thought about it and tossed it in the game for players to peruse is quite impressive.
Then there are the graphics. I didn't think I'd ever be impressed by PS2 graphics again, which was evidently a stupid assumption on my part. Tri-Ace have juiced out some effects I didn't think this aging hardware was capable of. The environments are outstandingly detailed, and absolutely massive. Whether it's a town, overworld, or even a dungeon, it's big, pretty, and has lots to look at. The lighting is all realtime, complete with dynamic shadows, and it's a sight to behold. In one dungeon, there's even a clever puzzle that requires you to adjust lights to have your shadows fall accordingly. Character animation is gorgeous, and the main cast all have real faces (not just texture maps). Hair sways, clothes sway, eyes move... my only complaint here is that NPC's are very low-poly when compared to the main cast, and it's noticable in cutscenes. The water effects are the flat-fuck best I've ever seen in a game, period. Whether it's a waterfall, fountain, brook, or river, the water flows accordingly and beautifully. It moves around rocks, flows with the contours of cliffsides... I don't even know how they made it appear so dynamic. An outstanding job of texture mapping, maybe, I really don't know, but it's gorgeous. Most amazingly of all, the game flows at a constant 60fps, with nary a kink to speak of. It's baffling, then, that with all the attention put into visual detail and effects, the camera is permanently stuck high and above your character in a very traditional overhead angle. It's distancing and outright frustrating when you're trying to observe. I don't think it's to mask pop-on, all I can imagine is that it was implemented to limit the number of on-screen objects and assure a steady framerate, which is a real shame.
With all this game has going for it, it's really too bad about the combat. This may well be the worst combat engine ever. For starters, it feels completely out of control. There are two auto-lock systems to choose from: crappy and super crappy. Enemies are fast, and there's an aggravating pause after each slash, so if you miss (which happens quite regularly), you have to wait a few moments before your next chance to attack, during which time the enemy will have scuttered away or possibly launched a fatal counterattack. Even if you can manage to connect with the enemy you're trying to slash, actually inflicting damage is a whole other pain in the ass. There are two slash types: weak and strong. Weak slashes are blocked more often than not, and when an attack is blocked, there's a possibility that your player character will be knocked unconscious for a short period of time. Even if it's not fatal, it completely disrupts the action and eventually becomes an insufferable pain in the ass. The other attack type, strong, takes so long to charge up it's nigh useless, and then the recovery time is even longer than for a weak slash, so if you miss (which is usually what happens), you're completely vulnerable for way too long. Don't count on your teammates for any help, because you may as well be fighting with college educated bricks. Even when you set their AI to "act in a well-balanced manner", they resort to one of two extremes: either slashing maniacally and idiotically until they're dead, or standing around not doing a damn thing. Literally. I've yet to determine whether this is a glitch or not. Even if you have a mage to cast much-needed healing spells, by the time they finish chanting, your characters are dead. Especially later on, when enemies attack, it's in vicious combos which are impossible to break free of and will cut through your HP like cool whip.
In addition to the technical problems with the combat, there are some odd quirks that come off as just plain bad ideas. Special moves require HP to use, which makes no sense whatsoever. There's an MP bar, too, but characters will die even if their MP hits 0, so there's essentially no difference at all between using spells and special moves. Plus, since there are enemies who damage only your MP, it requires that you keep even melee attackers levelled-up in the MP department, which is an otherwise entirely useless stat for them. That's just plain bad design. The rolling boulders that appear in combat during certain dungeons are stupid and frustrating. They interrupt combos, and because of the camera, you can never see them coming. It feels more like you're trying to fight in a fucking game of marbles than avoiding falling rocks.
You can never see enough of the action at any time, and quite often your teammates' attacks interrupt your own combos, leaving your character vulnerable while he's recovering. It's especially frustrating when an enemy gets knocked over, because they become invulnerable for a few seconds while they get back on their feet. What the hell? In addition to the fact that that makes no sense whatsoever, it's a total pain in the ass to be stuck in an automatic combo over an invulnerable enemy, because by the time you gain control of your character again, the enemy will already have recovered and will be attacking your ass.
Even the "bonus" system feels flawed. Ultimately it feels less like you're rewarded for doing well and more like you're punished for being victimized by the game's unfair, totally dysfunctional combat engine.
I honestly can't think of a single good thing to say about it. It blows my mind how this load of dreck ever passed the testing department. I guess all their A people were working on the graphics team, but they should've had somebody supervising the interns designing the combat.
One throwback to RPG lore that I could've done without is the return of the mammoth, labyrinthine dungeon. At first it was kind of cool in a retro sort of way, and injected a bit of challenge. However, it turns plain obnoxious way too quickly. I'm talking about long, winding passages that lead into dead ends... no treasure chests, just walls and empty rooms. Since enemies regenerate everytime you walk out of a room, it gets to be an inexcusable annoyance. Dead ends aren't fun, especially not when turning back means you have to re-fight the same enemies you fought going in. Even if you do manage to stumble across treasure chests, most of them contain useless, shit-wad items that can be purchased in town for 3 Fol. How many goddamn Aquaberries do they think you need, especially considering you can only hold 20?
Some dungeons also feature particularly frustrating gimmicks, like the turtle kart riding and the dragon flute dungeon, which requires you to press the circle button with specific pressure and for specific amounts of time, or be punished with a fight. Weak.
There's an item creation system that's basically entirely random. It literally works like this: you choose 1-3 characters, assign them a particular task (cooking, smithing, writing, etc.), then sit around and wait as they spend your money in hopes of eventually coming up with a random item, which may or may not be utterly useless. No skill required, just luck. Again I say: weak.
The story doesn't quite seem to know what it wants to be. The game starts off decidedly sci-fi, and if you read the dictionary during this time, you find all kinds of information about various planets, races, governments, and conflicts, and it's really exciting because it seems to hint that you'll eventually visit all these places, which is a bald-faced lie. Almost the entire game takes place on a fairly generic medieval planet, complete with dragons and castles. And you can't even visit all the exciting-sounding places on this planet, you just travel back and forth between the same 5 towns the whole time. It's not really a bad little story... you find yourself stuck in the politics between two warring nations, but it doesn't nearly deliver on the promises the game hints at early on. When the game does finally get sci-fi again, things pretty much just go downhill. There's this one cool plot twist later on that, without spoiling anything, basically boils down to the big "what if" in-joke that gamers have been thinking about for the past 20 years, and I recommend playing it high, because it'll blow your mind. Unfortunately, the cutscenes and scenario flow around this point get real dodgy, and I can't help but think the writers were either getting bored or the deadline was getting close.
Final qualms: the characters themselves are trite and mostly forgettable. The music is good, but when you've heard the same track looping continually during a 2-hour dungeon crawl, it will having you foaming at the mouth screaming for salvation. Save points are entirely too far apart. There are occasionally some glitches loading menu screens, and once the game even locked-up while I was trying to access the invention menu. Your backup party doesn't level-up at all, and when new characters are added to the team, they start way too low to be of any use, requiring you to level them up if you want to utilize their skills. I'm sure I made a bigger mental list than this, but the rest escape me at the moment.
The game really struggles to be great, and at times you almost think it's going to make it, but ultimately it's a series of empty promises that add up to one great, big empty promise. It starts off decent enough, but from the outset, it's a constant, gradual deterioration, especially once you crash on Elicoor 2 and realize that's basically where the rest of the game is going to take place. I had to force myself to sit down for the last few sittings, and I don't think I'm going to be able to bring myself to finish it up, as close to the end as I am. I think if the combat engine weren't a total load of bullcrap, this would still be a solid, if largely uninspiring game. As it is, it's just a big chunk of wasted potential.