Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

"Enter the hardest game to review, till the end of time."

The PlayStation and the PlayStation 2. The names alone strike the feelings of RPGs into our hearts, with it all beginning with Final Fantasy VII on the PS1 and going onto the next-gen RPG eras on the PS2. Star Ocean 3 was in a ring against Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube, fighting for best RPG of mid-2004 but not really living up to the hype that ToS managed. And I'll be the first one to say that Tales of Symphonia was the best game of 2004, whereas Star Ocean 3 fell a bit behind. While it was a decent RPG, ToS was definitely the winner.

Star Ocean 3 begins with our main protagonist, Fayt, inside a hotel with his friend Sophia Esteed. Stuff happens, and he gets separated from his friends and family, and then gets caught up in a conflict between the defending force of Aquaria against a military force led by tyrants, called Airyglyph. But the thing is, wherever Fayt goes, another force (even stronger than Airyglyph) seems to be after him, and he's caught in an everlasting struggle attempting to find out what it all means.

While the story does have its cliched moments and such, Star Ocean 3 has a great cast of characters in which you really come to care for. There's Fayt Leingod, someone struggling with his past; his friend Sophia Esteed, a magic user and somewhat lively young woman; Cliff Fittir, a member of a race called the Klausians and who is, ultimately, a muscleman; Nel Zelpher, a soldier of Aquaria; Peppita Rosetti, a circus leader and extremely loud teenage girl; Roger S. Huxley, a young kid who aims to call himself a "real man"; Mirage Koas, a friend of Cliff and one who can obey any order; Maria Traydor, the leader of Cliff and Mirage, and who has a past that rivals Fayt's, and two other characters I'd prefer not to mention. Overall, it's a cast you'll love.

For an RPG to beat the greatest game of 2004, it has to offer an amazing battle system, and that's something that Star Ocean 3 first takes the hilt of but then drops upon its toes, stumbling and falling as it goes. In other words, it's impossible to tell whether or not you like it. It's an action based battle system, everything in real time. You can control any of the ten characters whom you want, and everyone's got their unique set of abilities and magic, and everyone has a different fighting style. That's part of the good.

Each character can do two types of attacks: a weak attack with X or a strong attack with O. The battlefield is 3D, which means you can run away from the enemy at your will, getting as far away as possible and casting a spell, curing yourself, or whatever. If you're quite a bit away from your foe, you're in "Long-Range mode", whereas if you're close to the enemy, you're in "Short-Range". You can set four of the character's skills for them to use in the battlefield, one for X in short and long range mode, and one for O in the two, respectively.

However, I've gone on enough about the good. The characters have three stats ongoing: HP, MP, and Fury. HP is the health as usual, MP is the amount of magic points IN WHICH CAN BE DAMAGED, and Fury is the stamina. It increases if you stand still, but your attacks will miss and get blocked if it stays below 50% or so. But anyway... I could rant a 10-paragraph rant about the MP but I'll talk about it here: enemies can attack it and your HP, and if you lose all your MP, you die. Don't ask me why, that was the way that Enix made it.

Fortunately, though, every time you level you'll gain extra SP. If this gets high, you can increase your HP/MP/Attack/Defense by considerable amounts, except once you give yourself a few stat bonuses you'll have to level up three or four times for a single gain. In addition to this, there's the Bonus Battle Gauge which fills as you attack. Depending on whether you filled it with a weak attack, a strong attack, a skill, or a spell, it will increase the EXP gain, Fol gain (Fol is the currency in Star Ocean 3), the chance for item, or the small recovery rate upon completing the battle.

This gauge can be broken if an enemy pulls a strong attack against your main character, which means that it hardly ever stays up for more than one or two battles, sadly. Overall, almost everything except the point about the MP that I've told you about has been positive, but there's a problem: enemies seem to block every single attack you pull off. Instead of Tales of Symphonia, in which the damage was weakened, a shield appears around the enemy and they get to score a free hit on you. Fayt's sword attacks miss about half of the dang time, which makes battles in Tales of Symphonia much more fast-paced and enjoyable to fight. The character AI, however, is pretty good.

Because of the problems with response in which I've told you about, as well as the MP problem, Star Ocean 3 is one of the hardest RPGs of this era. Some enemies will just get up on you and smash you to pieces, going for your MP more than anything. Healing items also tend to get used up extremely fast, because they restore 30% of the corresponding stat, and are instantaneous, curing the character as soon as you hit X. You can't really expect to make it through Star Ocean 3 without dying several times.

Overall, the battle system isn't too bad, despite some things I've told you about. But sometimes the game will drive you nuts because it's full 3D, and it becomes impossible to tell one place from another. The only way to do this is to use the map on the lower-right hand corner, but it gets annoying to be looking at that more than you look at the screen. So oftentimes, Star Ocean 3 can play very awkwardly. And the dungeons... they're the worst. Hardly ever, you can manage to find everything around them, because you pay much more attention to the map then to the screen. And Star Ocean 3 single-handedly takes the cake as recent RPG with the most annoying, longest, and hardest dungeons as of late. And I've seriously lost count of the number of these.

However, before I finish off on the gameplay section, I'll talk about what might quite possibly be Star Ocean 3's strongest point; and that is Battle Trophies. Collecting these things is just so damn addictive, you just come to want them and enjoy spending two hours in front of your TV, trying to collect them. You collect Battle Trophies by accomplishing various different tasks in battle, such as beating a boss in a single minute, beating a boss without taking a hit, and doing 111, 333, 666, or whatever amount of damage. They'll unlock various different odds and ends in the game; therefore they create something which can easily drain the life out of completionists.

The graphics here are very richly detailed, and most of the cutscenes will give you a time to look and enjoy them. The character models are all semi realistic here, although there's always Albel showing half of his chest, Fayt and Maria with blue hair, and similar weird things that you see in every RPG. The backgrounds are mostly great, although a lot of them you won't be able to enjoy because the map will be blocking the screen half of the time. Overall, there are no real problems.

But one thing that stops Star Ocean 3 from being a revolutionary RPG is the god-awful music. Ugh, this is the worst RPG soundtrack since Final Fantasy X-2 but that one was a specially bad case. There is a good battle theme, and the boss theme isn't half bad, but the rest of the music is just... bleh. And repetitive. I've come to expect separate themes for each town and dungeon in RPGs nowadays, with one or two repeats, but you get the same theme for every dark dungeon. The same one for every enemy hideout (and a horrible one, at that). The voice acting, when it's not overdone in battle, is all good, all suiting the characters. All the same, the music was a HUGE flaw.

Don't get me wrong, what with all the criticism. Star Ocean 3 can be addictive as all hell once you get into it, but the flaws in the battle system and the terrible music really bring it down below Tales of Symphonia (my vote for game of the year 2004). All the same, it's worth a purchase and has a great story in which you'll want to experience. It's extremely difficult to give it a score, however, but I'll give it a 7/10, one which will probably become a 3/10, 5/10, or 9/10 come I play it again for another five minutes.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/13/04