Star Ocean: Til the End of Time didn´t receive the status that the older titles got. I don´t remember why but people still thought it was not as good as the classics. Will this title start a new hope for the Square-Enix and Tri-Ace series?

Here are my own first impressions of this title that I´ve waited for since I last played Star Ocean: Til the End of Time. And yes, I was one of the people who really enjoyed TTEOT.

Story

Starts of simple enough. After a third world war where nukes were heavily used the humans signed a peace treaty and started doing research for how to find suitable planets to move to. To do this they started research on well basically time travel and they were soon successful in creating wormholes so that space ships could travel trough space pretty fast.

Edge Maverick is a what should I call him? Young boy with dreams of being a captain of his own spaceship? Anyway he is sent of together with his childhood friend Reimi on the spaceship to find a suitable planet for the rest of the humans to move to. While in the wormhole something goes wrong and they have to crashland on a nearby planet…

As you can see it is just a standard story that from the looks of it will evolve into saving the whole universe. Boring as to say the least.

Characters

So far I´ve found 4 characters. Edge and Reimi are the first one that you encounter and can use. Edge fights with a sword, a cliche I wish they would stop using while Reimi used a bow. And she does it well too.

We have Faize, a alien that looks up to Edge. From the looks he is male but I don´t want to know what he wants to know from Edge… and finally Lym, our loli going her pace and a really good symbologist, or as we can call her, a magic user. Faize can also use some magic. But Lym is way better than him and even has her own pet dog, Cerberus, a flaming dog.

Edge fills the cliche of mysterious power user human that has a tragic past. Reimi could be considered the first love interest as they always fight with eachother and a classical childhood friend. Faize is elegant, noble. Think of high class people and you´ll get what I mean with his looks and choice of weapon. Lym as said is a my pace going child.

I wonder what more cliches we are going to find as we continue to travel the vast sea of space.

Battles

Battles have always have a big part of the Star Ocean series, and as they are in real time you can´t sit this one out. From the very first and TTEOT there has been some changes.

The light and hard attacks from TTEOT are gone, now you just use the A button to attack. Depending on you´re long or short range from the enemy the attack changes. Gone is the value in TTEOT that decided how long you could attack. I forgot what it was called.

The special skills are not activated by holding the A(X) or B(O) buttons down like you did in TTEOT. Instead you use the Left and Right trigger to activate them. When you´ve learnt a special skill you can make the same chain combos you did in TTEOT and the damage increases as well.

New for the series as far as I know is the rush meter, when you deal out damage or take damage this meter fills up, when it´s full you can use a rush combo that is a simple mini-game, press the right buttons that appear on screen and do massive damage to the enemy. Or you can just use this rush as a way of not being knocked down, you can attack without being interupted and more. At this point I do not know if you can make a MP kill, but I don´t think so.

You can circle your enemies easy, you can jump and so. Every character has his/her own style, Reimi with her bow stands at long range and fires arrows at her enemies, Lym uses her wand to throw magic at her enemies or spin around to multi hit attacks.

What you can also do is get the enemy target you, then hold the B button down, you see that the character starts charging up, when the right time comes press left on your controller and you will do a blindside attack, which basically means that you use your characters special move and get behind your enemy to get free strikes that are always critical.

There are also 3 different kinds of ways for you to fight. These are called “beats”. At this point I´ve forgotten what they are called except for “neutral” so you´ll have to excuse me.
One beat focuses on increasing your ATK/INT together with blindside damage. The other focuses on defense, increasing your HP, DEF and such parameters alont with giving you more time when you start the rush mode.

Then finally is the neutral version that is a combined of the other two´s levels mixed together without any kind of bonuses to either blindside or rush.

Certain enemies can counter blindsides. But you can either get a high enough level to withstand this or I think there was a certain way to counter this counter. But I´m not sure.

Graphics

Square-Enix has always been good at doing 3d figures. For some reason I find this kind of graphic dull. For all that it is worth it looks brilliant and great. But something just disturbs me with this style. Maybe it´s because the pretty big eyes. Or simply put, take animestyle, make that into 3d and well, it kinda looks ugly or for me something just feels off. But at the same time it´s good. Mixed feelings? Hell yes.

All in all

A classical cliche filled storyline along with characters that you´ve seen before. But what is great is the battle system. There are some stuff that is really well made. The part which I just played trough was sad as hell. But nothing that I hadn´t seen comming a mile away. So I´ll hope for good things in the future of this game. And above all, I need to learn the battle system better and remember what those beats is called.

If you want a good RPG though. Pick this up. It´s well worth the money you spend on it.

edit – Need to know the names correct before I start using them.