I did a rather dumb thing last night and went ahead and finished Star Ocean 4 when I really just should have gone to bed. Hurray for seemingly endless dungeons with a derth of save points. (Isn't the save point mechanic one of the worst things to come out of the consoles...ever?)
So, I really don't have a lot to say about the game. I liked it, but for the most part there isn't much really to say about it. The game's story was haphazard, and towards the end got needlessly talky and rather out there in regards to plot. I generally liked the characters, with some caveats.
Edge was OK, until he turned all emo.
Reimi was OK, but too passive and unsure of herself. Still there were some pretty funny scenes with her. Very powerful in combat.
Lymle sucked, 'kay?
Faize was a bland annoying twit. There was so much they could have done with this character too, but they didn't.
Myuria, the hot red head elf chick. Was devistatingly powerful in combat and otherwise a total man-slut who had no real purpose in the game.
Arumant...Faize's replacement, and he isn't really all that better of a character.
Sarah...wtf don't even get me started.
Bacchus is fairly cool. Not very important story wise, but he's got a very good mix of abilities and was fun to use in combat
Hmm, ok, maybe I didn't really like the characters so much. Still Reimi, Myuria, and Baccus were fairly cool.
As I write this, I'm actually having a hard time describing -why- I liked it. And that sounds like a back-handed insult to the game, but it's really not that bad. It has a fun combat system, and lots of stuff to find and explore. It has a central mystery that the game ignores for large parts of the game, and a general plot revelation that is quite out of left field even though it is also completely telegraphed.
I spent a lot of effort trying to get all of the endings, and was completely disappointed with every one of them. But it also means that I pretty much saw everything there was to see in the game in regards to story. Though I did skip some end-game quests and chests, mostly because by that point I was just ready to be done with the game.
I never messed much with item crafting, or synthesis. Not doing so did not really affect the game. Due to some farming I did, I was way overpowered in regards to level compared to what the game expected (I entered the last dungeon at level 92)...it was so easy to get a 120% xp bonus and chain it for hours that near the end I was regularly getting 20-30k xps per fight.
One other thing...what was up with group SPs? I couldn't figure out how to spend them, and by the end of the game had close to 20,000. During the discovery process I maybe used 200 total? Were SPs used in Item Synthesis maybe?
Ahem, anyway...
The main draw of the game was the more action-oriented combat system, which was more complex and engaging that a lot of other RPGs, without bogging it down and making it too slow. Fights could be completely pretty quickly, especially if you slightly out-leveled the content (and it was very easy to stay ahead of the curve). It actually may have been TOO fast, as combats typically didn't require much character switching.
To me, the combat system HEAVILY favored the ranged characters. Which is why I generally used Reimi, and then later Myuria and Bacchus; all of which are very good at ranged combat (so is Lymle, but I couldn't stand her, 'kay?'). Considering that it was easily to have your bonus board broken when using melee, the game actually punished being melee. I'm not saying that melee characters weren't powerful in the game--they were...but ranged gave more options, more control, and was generally safer.
So, thinking about it, I'm going to give the game a B-. The game had a solid and fun combat system. There was a lot of interesting exploration possible in the game. And the story was ok, if bland and fragmented it was at least not offensive (except Edge's Emo stint). And while the characters themselves didn't really appeal to me, only Faize and Lymle were actively disliked. The others just didn't add much to the story, which admittedly had a hard time coming to a point in the first place.
The general suckiness of the 'secret' hidden endings though, really disappointed me. Considering how many cut scenes were in the game and how much pointless exposition was wasted, I was really expecting more than a few 1 minute shorts regarding the fates of each character. But, oh well.
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