Star Ocean: The Divine Force
Review
Stay out of the water
by Samuel Corey
reviewed on PC
No Faffing About
It's no secret that JRPGs tend to waste their players' time. Take your standard random encounter, where the player will usually be subjected to a screen wipe indicating the battle has begun, followed by a brief shot of the enemies in the battle. When the battle ends the game will again pause and show the player what gold and exp they earned while pointing out any items the monsters dropped before transitioning them back to the overland map. No one element of this sequence is really intolerable on its own but when you're playing a game that has several thousand of these encounters you begin to begrudge every wasted second.
It is laudable then when a JRPG dispenses with as much of this tedium as possible, and I haven't seen a JRPG more devoted to this end than Star Ocean: The Divine Force. The map has enemies strewn about it that you engage by approaching. The battle begins instantly and takes place on the same map that you were just exploring. When the battle ends the combat music stops playing immediately and EXP and gold are displayed in a tiny corner of the screen while the player is left free to get back to business. You can flee combat in the most intuitive way imaginable, just run from the enemies and if you get far enough from their spawn they will de-aggro and a message will flash on the screen telling you that you have escaped.
Naturally, there are drawbacks to this. In many cases, I had no idea just how many enemies I was fighting or sometimes even what type they were. Battles would end suddenly after defeating a particular enemy and I was left momentarily confused, thinking I was sure that I had counted more of them before the combat started. However, on the whole, it is a welcome change of pace from the traditional glacial pace of JRPG combat.
It's a shame that this is married to a flawed and tedious combat system. The combat here suffers from the usual problems of the genre, in that it is over-complicated by various systems. All the attacks are accompanied by flashy effects that look nice but make it difficult to actually tell what is going on. Good luck knowing when to dodge an enemy attack when they're half-hidden behind particle effects. Fortunately, combat is of only trivial difficulty, for the most part, making it more of a chore than anything else. Still, like with last year's Tales of Arise, boring combat in a JRPG can be redeemed by an intriguing story or compelling characters. Unfortunately, the story and characters are where Star Ocean: The Divine Force fails to deliver.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The game's story follows Raymond, a space merchant who crash lands on an alien world with a technology level roughly equivalent to medieval Europe or to be more accurate a Dragon Quest game. This is by no means a bad hook for a story. It gives us a fish-out-of-water viewpoint character who will need every relevant detail of the world's history, technology, and politics explained to him, very helpful for the audience who are just as ignorant of the world as him. It also opens interesting room for cultural misunderstandings and conflicts between the spaceman and the people he meets in Dragon Quest-land, as his values and belief are likely as alien as his person.
This latter opportunity is squandered almost immediately when Raymond is immediately met by Princess Laeticia and her butler/bodyguard Albaird and the group team up instantly with very little discussion or debate. For the first five or so minutes, Albaird is slightly suspicious of the literal alien that is tagging along but he comes around before you even get to the first town. Later on, when Raymond discovers there's another escape pod carrying one of his crew-mates, it just so happens to land right next to the place Laeticia and Albaird were already heading, meaning there's no reason for the group to stop and debate about what objective they need to prioritize. It's a wasted opportunity to use the internal conflict to better characterize and define these figures.
The game also has a bad habit of keeping the player at arm's length from the characters, their motivations, and the world they inhabit. For instance, at the start of the game, we know that Laeticia is seeking the wise-man Midis, but we have no idea why. It will be hours before the game lets us know that it is to prevent some kind of disaster but again the game is in no rush to tell us just what this disaster is. I'm not saying that I need a half-hour-long info dump or an opening text crawl explaining the premise but it would be nice if I was given some inkling as to what is happening in this world. Hell, I would settle for a few lines of dialogue from NPCs in the towns that drop hints about the larger stakes of the story but unfortunately the only people I can talk to there are either trying to sell me something or play a card game.
None of this is helped by the fish-eyed, doll-like character models that struggle to emote. I feel bad for the poor voice actors because while they are generally doing a serviceable job delivering their lines, but their in-game avatars are absolutely botching any physical delivery. Part of this, no doubt, is the minimal animations during story sequences, but there is something about their faces that is strangely off-putting as well. Add to this the fact that every character design is offensively over-complicated and I was left in the position of not understanding the characters and not wanting to look at them either.
Open World Lite
I have seen this game described as an "Open World", which is categorically untrue. While the level design has a degree of openness to them, giving the player multiple routes to reach their objective they are still decidedly structured. There is no seeing a mountain off in the distance and walking until you reach its summit. This is not a complaint, as I tend to prefer a smaller, crafted level with multiple pathways to a sprawling sandbox with little structure or logic. It helps that the game gives you some interesting travel mechanics to get around as well.
After the first boss, you get a mechanical device that follows you around and allows you to fly for short periods of time, which is probably the single most enjoyable part of the whole game. I never got tired of zipping up cliff faces or floating onto the weird hovering islands that inexplicably dot the landscape. The game encourages this by sprinkling upgrade tokens and items but if I'm being honest I probably would have done it without them.
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6.0
fun score
Pros
Dispenses with a lot of time wasting and tedium associated with the genre, Movement mechanics are fun
Cons
Combat is dull and repetitive, Story and characters fail to grab attention, Character designs are too busy.
