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tar Ocean: Till the End of Time opens with a long, beautiful cinematic that establishes the setting as an Earth future where skyways, flying cars, huge space stations and interplanetary travel are all the norm. The action of the game begins on the resort planet of Hyda IV. There players take the role of college student Fayt Leingod, who is vacationing with his best friend, Sophia Esteed, and his famous scientist parents, Robert and Ryoko. Players get to do a little poking around the hotel before the planet is attacked. While fleeing, Fayt is separated from his family and friend and marooned on the technologically backward world. From this point, Fayt battles his pursuers, tries to find a way home, and unravels the mystery of who the attackers are.
The story of Star Ocean plays out in many long cinematic graphics and many more in-game engine cutscenes. As Fayt, players will have to talk to many non-player characters in order to trigger the cutscenes and move the game's action to the next point. The next point is often a chance to fight, an activity that takes place in real time. The spoils of combat are experience (used to level up the characters), advances in the story, and trophies that unlock even more skills, features and content.
All games, and particularly all RPGs, allow players to pick and choose how much of the game's content they want to enjoy. Star Ocean is no exception, but one of its differences from other Japanese RPGs particularly can completely change a player's experience of the game. That difference is that there are no random encounters. All the monsters are marked on the map, and, with careful travel, players can avoid many of them. Avoiding monsters, however, makes fighting the ones who cannot be avoided much harder, because the characters don't level up as much or earn as many trophies to unlock special abilities. The less of the game the player plays, the harder the game is.
Two full disks of adventure
The thing to keep in mind about Star Ocean is that it is big. Two full disks, 40 hours of gameplay, although you really need 80 to see it all. This point is brought home right off the bat when the game complains that it needs more room on the memory chip to store saved games. Players should have an empty chip on hand, because they are going to want to save this game. In fact, they are going to want to save it far more often than the game allows. Thankfully, players can set the game options to let them skip the cutscenes, but if Fayt dies in battle, there will often be more than one fight that has to be redone before the player can try again.
Luckily, the fighting is robust, varied and easy to control. The player can map up to eight attacks to four buttons; each button launches a different attack, depending on how far the character is from the target. In addition, each character gets up to six skills. The player can change instantly which character they control by pushing one of the shoulder buttons, but this is largely only necessary to activate the various healing powers. The AI does a good job of fighting the other characters, and players can set the characters to fight in different formations, which facilitates the chaining and combining of attacks and skills. It takes some planning and some trial and error, but when the characters are combined the right way, they are amazingly powerful and fun to play.
Fans of the big-eye, strange-hair-color, clean-line style of anime will like the look of Star Ocean. The backgrounds are equally stylized, but with enough detail to fit the story. Voice acting is unremarkable. The view is adjustable all the way through 360 degrees, but the camera is at a fixed height and angle, which is aesthetically annoying but doesn't affect the gameplay. The plot is much deeper, with many more twists and turns than players would expect from the game's setup.
Players who can commit themselves to the time it takes play out every nook and cranny of this game will ultimately enjoy it more than those who rush through, and not just because they'll get to see more of the 10 possible endings.
Personally, I wish more of the game had taken place in space, in the high-tech environments of the Pangalactic Federation. These environments felt newer and fresher to me than the low-tech planetary setting where Fayt spends most of the game. — Eric
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