Star Ocean and why I have a headache
This started as a standalone discussion of Star Ocean The Last Hope, then dovetailed into a frank discussion of why my favorite sci fi fantasy series is actually kinda dogshit. The essay is still about how the series routinely does its women dirty even if it’s trying very hard to be very woke actually. And then it turns into a more heartfelt thing about why I liked the series so much and why The Last Hope actually hurt to play.
Bear with me. It’s me, I’m Bear, now BEAR with me! And if I hear anyone using this essay as proof that anti-feminists are the real feminists I will shove them out the nearest airlock! Bye bye dipshits!
Star Ocean The Last Hope puts us in the shoes of Hero Protagonist... I mean... Edge Maverick, followed by his childhood friend and reliable partner when the writing isn’t fucking her over, Reimi Sainoji.
It’s the prequel to the entire series, more or less. Humanity is just ranging out into the stars with the help of an advanced society of aliens who look kind of elvish, after blowing our own planet to kingdom come, but... World War 3 ended in hours, and within weeks, the nations of the world united as the Greater United Nations.
This is the start of a project about how Star Ocean routinely fucks over the women in game. Not intentionally, there’s... usually other intentions behind the way they’re written, but there is an unfortunate trend outside of two of the games in the series I’ve played to drop the ball with those women in ways I have legitimately never seen before even in works that were trying their hardest to be sexist. Which is something I say as probably the most ardent fan of this series that you will ever meet.
Talking about these is not going to be in “Story Order”, though I am starting with The Last Hope while I also play The Divine Force because they’re the entire two games in the series I haven’t beaten that are on PC.
I’m also playing Star Ocean Integrity and Faithlessness on my PS4 when I don’t have access to my PC.
When I say Star Ocean is Japan's answer to Fallout I am being facetious, but the idea that every country decided to pull a ceasefire after WW3 started in the 2060s and ended in two weeks when an EMP strike detonated Every Nuke On Earth, and by 2087 they had formed the Greater United Nations and started the Last Hope Initiative and ranged off into the stars to try and bring back resources to restore Earth's climate and establish colonies specifically on uninhabited planets until such time that Earth could be restored...I don't think American or European produced media would have that take on nuclear war.
But yeah, you’re star trekkin’ across the universe! You hope things get better but they’re probably getting worse. We set out with a crew of three. Edge, Reimi, and an elf twink I mean Eldarian Twink named Faize.
Early on it’s clear that the universe is favoring Edge Maverick. It’s treating him like a protagonist. Reimi is quick to actually call this out, and say things like “This is no fun at all!” watching Edge have things just randomly make him “special” by happenstance... And it’s the text. Not some metacommentary on a developer level. It’s almost drakkengard esque? Except the commentary is the text, and Edge isn’t a murder obsessed madman. He’s a well meaning kind of guy who makes things a lot worse from his place of privilege when he tries to help “Underdeveloped Planets” with Earth’s advanced technology and his abilities.
Outside of the story.... the gameplay is rough, kind of? Given Star Ocean Til The End of Time, for all of its many many many many many faults... nailed down things like “Controlling a camera in a 3D space” and “The place the camera sits doesn’t make movement occasionally miserable”, I really have no idea what happened here. The easily accessible today on Steam and PS4 “4K and Full HD remaster” can’t have introduced these problems but I really have no access to a vintage PS3 or Xbox 360 copy, but as I’m sprinting through a dungeon to try and get to the end, the camera jitters uncomfortably and is way too low to the ground. It gets dizzying to play. I don’t get motion sick in games!
I did remember things very wrong when I was coming back to this game, though. This is a story about Edge Maverick fucking up. A lot. but without the judgment someone with tons of spacefaring experience would have cast on them.
Because they legitimately just don’t know what they’re doing. And it seems like other spacefarers have shown up in some places, and thrown things out of whack before Edge even gets there. But them not knowing what they’re doing isn’t a dig, it isn’t a flaw... it’s the point of the story.
The first planet you visit is pretty innocuous, but I’m not going to go into it because I have to stop this one here. I can’t keep playing this game. They fucked up the camera worse than any 3D JRPG ever has, I think. I don’t get motion sick in games but this one is making me motion sick! I’ll see if there’s some kind of fan fix or something but as of now, I’m putting this note here for posterity, and if I ramble on a bit after then post this, you know I couldn’t find a fix.
Found a fix. Kind of. The aspect ratio was the problem, the camera’s still awkward as hell but I’m not getting motion sick.
I decided I wasn’t going to finish Star Ocean The Last Hope, because it was around this time I realized how goddamn SKUNCHED this entire series is. How skrunkly it is. It’s kind of a scrimbly mipo. Maybe even a mipy. Know what I mean? Of course you don’t even I don’t. Last Hope isn’t awful but the general jank and performances from Japanese voice actors that sound completely phoned in or the enthusiastic but genuinely dire voice acting from the American dub that Matt Mercer confirmed had next to no direction or context for their lines... I wasn’t really having any fun.
The series, as a whole, though?
It’s one of the biggest mixed bags of all time. One of my favorite games of all time tops off the first duology, available as “First Depature R” and a REALLY half assed HD2D remake called Second Story R. Second Story R is visually lazy (the original sprites from the PSX version without any kind of changes, but weird 3D environments that feel like they were doing a full 3D remake and ran out of budget?) but the gameplay overhauls make it the genuinely definitive edition of the game. You can’t accidentally make Gabriel remove his limiter by talking to a random NPC with no context until New Game Plus, which means you might actually be strong enough to fight him.
When I first played the PSX version, there WAS no new game plus, and “Indalecio” was so fucking strong that the devs of the PSP remake realized you might actually need a New Game Plus to get strong enough to fight him but not that the NPC you talked to in the first half of the game (very early on) to remove the limiter was a bad idea to have available on your first run.
We’re going to pivot from focusing on The Last Hope to the worst game in the franchise.
The games still tend more towards being at least good enough that you put up with the bad parts. Except for one. Except for my least favorite game of all time.
I don’t wanna talk about Star Ocean 3. I really fucking don’t. I’m going to. It hurts. Ogh. My life is slipping away I am jettisoning myself into deep space with my own blood gushing from the open would this game left in my common sense.
Star Ocean: Til The End of Time is a divisive game. It’s either someone’s favorite, they ignore it, or it ruined the whole franchise for them. For me it’s kind of in between ignoring it or ruining the entire franchise. I’m not gonna bury the lede here... It’s my least favorite game. Full stop. So not nice I said it twice.
The second disc starts a quick descent into insanity from what had been a mediocre but compelling story about two guys stuck on a planet that might not be as underdeveloped as they thought because of a place called “Greeton”, that is apparently advanced enough that their space ship crashing into a medieval german style town was explained easily by the planet’s populace as “Some new device from Greeton”.
This entire plot thread is dropped and we never actually learn anything about Greeton. We just start actively fighting in the war against Airyglyph... which has no greater meaning. It’s just a conflict between two countries. An actual war, on a planet that’s around the level of medieval europe.
This is still me talking about how in an effort to be Very Feminist Actually the women in the game are getting fucked over. The one game where women don’t get routinely fucked over (that I’ve played all the way through, The Divine Force is getting a pass because I haven’t finished it yet.) is Star Ocean 2.
Reimi got consistently screwed in The Last Hope but at least she was there. Sophia in Star Ocean 3? The game spends a stupidly long, horribly boring intro setting up her and Fayt’s friendship only to put her on a bus for 3/4ths of the game.
The kicker is she’s the game’s only dedicated healer. She’s the game’s only dedicated symbologist as far as I know. Enjoy not even thinking about her for 50 hours.
Anyway within a few hours of rescuing her from the alien fleet that invades the planet you’re stuck on and getting back into space you’re greeted with lovecraftian bullshit that turns into “WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS AN MMORPG?!” and it gets dismissed by a character saying “Well, I think, therefore I am, right?” and then you go to the Real World and you beat up some employees as Sphere company and then you go back into the game, the server room is IN THE GAME somehow and then you kill the CEO in the server room and you believe hard enough and become real (the other employees keep the servers on).
This takes place in the space of about 7 to 10 hours. It’s less than one third of the total playtime of the entire game. The focus on specifically “Sphere Company” as the evil corporation is... suspicious? It feels like venting about the Square Enix merger, even though Enix is a publisher that regularly fucked Tri Ace. But also it seems too... planned out to genuinely be the devs ventposting about the merger. It just reads as something very very poorly written that the devs planned out way too thoroughly and realized they didn’t have time to fully plan out.
It’s genuinely perplexing writing. On the level of Faize’s writing in The Last Hope, but Faize is at least... somewhat realistically reacting to his surroundings and stimulus. Faize betraying the party being telegraphed feels like “These guys didn’t even take me seriously after my entire species was almost annihilated!”
With the plot twist that the twunk with the beam scythe who looks evil is fine? I dunno, man. I’m kind of signing off of The Last Hope for this writeup as soon as the plot gets started 36 hours in because Faize gets treated like a whipping boy and then the writing seems to think he’s unreasonable for not liking it?
I’m gonna go on another tonal shift here because we’re 1900 words in and I’d like to talk about why I liked Star Ocean 2 so much. Star Ocean First Departure on PSP managed to capture the same feeling, too.
Frankly, it’s the novelty of an RPG not just being modern-ish still weirdly outdated fantasy (FF7, FF8, though at least FF8 had storyline reasons for it being weirdly backwards in terms of communications tech.) but actually sci fi. Well. Sci-fantasy. Symbology is just... a thing in the setting, too, though I don’t know if the ‘Claude discovering symbology via Rena healing him’ was a real thing, or the translation on the PSX version was just bugfuck awful... I’m erring on the side of bugfuck awful translation on account of Roak being a member of the Federation after the first game as the move that made Ronyx Kenny’s career, and the fact that they had symbology... but there is a thing where Rena’s HEALING symbology is weird and like nothing they’ve ever seen on Expel (the planet Star Ocean 2’s first half takes place on) but Millie and other characters from Roak had healing symbols.
Which is to say
Tri Ace is pretty sloppy with their canon a lot of the time even in their good games. I dunno if I’m gonna continue The Last Hope to be honest. It’s got a compelling story but the exploration is unpleasant because of the camera and the combat is very... run of the mill. THE DIVINE FORCE (All caps on my steam library and on the store page) is actually fun to play and traverse, and the story is... it’s pulling me along so far. I have no idea what went wrong with The Last Hope’s... everything? Maybe I’ll use some cheats to blast through it for the story at some point.
I’m probably going to focus on something other than Star Ocean for a bit because I’m actually upset from how I was getting simulation sickness from playing The Last Hope. My old save is 36 hours into the game so it must be some kind of recent development with my eye issues. This one got weird and ends abruptly.
That’s just how it goes sometimes. Intent doesn’t match what’s there, I guess? I really want to comment more on Edge, though, so I might just power through it. We’re almost at 2500 words though and I wanna do anything else right now.
Byeeeee nerds