FABIO wrote:


-4 player mode

This part is pretty wonky. First of all, you don't start off or always have 4 characters in your party. In fact in the first hour you're going to frequently have less than 4. Those extra people are going to have nothing to do when the story reduces yours party. Characters also hop in and out of your party frequently so it's impossible to pick a favorite and stick with him.

Now here's a big boo boo. In fact, I think I must be mistaking on it because it's such a glaring gameplay flaw. You see, the controller port determines who controls which character. Port 1 controls whomever is in the first position, port 2 the second, etc. It seems that you CANNOT SWITCH WHICH CHARACTER YOU CONTROL DURING COMBAT. You can switch wheter a character is human or AI controlled, but you cannot change which character you're manually controlling. If you want to switch to the magic user so you can cast a specific spell, you're fucked. If the character you're controlling is killed, you're fucked. Actually, there is a gay way around this: just pause the game, and plug the controller(s) into a different port, then switch your old character to AI controlled and your current character to human control. What unnacceptably retarded bullshit is this? In Star Ocean 2 you switched party members with the press of a button with the AI taking over for the character you weren't controlling. Again, I'd like to think that there IS a way to switch characters and I just can't find it (no instructions with my rented copy), but pushing all the buttons on the controller yielded nothing. This is a huge goddamn design oversight.