Caltrops - Reviews - Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Rambling review

Forum Overview :: Reviews

by FABIO 09/10/2004, 5:57pm PDT

Kabuke wrote:

So is it worse than Star Ocean 2 or that new Tales game?

I wouldn't use any form of the word "bad" with SO2 (except the slow beginning maybe), but Tales of Symphonia was definately worse.

SO3 is okay decent so far, with signs that it'll get better, but it sets an all time record of the SLOWEST GODDAMN START IN THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES. I mean, SO2 took awhile to get going, but the slow beginning lasted 5 hours at the most.

In SO3:

-At the 15 hour mark you still have only the most basic of magic spells (and even then only one character gets them): healing and variations of the "firebolt" spell, which is so basic it was obsolete in SO2 before you even got it.

-The item creation system, a huge part in SO2, is not even available until hour 10. At hour 15 I still have yet to sucessfully create a single item. You also must be at an appropriate "workshop" in a town to create items (you could do it anywhere in SO2). Modifying existing items is supposed to be easier, but every workshop says I can't do that there.

- At 9 hours, I still had the same 3 people in my party. At 13 hours, a fourth offered to join but was so damned annoying that most players will refuse to let him join. At 15 hours, a fifth forcibly joins but isn't very useful.

This game also dethrones System Shock 2 as having the most sidetracking from the main plot ever. You'll get a new quest that sidetracks you from the current one, then 10 minutes later get another quest that sidetracks you from the previous sidetrack, and so on. Imagine if Dragon Warrior started off with the king telling you to "go defeat the Dragonlord". You set out but get lost and stranded in a mountain range where you meet a primitive tribe of mountain pigmies. You eventually manage to find your way out of the mountains where you immediately get lost in another set of mountains with another primitive race of pigmies that are at war with other pigmies. They beg for your help in fighting the other pigmies and you get dragged into their war for 10 hours (getting sidetracked from the actual war numerous times along the way) until you've forgetton all about the Dragonlord.

Most of the plot, dialog, and quests feel like filler just to make the game last longer. Remember that part in the first Lord of the RIngs movie where they decided to go through the montains instead of Moria, then after 10 minutes said "fuck it" and went through the mines anyways? You're going to be doing a lot of the same here.

In fact, the plot is the EXACT same as SO2 only padded out so it takes 3 times as long. They're so exactly alike, that they couldn't be bothered to even think up new character names and just started recycling them. Highlight the vague spoilers below to see just how exactly alike (if you've already played SO2 though, these won't really be spoilers).

SO2- Start off as a citizen in a technologically advanced galactic federation. Become stranded on a primitive midieval planet where you meet a pointed ear elf girl named Rena, who you rescue from a bandit. Then embark on a quest where you'll travel to a kingdom at war which you get caught up in.

SO3- Start off as a citizen in a technologically advanced galactic federation that gets plunged into a war. Become stranded on a primitive midieval planet where you meet a pointed ear elf girl named Meena, who you rescue from a bandit. Then get rescued from the planet only to get stranded (by the exact same means as the first time) on ANOTHER primitive midieval planet, where you get caught up in a war.

SO2- Meet some sorcerer chick and get taken to see the king, who begs you to help their kingdom. The kingdom is working on a secret weapon, a giant cannon that fires magical energy (yawn). The cannon's designer, Leon, asks you to recover ore from a mine so he can complete it. The kingdom is invaded and you must fend off hordes of enemies to buy time for the cannon to be completed.

SO3- Meet some sorcerer chick and get taken to see the queen (getting sidetracked half a dozen times along the way, mostly from constantly having to rescue numerious inept, weakling girls that you keep running into), who begs you to help their kingdom. The kingdom is working on a secret weapon, a giant cannon that fires magical energy (double yawn). The cannon's designer, Dion, asks you to recover ore from a mine so he can complete it. The kingdom is invaded and you must fend off hordes of enemies to buy time for the cannon to be completed.

The gamefaqs review I linked to tells most of the story, but here are a few points I thought he was either wrong on or didn't emphasize enough.

Graphics- Everyone is saying how gorgeous these graphics are. They're really only half right. The backgrounds are gorgeous at times (sometimes not), but the character models are awful and look like they were taken from a four year old PS2 launch title (Square's The Bouncer comes to mind).

I feel bad for the artist who made the gorgeous backgrounds, because you will almost NEVER LOOK AT THEM. The travelling camera is set too high up and a lot of the time you can't get a good look at your character because they're blocked by a house or whatever. There is a very excellent mini map though and 95% of the time you'll be looking at that instead of the actual screen with its gorgeous models. The only time you'll look away from the map is when you find a treasure chest.

Voices- There is voice for all scripted events. You can turn them off, which I did. It's not that the voice acting itself is bad (it does the job, although every once in awhile you'll run into an extremely annoying high-pitched female), it's that it seems like they originally made it all text then threw in voices at the last minute and did a poor job integrating it. The characters will talk, but will go overboard with exaggerated gestures like nodding and shrugging so that it seems like an old silent film (or "silent RPG" like Final Fantasy 7-9) where they're trying to compensate for no sound, only there is sound. Going with all voices also doesn't work because every "shot" is framed with the idea that there's going to be a big block of text somewhere; turn off the subtitles and there's going to be a lot of odd looking wasted space everywhere.

Voices will also progress haltingly, like the game was waiting for the player to hit a button to continue the dialog, or everyone will wait until someone is finished with the prolonged shrugging before speaking.

The biggest problem though, is that half the time you can't even hear what anyone's saying. Often the music or ambient sound will drown out speech, just like a DVD movie. This is also the first game I've seen in years where you can't seperately adjust volumes for speech, sound effects, and music, so you can't fix the problem there.

Music- Game Informer magazine called this "easily the worst RPG score I've ever heard" and claimed that you'd scramble for the mute button whenever the music started up. I have no clue what game they played. The absolute worst you could call this game's music would be "forgettable". There have been 2 good bits so far, but the rest I've forgotten. Nothing I'd call bad, but I'm still disappointed since SO2 had the best music outside of a Squaresoft game.

Combat- Holy shit you miss a lot. You have to wind up for attacks. Half the time the monster will have moved out of the way by the time you swing.

They also threw in a stamina bar, which goes down as you attack and refills as you stand still. This probably sounded good on paper where the element would add strategy to battles, but really all it does is make you stand still for a couple seconds after attacking. Ask anyone who loved SO2 what their favorite part was, and most of them would answer "the fast paced combat". So why on earth would you add a stamina bar that slows it down?

The combat party size went down from four in SO2 to three in SO3. What is it with ever shrinking combat parties in RPG's? Is it really THAT tough to render an extra one or two 3D characters?

It can be hard at times to pick your character out from the background during combat since you are no longer dealing with the bright sprites of SO2.

There's a "quick sidestep" move you can do similar to the one in Tales of Symponia. I guess the idea is to quickly dodge an attack then counter. After the tutorial that taught it I have NEVER used it. You can move around normally just as fast (maybe even faster) to dodge so there's really no point. It's also too awkward to use effectively: hold down the L2 button then a direction (which means you'll fail to trigger it half the time), or push the arrow pad (too awkward to take your hand off the analog stick to the pad when you're zipping around during a fight and have to suddenly dodge at a split second).

There are 2 different modes of targetting that should have been combined but for some reason were kept seperate and exclusive. You can either just have it automatically target whichever enemy is closest. This is great for fast paced melee but bad when you want to cast spells or attack a certain enemy from a distance. You can also manually target by holding down a button and cycling through the enemies, but the game doesn't pause during this (like it did in SO2) which makes it bad for fast paced melee but good for long distance. You have to pick one mode or the other and can't change it during combat. Why the heck couldn't they do both? Why can't I have my chocolate WITH my peanut butter?

Combat voices are now just sort of wacky instead of the "holy shit I can't believe that's coming from an actual person" wackiness of SO2. :(

Non-combat stuff- There was a shitload of non-combat skills you could spend points on in SO2. Here you just spend points on HP/MP, attack, and defense. There doesn't seem to be a way to inprove your item creation skills, which is depressing because I can't create a damned thing right now.

Characters- In SO2, you could split up in towns. You'd bump into your party memebers doing their own thing and occasionally you'd have scripted events with them where you could choose a response and affect whether they despised or loved you. On the surface it seemed gay but really grew on you. In SO3 you still split up, but you mostly just get a curt response from your party (the whole 2 other members I still had up to hour 14). I think there have been a total of 4 dialog choices so far in the 15 hours I've played.

Some of the characters seem like they just join for the hell of it, and have no place being epic warriors (annoying furry children, annoying little girl gypsy), which gives me that sinking feeling that I'm playing Chrono Cross again. :(

Misc.- Sometimes you have to go to some arbitrary location in a town or whatever to advance the plot. More wandering around trying to make this happen than there should be.

The mini-map shows locations of exits, NPC's, and monsters, but nothing else. You'll be looking at the minimap for navigation most of the time and grow so reliant on it that it's easy to miss treasure chests or other important objects.

POSITIVES! :)

I don't hate the game though. It's okay-decent.

The combat is mostly similar to SO3, except for the stamina bar and annoying wind up time that causes you to whiff too much.

The item creation system seems like it could be cool. You can invent new items (or find them in treasure chests) and patent them for sale around the world and you get a cut of the profits. So far I've patented "winking sage cider", which sounds like slang for "semen". People are paying me royalties to gulp down bottled semen, which is awesome.

There is a shitload of a variety of different items you can find, use, sell, and create just like in SO2.

There's a cool bonus battle gauge that fills up as you hit enemies. When it fills up you enter bonus battle mode and get bonuses like +300% experience or +200% money. The gauge resets if you run away or take a critical hit. The more consecutive bonus battles you fight the more bonuses you start getting. This really speeds up levelling if you're kicking ass.

You don't make all your money from fighting monsters. In fact, I'd say only 15% of the money I've made was from that. The rest has been from finding hidden treasure chests and selling valuable items I've found. Presumably when I start inventing and patenting stuff I'll make dough from that. I really like this new RPG economic model.

15 hour verdict- It feels like the Square side of Squre-Enix recycled SO2's plot and tried to "improve" it by padding it out with overly long conversations and pointless quests, then stuck it all on the Xenosaga engine to save money. Then the Enix side scrambled to fix it by injecting as much fun gameplay as possible before it slipped out the door and were 50% successful.

If you liked Tales of Symphonia, you'll like this more (the biggest point that gamefaqs review got wrong was calling ToS a masterpiece compared to this). If you like gameplay over plot in your RPG's and/or are sick of Final Fantasy's "red rover" static line combat then you'll like this. If you absolutely cannot stand going through slow beginnings (shopping with your plutonic girlfriend!) then you'll hate it. If you value plot above all else and want memorable characters to pretend you're friends with while totally scoring with the blue/pink haired love interest, then you'll hate this.