Caltrops - Reviews - Hour 20 update

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by FABIO 09/12/2004, 3:51am PDT

I think I'm finally getting the hang of item creation. The trick just seems to be waiting until the good inventors start popping up then recruiting them. Your own characters can't create shit though, which is kind of a shame.

The plot of both Star Ocean games is best described as a cycle of "hours of slowness, brief spurt of complete awesomeness". The plot is at its best when it gets back to the futuristic sci-fi/space/startrek elements, but for some reason is constantly going back to (and stays for most of the time) on the completely generic medieval fantasy parts; for every minute of space-faring battleships blasting the living hell out of planets there's an hour of fetching the mystical orb of bewilderment from the temple of banality. By hour 2 you're dying to get off the primitive backwater and back to the intergalatic space war, but no, you just got sent on another fantasy fetch quest. The motion picture equivalent would be The Phantom Menace where they spend half an hour on Tatooine befriending a kindergardener and pod racing instead of saving the galaxy.

So I guess the medieval part was just meant as filler. Fuck, there's so much filler in this game

Not really spoilers since they have no relevance to the overall plot anyways:

-Shopping with your plutonic girlfriend in the intro. Who the hell designed this? "Shopping" and "plutonic" are the two words most dreaded by the all important male demograph. The game wants you to feel bad when you're forcibly seperated from her, but "I'm a free man!" was all that came my mind.

-Your party is being pursued. Two NPC's (the first of many stupid weakling women doing dumb things you'll have to rescue them from) offer to create a diversion so you can escape and continue to your destination. The NPC's are captured and you get away. Halfway to your destination you decide to go back to the heavily guarded enemy base (thereby defeating the whole purpose of their effort to keep you out of danger) and rescue them. After a 2 hour dungeon you rescue them and continue on your way like nothing happened. Why even have this episode at all?

-Continuing on your way as you pray they get back to the sci-fi part, an old woman begs you to rescue her grand daughter (stupid weakling girl in need of rescuing #3) who collapsed while picking flowers in a forest. The forest ends up being about 10 miles, 3 dungeons, and 2 boss fights away. That's what you get for taking your daughter to pick flowers in a fucking WAR ZONE, bitch.

-Get told that you have to go fetch copper from a mine, which is all the way back where you started from. Rescue stupid weakling girls again along the way. (Wasn't there some big space war I had to get back to? I forget)

-Anemic/asthmatic flower picker girl decides it's a good idea to travel cross country on foot by herself. Collapses again. Rescue her, again.

-Immediately after a taking part in a huge fucking battle of a huge fucking war (and wanting more of it), carry out a mandatory fed-ex quest to reunite a girl with her long lost penpal. What the fuck?

-Just when it looks like the main plot is finally starting up again, get told that some holy artifact that had never been mentioned before in a shrine that had never been mentioned before is being stolen for no real reason. Go through a 2 hour dungeon to stop the theft of the meaningless artifact with no relevance to the plot and return to starting location to pick up where you left off.

So I guess the moral is that females are helpless and need to constantly be protected, and that everthing you do is ultimately about protecting helpless females. At least the game gives them all high cooking skills. Make me a sandwich!

Has there even been a futuristic, space-faring RPG since Phantasy Star? If you have a semi-original setting that hasn't been done to death, why sidetrack it into a fantasy plot so generic and directionless that it could have been dreamed up by Imari Stevenson?

I still don't hate the game. The good parts (gameplay) are good enough to keep me playing and have a decent enough time doing it (as opposed to the complete apathy I felt for Tales of Symphonia), but christ it could have been so much better if they left SO2's combat (mostly) intact and didn't have a committee of 13 year olds writing most of the story.

If this game was a woman, it would be the super hot one that leads you on into thinking you have a chance with her. Before you know it, you're shopping for shoes for with her, and for what? A quick peck on the cheek for spending an hour taking her dog to the vet. But you can't help it, she's too damn hot. You stick with it, because you know that someday, oh yes, someday, it'll happen.