Star Ocean: Till the End of Time / YMMV

Alternate Character Interpretation: The interesting default spread for party member affection points gave rise to some of this, despite most of it never really coming up in character interactions. Does Maria have such high AP for Albel because All Girls Want Bad Boys, or is it because she didn't really know him as an enemy and thus he made a more benign first impression on her? Nel has pitifully low AP for Albel — with good reason — but Albel has very high AP for Nel. Amazon Chaser or Villain Respect?
Ass Pull: The plot twist. Besides the implications it has for the entire series, it also comes right out of nowhere with almost no foreshadowing, which further compounds the ire it tends to get.
Awesome Music:
- "Cutting Edge of Notion". This battle theme can get you pumped up for each and every battle.
- "The Divine Spirit of Language". Doubles as Autobots, Rock Out!, but it's nonetheless an excellent, high-energy battle track.
- "Highbrow" is an impressive, 10-minutes long piece of art. It is to be expected when Motoi Sakuraba is doing the composing.
- "Mission to the Deep Space" is the song that plays in almost all of the bonus dungeons.
Base-Breaking Character: While there are those who find Peppita annoying, she has a dedicated fanbase who like her quirky skills. She can do a surprising amount of damage using a few exploits of the game's AI, but she still won't outdamage Cliff or Maria most of the time. Some just dislike how late in the game she joins the group, and how removed from the plot she is when she finally does join.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Right as the party is about to enter the Urssa Lava Caves, a strange floating boy, who turns out to use wind attacks, comes out of entrance and challenges the group to the fight out of nowhere. He has no bearing to the plot and, after the fight, the game continues on like nothing ever happened. It doesn't help that he's an annoying boss due to That One Attack.
Broken Base: The infamous big plot twist that the characters are in an In-Universe MMORPG. Some fans hate it because not only it is an Ass Pull for this game, but it is also a retroactive one for the entire series that makes the rest of it feel pointless, since none of it was real anyway. Others have praised for being daring and exploring a subject that is rarely touched upon. A third group believes that the plot twist would have been better if it was either handled differently or featured in a standalone game instead of retroactively applying a drastic change to an already-established setting. Fans who jumped onto the franchise with this game tend to not see what the issue is.
Critical Dissonance: This game is disliked by quite a bit of fans for the unwieldy changes to gameplay, Sequel Difficulty Spike, and infamous plot twist that retcons the entire universe into an in-universe game. However, it has an 80 on Metacritic, which is tied with fan favorite The Second Story for most highly rated game in the series.
Demonic Spider: The spider-like tank enemies are very aggravating to deal with. Not only are their missiles big and powerful, but they're fast and capable of homing in directly on your party. Their strong attacks also come out faster than you would expect, meaning you can't abuse the stun aura against them.
Die for Our Ship: Sophia receives this treatment most of the time from fans that wish to pair Fayt with someone else.
Difficulty Spike: Disc 2 is absolutely brutal with the amount of strong enemies the game throws at you, starting at Moonbase. Their attacks can shred through your characters' HP in mere seconds, even at high levels. To top things off, they'll also replace the weaker enemies on Elicoor II. This makes grinding for Sophia and Peppita, who join at level 1, much more difficult.
Draco in Leather Pants: Many fanfiction revolving around Albel tend to downplay his negative personality traits.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Clair is pretty popular considering that she never joins the party. She ended up being playable in Star Ocean: Anamnesis, as a 5-Star Galaxy Rare character.
- Welch Vineyard, so much so that she was retroactively added as a playable character in the remakes of the first two games.
Esoteric Happy Ending: Sure, Fayt & friends saved the whole universe from being deleted by Luther. However, the whole Pangalactic Federation is still gone. Even if it's seen as 'an antagonist being beaten' by Maria's Quark (which is afterwards disbanded), this has the side-effect of the galactic civilization taking a huge blow in development and more likely will face an development stunt in the future without the Pangalactic Federation managing things. The galaxy will still face an uncertain future because the 4D beings' destruction of the Pangalactic Federation is not undone.
Fan-Preferred Couple:
- Albel has three big ones: AlbelxFayt (speaks for itself), AlbelxNel (pairing the two Elicoorians, who for bonus points were bitter enemies throughout most of Disc 1), or AlbelxMaria, who's more or less the only party member who doesn't inherently dislike or openly disparage him. From a meta standpoint, Maria starts off with bizarrely high affection points for him while Albel has a high initial affection score for Nel that she very much does not reciprocate.
- On a (mostly) non-romantic note, the FaytxCliff ending is usually seen as the most satisfying since it actually goes into what the post-game world would actually be like following everything that happened.
Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
Goddamn Bats: The 4D soldiers sport very little health, but they often come in swarms and attack by constantly shooting at you. They can fire at you from long ranges while their shots can easily stun you in addition to doing moderate damage. Their shots can also even break your MAX fury auras.
Harsher in Hindsight: Lots of people give Fayt grief for his insistence on the obeying the UP3; it's a running gag. When you play The Last Hope, which explains the reason why the UP3 was established (Edge shared antimatter technology with an alternate Earth in their 1957, which led to the planet being utterly destroyed by a Mad Scientist that misused it, severely traumatizing him in the process), all that joking is no longer funny and Fayt comes off as the most reasonable of the bunch.
Ho Yay:
- Albel and Fayt, especially if you get their ending together.
- Fayt and Cliff too for the first half or so of Elicoor. Just watch their duplicates in the Urssa Cave Temple.
- Nel and Clair. At one point, they share a hug, which the manga adaptation played up with both of them blushing and staring into each other's eyes.
Inferred Holocaust: Luther did successfully wipe the Eternal Sphere- only for it to be restored and made practically its own independent reality. What will happen without 4D Beings moderating the universe? Is it "the same" as the simulated universe that was erased by technicality? No one really dwells on it nor does the ending really give much consideration to dwell on it; as far as the heroes are concerned, they saved their universe and that's all that mattered. The manga goes the extra step to clarify that a data backup was restored instead, probably to avoid the erasure implications, only to mean that 4D still technically powers the Eternal Sphere, just without a nutjob like Luther in charge.
It Was His Sled: All of the characters are actually unknowing NPCs inside an MMORPG. Those who have never played the game know about this game just for this twist, and it's left an impression across the entire Star Ocean series.
Jerkass Woobie: Albel Nox is a rather sadistic, aloof warrior but he has a rather tragic backstory involving the loss of his left arm and his father from an incident pertaining to Albel being unable to tame a dragon. His anti-social behavior partially stems from not wanting to connect with others in fear of losing them as well. He also suffers from one hell of a humiliating How the Mighty Have Fallen after being defeated and spared by Fayt in a duel, being stripped of his title of commanding officer and being left to rot in the dungeons of Airyglyph until pardoned to tame Crosell alongside Fayt and the others. His status only grows if you choose not to permanently recruit him, where he spends all his time training in Crosell's caverns simply because he has nothing better to do.
Low-Tier Letdown: The two main Symbology users, Sophia and Adray, are often considered low tier characters overall as their Symbology spells eventually get overshadowed by faster, more damaging physical attacks of the other playable characters, although Sophia's Thunder Flare attack can stun lock enemies. Outside of their Symbology, they lack other good options since Sophia is slow and fragile while Adray's physical attacks tend to leave him wide open. To top it all off, they officially join the party at low levels in Disc 2, with Sophia re-joining at level 1.^note
Moe:
- Sophia's a cute girl who serves as the party's best spellcaster.
- Peppita's a young member of the party who's a Circus Brat and Dance Battler.
Narm:
- The English voice acting is of mixed quality, to say the least. While the acting for the main party is generally solid, side characters like Farleen are ear-gratingly bad. Combined with the strange movements with the character models, watching the game becomes a very surreal experience.
- Biwig just killed Dr. Leingod, Fayt's father, right in front of Fayt's eyes. Fayt understandably has a Heroic BSoD over this, and a boss battle ensues immediately after. Trouble is, the battle is set to "Bitter Dance," which is a rap song with lyrics that focus on dancing to the beat. Not exactly the kind of music to set the mood correctly.
- A lot of the postgame content cutscenes features some kind of weirdness happening with Fayt (and sometimes the others) simply reacting in confusion. The humor in them is very hit or miss.
Not Badass Enough for Fans: Sophia gets a lot of hate, mostly for being a sweet-tempered Nice Girl instead of something more aggressive like Nel or Maria. The fact that she joins late in the game (and thus low leveled) did little to endear her to players. Also, because she is Fayt's childhood friend, she gets bashed from the Die for Our Ship crowd as well. Finally, she has an Identical Stranger who is the focus of an ill girl Damsel in Distress side arc, and so she is associated with that.
Polished Port: The original Japanese version of the game was an Obvious Beta that necessitated a Director's Cut.^note The Director's Cut, which is what the overseas versions are based on, was better received.
The Scrappy: Adray is considered by many to be an unnecessary addition to the Director's Cut/overseas versions. This is due to him being shoehorned into the plot and forced into your party. His subpar and overall awkward combat performance also earns him a lot of hate. The fact that he joins you instead of the actually-important fan favorite Clair or the similarly-liked Nel and Albel only makes things worse.^note
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Till the End of Time is noticeably harder than the previous two games due to being more of a dungeon crawler and because some of the new combat mechanics (stamina-based actions and MP Kill) discourages "button mashing."
So Bad, It's Good: "Bitter Dance", an otherwise decent song rendered hilariously awful by inappropriate, often terribly timed samples. These are the same samples that made the dorm theme from Persona 3 so hilarious.
Take That, Scrappy!:
- If you never meet Roger, a post-credits scene will show him crying inside his cage. Also, Lenneth sends him flying after he call her a little brat.
- In the Adray ending, he gets beaten up by Clair after proposing her to Fayt against her will. Fayt himself is not fond of the marriage either... because it would make Adray his father-in-law.
That One Attack: Robin Wind's Aerial Slash. It has little-to-no startup, does a lot of damage, hits multiple times, and covers a wide area of attack.
That One Level: The Shrine of Kaddan. To reach it, you have to go through an admittedly smaller dungeon, but the Shrine itself is still long, repetitive, boring, and has widely spread-out save points.
That One Sidequest: Recruiting all of the inventors thanks to massive amounts of Guide Dang It!. Some of them will join you for money, but others require certain items that either have to be crafted, which may require other inventors, or are found throughout the game in obscure places. In particular, the Bent Mystical Sword needed to recruit Boyd, the game's best Smith, requires you to participate in the bunny races in Gemity, which are totally random.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Many fans of the series, especially of The Second Story, hate this game for the changes it made to the item creation system and other aspects. Most of the hate is not because of the changes but rather the new systems are unwieldy, overly dependent on randomness, insanely expensive, and very frustrating. In addition, said fans also hate the drastic change done to the setting itself with the infamous reveal that the universe is all a Game Within a Game, which is considered to cheapen the plots of the first two games by rendering them in-universe fiction.
- Due to the aforementioned implication the plot twist has for the entire series, many fans still have trouble getting over it. It was so bad that the next game provided a way out for those who didn't like it without completely retconning it for those who didn't mind.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Many fans feel that Clair should have been the eighth permanent party member, not her hitherto unseen father Adray who was only introduced in the Director's Cut.
- Despite spending up to half the game with the party, Nel is only an optional party member to take beyond the medieval part of the game. The default seventh party member, but still optional. A common complaint was "I can't believe [insert character here] is required and Nel isn't!"
- Despite his popularity, Albel is only an optional character. As such, he gets similar complaints about his status like Nel does.
- The Veendeni. For an army of evil aliens whose technology rivals the Pangalactic Federation's, they're Out of Focus during most of the game despite triggering the plot. If you didn't bother with the in-game encyclopedia, you won't even learn why they are after Fayt in the first place.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- The plot twist was wasted; it might have fared much better if it was used for something else, such as having an ally turn out to be a player character mole or examining the impact common MMORPG behavior would actually have on its universe. However, it's more or less an Ass Pull for the sake of it, and brings up so many questions about the franchise that could never be properly addressed. It's telling that despite how heavy the twist is, almost no subsequent game has ever referenced it, except for Star Ocean: Anamnesis going out of its way to make this game take place in an Alternate Universe to the rest of the series.
- Peppita mentions not having her father, but that he isn't dead. Her father is hinted to be Commodore Whitcomb of the Aquaelie, given that they each have one gold hoop earring apiece. But nothing comes of it when the two of them meet.
- As an optional party member, Nel doesn't have any unique dialogue when the party returns to Elicoor II in search for the Sacred Orb in Aquaria, despite her significance to the nation. She doesn't even say anything when the group talks to the Queen, and the Queen likewise doesn't say anything to her.
Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The character models are all very high quality and look great compared to other games on the same system, but their movements are just so distinctly off at all times that everything generally looks weird.
Unexpected Character: In the Director's Cut/overseas versions, you'd expect Clair, the important NPC who assists the party throughout the game, to be an obvious choice to be a playable character. Instead, you get her crazy dad, who wasn't even mentioned at all in the original version.
Vanilla Protagonist: It really depends on the player, but by default, Fayt is essentially the snarky Straight Man to his far more diverse party members, especially if the player chooses the nicer PA options. On the other hand, Fayt can be played as considerably more cynical, rude, and battle hungry than is typical of this if other choices are made, particularly if you're trying to curry favor with Albel.
Viewer Gender Confusion:
- Fayt is very Bishōnen and can be mistaken for female on the back cover art.
- More than one person has been confused by Albel's gender. Must be that sarong, his nice legs, and the panty shot.

YMMV / Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

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