The Star Ocean Series

That was the worst bit, ultimately: the majority of the game was spent on a complete irrelevancy.

Well they did at least make a part of it relevant by having the Sacred Orb turning out to be a plot device.

Really, I think the most interesting bits to come out of the game's story for me are:

1. I wonder if Nel still follows her religion after everything she learned. The game kinda addresses it if you talk to her on the Diplo, as she says she doesn't want to think her ancestors actually worshiped the 4D beings but she doesn't have much of a choice.

I guess I just find it interesting since belief in Apris can kinda tie into the game's message of "our perception is reality."

2. I REALLY wonder if Nel and Clair were lesbians. Just a really strong vibe from Adray's ending....

I guess what I'm trying to say is I loved Nel.

edited 10th Jun '12 8:57:56 AM by Nikkolas

I considered the lesbian "subtext" to be just plain text, myself. It was maybe not quite as explicit as Grim Grimoire, but at least as obvious as Nanoha.

Well I do like them together. I've seen a lot of Shipping discussions about this game and the only ones that interest me are Nel/Clair and maybe Cliff/Mirage.

I have no idea why people support Albel/Nel....

This is gonna be a fun month.

I got Xenoblade, both Persona 2s and SO 4.

Now I'm sure a lot of people would say one of these is not like the others but I really want to try out The Last Hope.

I feel compelled to play it like I felt compelled to play FFXIII. Everyone just saying "this game is shit" makes me want to experience and judge it myself ya know.

Perhaps I like to "white knight" as they say. After all, I went into 13 fully expecting to come out loving it. I'd post on this forum and others that the game was actually pretty awesome.

...sure that didn't happen and I never plan to play FFXIII again but there's always the possibility my positive attitude going into SO 4 will be rewarded.

As long as half of the game isn't boring and pointless like in the last one.

Eh, the gameplay's pretty good, it's the story and characters that have...problems. The really annoying characters usually have reasons for their behaviour, but the voice acting doesn't help. And the graphics look a tad...off.

Like SO 3's graphics? Everyone talks about how "creepy" Xenosaga I'S models look but Till the End of Time's characters looked way weirder to me.

No, kind of like dolls or puppets or something. The bodies move a little too much (result of sup-par motion capture) and the faces can barely make any expressions.

Hm. Well I doubt that sort of thing will bother me. Dunno if i said this in the JRPG plot thread but some of what I heard about SO 4 really interested me. Whether it's well used or not, it's still enough to give me some hope going into the game. Like the Earth in the 1950s bit. I dunno anything about it apart from they go to Earth in the '50s but that alone sounds intriguing.

I got a while till I play the game though. i figure I'll start with Xenoblade then beat that and then move onto SO 4. Save Persona 2 - what I predict to be the best - for last.

edited 3rd May '13 5:10:57 PM by Nikkolas

The plot of SO4 is flawed but overly bashed. Believe you me, the part with 1950s Earth is incredible.

Well I still feel kinda like a pussy but the Earth-level difficulty has a description that makes me feel a bit better. it says it's for those not used to So's real time battle system or action games. I do vastly prefer turn-based RP Gs and I'm garbage at most action games.

So I think I'll play on that.

Do that. This game is hard. Some of the battles can take upwards of half an hour or more, on Earth difficulty, and it's worse on the higher difficulties.

The game is off to a somewhat promising start. I just got Lymle and completed the Citadel dungeon area. Now I'm in a village looking for her buddy.

Until Lymle came along I wasn't really sold on any of the party members. I guess there's a ton of game left for plot and character development to make me like them but right now I'm just indifferent. Edge Maverick is an awesome name though and I can definitely see him becoming more interesting later on with the proper development.

But yeah, I love Lmle. I have a weakness for the lolis/adorable girls.

I guess that's why i like Welch... She was peppy in SO 3 but this rendition is off the charts in spunkiness. I can see a lot of people running screaming from their PS 3's just after her intro scene. (I find her funny though....)

The whole mysterious Meteor thing is, well, mysterious and interesting. Something tells me the Eldarians are not what they appear. Maybe they're not all bad and it's just the Section 13 guys or whatever.

Speaking of the meteor though, that dying crew member Edge and Reimi found before Faize came along, he said something about them finding a fragment of the Meteor and bringing it back to study. That is when everything went to Hell and he had to blow up his own ship.

...didn't Edge pick up something soon after? It looked like it might have spawned the boss you had to fight? I couldn't really tell. Was it supposed to be the same fragment the dying man warned them about? If so then Edge is kinda retarded.

Anyway, I'm enjoying myself well enough. So long as this game keeps up with the space stuff and doesn't keep me stuck in an irrelevant stock fantasy setting for hours and hours and hours and hours, I'll probably enjoy it more than Till the End of Time.

edited 8th May '13 3:02:19 AM by Nikkolas

Yeah, Welch appears to be completely insane. And (spoiler has to do with the other three games) she appears in all four games (the remakes of the first two) and in context appears to be immortal. But she looks really different here.

Lymle would be cool, but I absolutely cannot stand her voice acting. I mean, I know she's supposed to be emotionlesss, but her voice just grates. Faize and Reimi are cool, at least.

edited 8th May '13 6:54:16 AM by dmboogie

Likely a 4D being.

edited 8th May '13 7:00:16 AM by lu127

How...are...you...doing... kay?

edited 8th May '13 7:03:38 AM by Zendervai

I think it might have been mentioned in her entry on the Dictionary that the image of Welch we see could just be a fabrication since it's a hologram. Given her mental state, she could have just envisioned this new look for her and chose to use it.

I was warned by a reviewer on YT that the voice-acting in this game was absolutely dreadful. So far though, only Shamada's VA has made me cringe. Giving the right voice to a cartoonishly evil character like him is difficult and they failed miserably.

Everyone else thus far has been okay I thought. Lymle has some weird delivery though, that much is true. I checked the voice cast list a while ago and didn't see anyone I recognized for most of them. Welch sounds like Laura Baily's little girl voice but insane so I'm guessing that's who voices her. Kenny is voiced by Michael Mc Connohie as you can never mistake his voice.

Oh and I forgot to mention that I was pleasantly surprised to see I have a four-man party in battle. I definitely did not expect that.

edited 8th May '13 8:18:32 AM by Nikkolas

I wasn't even particularly a fan of Welch in the third game. I didn't think she was nearly an interesting enough character to make up for the fact that the whole Inventor's Guild mechanic was a kind of half-assed substitute for what, in the first two games, your party could do perfectly well by themselves.

I never figured out that crafting stuff in the third game... Maybe i should try harder in this one.

And, going off what lu 127 said, the reason the twist in SO 3 seems to piss so many people off is because they feel like it ruined the first two games. Going with that notion, everything in The Last Hope is also just a simulation in the 4D Beings' game.

Only...it seems to me each game has practically zilch to do with the otehr games. So I see no reason why SO 3 can't just be SO 3 and its simulated world only applies to it. The other games are all "real."

The third references events from the previous games, albeit mostly in the encyclopedia. You can declare it fanon discontinuity, but it's not like, say, the fourth and fifth Breath Of Fire games, where whether they occur in the same setting as the first three is a matter of sheer speculation.

What about the fourth game then? Is there anything to say it exists in the same universe as the others?

edited 8th May '13 1:22:39 PM by Nikkolas

I haven't played it, so I can't say whether there is in the game itself, but it was advertized under the premise of taking place in the beginning days of the Federation, which would make it part of the same continuity. I'm prepared to guess that it features or references characters who were previously mentioned in the third game's encyclopedia.

edited 8th May '13 1:40:10 PM by Desertopa

It would explain the 50s Earth thing, like, a saved previous state of the game that is normally inaccessible, but a glitch allows the characters to reach it. And maybe the chain reaction occurred because the timeline divergence was too big for the game to sustain, so it just deleted the save state.

edited 8th May '13 1:44:16 PM by Zendervai

The fourth game strongly suggests that the Morphus, Myuria's people, are connected to the Nedians from the second game.

Also, at the end of the game, the Underdeveloped Planet Preservation Pact (the UP 3 Fayt kept mentioning) is established. Crowe's ending suggests he is an ancestor of Roddick Farrence, the main character of the first game, and Sarah is likely related to Erys and Joshua.

edited 8th May '13 2:31:30 PM by lu127