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Bliss Authority posted:so on a scale of beer to everclear how much alcohol do you need for this Rubbing. I picked up this game when it first came out because I enjoyed the hell out of Star Ocean 2 and figured that they couldn't make something I liked less than Star Ocean 3. I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. This game is a mass of lovely plot twists and tired cliches slathered with creepy fanservice (and if I'm remembering right, the director is on record saying that if they'd have let him he'd have made put even more of that in), and I've been looking forward to seeing people's reactions to it for years.
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Jul 14, 2016 19:58
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Every time I think about the Star Ocean games I keep being reminded of the fact that they happen in magical medieval swords and sorcery times. Just on other planets for no reason.
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Jul 14, 2016 21:05
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That's really one of the worst parts of it, the games keep being like "here's sci-fi stuff! Spaceships! Aliens! Lasers! ok now gently caress it let's go back to the same pseudo-medieval generic poo poo every other RPG does"
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Jul 14, 2016 23:07
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Yeah that's a big part of why I didn't like Star Ocean 3 when I played it. That and the huge difficulty spike after the plot twist.
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Jul 15, 2016 00:30
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Skyridge posted:One of my most impossible video game dreams is for Star Ocean 3 to be remade and have the story altered just a bit to where it's actually good. It was actually pretty close to being really awesome, what with the whole defending a medieval-era planet from high tech aliens plot point, but things after that just kept taking turns for the worse. Despite that, it's still probably one of my favorite games. I don't want to spoil anything but I'm watching the cut scenes only ahead of time because I'm am too impatient to wait. Without going into game-play, I found the problems with Star Ocean in general is that the games tend to have too many arcs without enough to connect them all. I feel like I'm playing 3 or more shorter games under one save file. I found that this game uses mission assignment to make the story changes make a little more sense. I can't say more without spoilers. I will say that SO4 needs new VAs for certain characters and Welch needs to stop acting like an anime brat (it's not cute and adds nothing to the game other than making me want to mute the sound). It's anime as all hell but not as cringe-inducingly creepy as other games I've followed.
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Jul 15, 2016 05:13
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corn in the bible posted:so4 is too painful and lovely to even watch so i don't know anyone would want an lp of it really Listening to Pork Lift break during the tutorial was worth it
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Jul 15, 2016 11:00
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I've seen enough of SO4 already to know what's deeply, deeply wrong with it, so I'm really just here for wateyad & Pork Lift. The phrase "I'm operating at about half Mugi" has been stuck in my head for years.
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Jul 15, 2016 11:20
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Episode 2: Not THEM (???) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfEM6YBNTfM
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Jul 15, 2016 15:24
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Star Ocean games are bad.
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Jul 15, 2016 15:27
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wateyad posted:Star Ocean games are bad. The three important pillars of Japanese culture, sorted by relevance.
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Jul 15, 2016 15:38
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So Edge Maverick now has to fight giant bugs, Starship Troopers-style. It's a good thing that random SRF officer Billy Badass was carrying a sword with him before he got killed, so Edge could have his starter weapon. I'm hoping this isn't our fantasy planet that we're gonna be stuck on for 50-90% of the game.
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Jul 15, 2016 16:02
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Those bugs have some Dune-style shields, of course! Why else would we use a heroic sword instead of a rail gun, which is really the better weapon in about every way?
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Jul 15, 2016 16:06
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Because the sword can simply deflect the rail gun shots? I'd assume that's obvious.
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Jul 15, 2016 16:13
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I bought this game at release for some reason; I'd never played a Star Ocean game before, but the images on the box looked pretty and the whole space thing sounded cool, so welp. I ended up running into a boss I couldn't beat for the life of me, so I put the game down and never bothered to go back to it. No idea how far into the game I was, so looking forward to see where this trainwreck is going.
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Jul 15, 2016 17:11
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It is actually shocking to me how ugly this game is.
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Jul 15, 2016 18:30
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When I played this I didn't have an HDTV yet so this really didn't look so bad compared to other games, but holy poo poo look at that resolution in battle. Is that even 480p? It looks like someone put a smear filter over everything that's not the UI. Also the amount of bloom is straight up absurd.
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Jul 15, 2016 18:35
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That massive wall of BLOOM outside the ship is killing me.
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Jul 15, 2016 18:39
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Ok, so he's fighting the bugs with his chainsword (?) hull cutter, and he has magical protagonist powers in his glowy fists. The bugs don't have proper Dune slow shields or they'd have stopped those sword swings and any future arrows, so maybe they just only turn on when they detect high magnetic fields? Can't just be technology, the sword was obviously powered when the guy was using it on the hull. Not sure big bugs would evolve that. Then again, it seems they really did decide to send five ships crewed by children to the same place, so it might just be that everyone in this universe is functionally retarded and they can't tell the difference between bugs and robots.
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Jul 15, 2016 19:15
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goatface posted:Ok, so he's fighting the bugs with his chainsword (?) hull cutter, and he has magical protagonist powers in his glowy fists. The bugs don't have proper Dune slow shields or they'd have stopped those sword swings and any future arrows, so maybe they just only turn on when they detect high magnetic fields? Can't just be technology, the sword was obviously powered when the guy was using it on the hull. Not sure big bugs would evolve that. It's just plot reasons to justify you using space laser swords and bows and staves and poo poo, don't overthink it you nerds.
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Jul 15, 2016 19:16
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It's just lazy.
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Jul 15, 2016 19:18
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Is there any greater joy to be had out of ridiculous anime games than taking the piss out of them?
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Jul 15, 2016 19:35
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They eventually go back over it and explain that the bugs can sense EM radiation and were using that to tell how to deflect the railgun shots.
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Jul 15, 2016 19:35
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wateyad posted:They eventually go back over it and explain that the bugs can sense EM radiation and were using that to tell how to deflect the railgun shots. Instead they show us magical shields? Alavaria fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 19:49
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It is weird that there's an arbitrary reason why you can't shoot the bugs, when you're presumably stranded with limited supplies on this planet. Like, giving you access to guns but then challenging the player to know when to use the small amount of ammo available to them and when to just rely on swords and bows and junk would make for interesting gameplay. Also, I watched a trailer for Star Ocean 5 because I was curious to see if the studio is always really bad at art direction and textures or if it was just this game, and I think they managed to make ground textures that don't look horrible between this game and the sequel. The characters look a bit nicer too! Although they still look like those "Animegao kigurumi" types.
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Jul 15, 2016 23:09
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Robots. Von Neumann bots that look like bugs, because bugs are efficient.
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Jul 15, 2016 23:14
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Red Bones posted:Also, I watched a trailer for Star Ocean 5 because I was curious to see if the studio is always really bad at art direction and textures or if it was just this game, and I think they managed to make ground textures that don't look horrible between this game and the sequel. The characters look a bit nicer too! Although they still look like those "Animegao kigurumi" types. The characters in Star Ocean 5 look less horrifying because they're actually textured to look like anime characters rather than photorealistic humans warped to fit the proportions of anime characters.
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Jul 15, 2016 23:36
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Aauugugughghhghhghhgh THIS game I'm also one of the tortured few who loved Star Ocean 2 and thought "Hey, nothing could be as bad as SO3, right?" Can't wait to re-hear the most notoriously lovely/baffling voice acting decision of the era  For what it's worth I don't remember the gameplay being especially bad, just... Just the rest.
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Jul 15, 2016 23:54
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The game is basically nonsensical when it comes to everything other than the gameplay. Hell, even the pseudo-handwave as to why our leads aren't using guns is incredibly flimsy. At least Claude and Fayt had a combination of limited supplies and/or wanting to follow the UP3 as an excuse. Here? Even if you want to buy the bug electromagnetic field stuff why did they never switch back to guns against everything else? I haven't actually played SO 5 for any number of reasons, but didn't they completely drop the excuses and go back to the SO 1 solution? Ergo, you're playing a native on an undeveloped planet? Not entirely sure if that's a better or worse reason than 2/3 given it's a supposedly sci-fi game series.
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Jul 16, 2016 00:15
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Apparently controversial opinion: I've not actually played it but from what I've seen and/or heard 2 is the worst Star Ocean game.
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Jul 16, 2016 00:25
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wateyad posted:Apparently controversial opinion: I've not actually played it but from what I've seen and/or heard 2 is the worst Star Ocean game. Worst voice acted maybe? But it is not physically possible for it to be the worst when Star Ocean 1 exists.
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Jul 16, 2016 00:33
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It's been forever since I played it, but all I can recall from 2 is that there was no limit to spamming skills/techniques, so a properly equipped party could beat the poo poo out of even the toughest badguys before they ever got to use their moves. Also, you recruit some three-eyed chick in a kung fu dress with a giant gun. That alone made me remember it.
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Jul 16, 2016 00:36
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My perception of Tri-Ace is as an extremely creative studio but one with absolutely no filter applied to any of their ideas. They make games that are (mostly mechanically) full of weird poo poo with no attention paid to whether any of it is actually fun or makes any kind of sense. As such the games they make are generally fascinating but more often than not they are bad games. That said, I genuinely and sincerely hope they never stop doing their thing. Star Ocean 1 had a complete nonsense of a battle system that played like an RTS and was full of menus but for some unfathomable reason only let you control one character and only let you use moves you'd mapped to the shoulder buttons before getting into combat. That's interesting. Definitely not good (and in fact a step back from SNES Tales of Phantasia*) but interesting. As far as I can tell, the reason why Star Ocean 2 is the one people like is that it's the one that somehow stumbled into not having anything people would find egregiously unpleasant to deal with but also as far as I can tell, it doesn't really have anything to recommend it either. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, it has, in the most technical sense, an action based combat system but there isn't really anything you can meaningfully do to avoid taking damage so it just kind of amounts to the the two sides mindlessly unloading on each other until one falls over, which wouldn't be aggressively unfun to interact with but I also don't see any appeal. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Star Ocean 2 looks boring, which is just about the worst thing a piece of entertainment media can be, whereas the others all at least have the decency to be bad in interesting ways and thus provide at least indirect amusement. *Tri-Ace was originally formed by staff who split off from Wolf Team after making Tales of Phantasia and there's enough commonality between the SNES version thereof and the Star Ocean games that I feel comfortable regarding it as functionally being Star Ocean 0. Later versions of Tales of Phantasia were all retrofitted with more sensible mechanics from later Tales of games.
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Jul 16, 2016 02:36
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Poulpe posted:Aauugugughghhghhghhgh THIS game You aren't alone, brother. The skill spam and obscene hit boxes chumped so many enemies. And the broken crafting....
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Jul 16, 2016 02:54
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God almighty was the music during the crash landing awful. And some of the music in general. And the faces. And the graphics. And the aesthetics. And the voice acting.
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Jul 16, 2016 04:13
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wateyad posted:My perception of Tri-Ace is as an extremely creative studio but one with absolutely no filter applied to any of their ideas. They make games that are (mostly mechanically) full of weird poo poo with no attention paid to whether any of it is actually fun or makes any kind of sense. As such the games they make are generally fascinating but more often than not they are bad games. That said, I genuinely and sincerely hope they never stop doing their thing.
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Jul 16, 2016 05:20
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wateyad posted:As far as I can tell, the reason why Star Ocean 2 is the one people like is that it's the one that somehow stumbled into not having anything people would find egregiously unpleasant to deal with but also as far as I can tell, it doesn't really have anything to recommend it either. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, it has, in the most technical sense, an action based combat system but there isn't really anything you can meaningfully do to avoid taking damage so it just kind of amounts to the the two sides mindlessly unloading on each other until one falls over, which wouldn't be aggressively unfun to interact with but I also don't see any appeal. I have a lot of fondness for SO2, but this still seems pretty spot on to me. Somewhere between nostalgia and it being the first hot mess of this sort I'd played it will always hold a place in my heart, but I doubt I can say that place is from it having any real high points.
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Jul 16, 2016 05:28
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Jul 16, 2016 05:54
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wateyad posted:As far as I can tell, the reason why Star Ocean 2 is the one people like is that it's the one that somehow stumbled into not having anything people would find egregiously unpleasant to deal with but also as far as I can tell, it doesn't really have anything to recommend it either. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, it has, in the most technical sense, an action based combat system but there isn't really anything you can meaningfully do to avoid taking damage so it just kind of amounts to the the two sides mindlessly unloading on each other until one falls over, which wouldn't be aggressively unfun to interact with but I also don't see any appeal. At least for me, it was just that the entire game was just so novel and awkwardly nuanced, and it was nothing like I'd experienced in an RPG before, but like you mentioned that nuance wasn't necessarily required to even clear combat, though it would help. Off the top of my head some stuff that made it memorable for me include: -spammable physical special abilities that would slowly improve and evolve undocumented as you used them more and more in combat, it was never explicitly stated but you'd just notice that the ability you've been using is slowly changing, and there were about a dozen for each physical character -heavily voiced combat, which was reasonably unheard of at the time -different protagonists that experience the story differently, and actual variety in party composition between playthroughs, in that some characters were completely secret, completely missable, and often with these characters you had to make an either-or decision between them and another party member. Hell, there's two characters that can only be collected when you select their associated protagonist at the beginning of the game! What other JRPG has that kind of customization and variety while still keeping each character fleshed out? (In this case via "party can do their own thing in town mode", a feature also pretty unique to SO2.) It added a lot of interesting variety between my and my friend's playthroughs, and it was fun to see which characters worked together in combat - the entire skill system is a peculiar hodgepodge with pretty great benefits for experimenting with it, and it was so weirdly nuanced that figuring it out was fun. My guys have secret natural talents? I can pickpocket literally every NPC in the game and they're all carrying unique and varied items? I'm actually using my levelled cooking abilities in an iron chef style cook off? What? - they weren't afraid to spend time developing weird/crappy distractions and mini-games, much like the aforementioned iron chef cook off. More generally, this is something I think really drags down modern RPGs, if you think of the "great classics", Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, Mario RPG for example, they're all chock full of weird mini games, plot based or otherwise to grab your attention and keep you from getting bored of endless RPG battles. And it works! I don't know why this trend dropped off so hard but RPGs took a hit with it! And that's not even mentioning dozens of other weird features they included for next to no reason- did you know there was an entire system dedicated to merging two spells that happened to be cast at the same time? That you can make your entire party to play in an orchestra to summon a secret boss? That your party have secret "how much I like the protagonist" values that influence the ending? Just so, so, so much random crap and minutiae was included in the game, and it's your prerogative to explore it, or ignore it completely, and exploring it wasn't terribly tedious or difficult either. That's what made it special for me, anyway, despite the combat being a little simple.
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Jul 16, 2016 07:17
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Poulpe posted:- they weren't afraid to spend time developing weird/crappy distractions and mini-games, much like the aforementioned iron chef cook off. More generally, this is something I think really drags down modern RPGs, if you think of the "great classics", Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, Mario RPG for example, they're all chock full of weird mini games, plot based or otherwise to grab your attention and keep you from getting bored of endless RPG battles. And it works! I don't know why this trend dropped off so hard but RPGs took a hit with it! FractalSandwich fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 07:28
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I had a lot of fun with SO2's core combat systems, but then again I loved seeing all of the numbers and huge numbers and TEAR 'EM TO PIECES and the cacophony of violence and such.
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Jul 16, 2016 07:57
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