Hello and welcome back to a lightly distinct version of the thing I used to write about more often before writing became hard and motivation became harder. In what is definitely not a soft lead-in for The Wheel of Dubious RPGs Season 3, I’ve decided to catalogue my adventures in streaming through my RPG backlog in the only way I know how: writing dumb internet blogs. I used to do these things on a regular basis you know! I’m still hip! I’m still “with it”. Oh god I need to find a new place to put these, don't I?

I’m not going to pretend I understand how I’ve hoarded as many of these games as I have. I’ve liked most of the Tales of games that I’ve played, enjoyed a Tri-Ace in my time, and it’s not like I’m incapable of playing longer RPGs. My adult ADHD-addled brain can still focus when necessary. I think. The actual true detriment as we’ll find out (not in this week’s installment, but next week’s) is that it mostly has led to me wanting to play more bullshit while Monster Hunter and Avowed keep draining my time away. Not this week though. This week is for the things that inspired the feature in the first place.

Valkyrie Elysium

Developer: Soleil ltd

Release Date: September 29, 2022

Price I Paid For It: $10 (Gamestop Sale)

Budget: Extremely Mid

Time Played: Two and a half hours.

Heaven or Heck? Purgatory

From the developers of such classic hits as Devil’s Third and Wanted: Dead comes the follow up to Valkyrie Profile that Square-Enix immediately threw out to die with basically no marketing, fanfare, or enthusiasm alongside like three or four other games. This is a favorite (?) strategy of theirs recently, right up to and including the shocked pikachu reaction when said games sell approximately four copies. Both of the games in today’s write up were released on the back end of 2022 like a month apart, further bolstered by the tertiary presence of The DioField Chronicle, a SRPG that deserves accolades for making me genuinely upset at how boring it is.

Regardless of future blog material, Valkyrie Elysium moves and plays like an extremely forgettable, albeit inoffensive, action RPG from the PS2 era, which is not the last time you will read that phrase from me. Dealing with regular enemies involves mashing out simple combos, while dealing with bosses and harder enemies requires a level of precision and reaction that makes one ask “why didn’t the game even remotely prepare me for this in the previous hour of mashing.” The game’s hook, which it tutorializes and then doesn’t introduce formally for 90 minutes, is the ability to send out Einherjar as your semi-autonomous stands to fuck shit up and/or hit elemental weaknesses. It’s sort of like the interesting part of Astral Chain, except without the mechanical baseline that made Astral Chain’s combat (sort of) work. What if I told you there was also something resembling a stagger meter like many other popular recent JRPGs?

I want to be clear; I am slagging on Valkyrie Elysium a lot for a game whose greatest sin is making my eyes glaze over as consistent progress was made. Enjoyment is a strong word here, but I wasn’t having a *bad* time. Is it telling that I very much thought about putting the disk back into my PS5 while writing this, just so I could remember more specifics of how it played? Don’t worry, I didn’t do that. If you cared, you'd skim through the stream archive below. It’s apparently only a dozen hours to see credits, so I dunno, pay me enough money and I’d probably play more.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force

Developer: Tri-Ace

Release Date: October 27, 2022

Price I Paid For It: $30 like two months after it came out.

Budget: Secretly a PS3 game

Time Played: A little more than three hours

Heaven or Heck? Neat side of good.

Star Ocean 6 was supposed to be the big final hope for Tri-Ace, whose adventures in mobile and gacha seemed to backfire, leading to one final big RPG from them. Unfortunately, it seems like this thing flopped pretty hard and we haven’t really heard a peep out of them since, so this might end up being one of those Japanese zombie companies which still exists on paper but doesn’t have a ton of people anymore. It’s a shame. I make no secret that I love Tri-Ace and their scrappy development history, from their humble beginnings as a splinter of Wolf Team to their slightly less humble adulthood as the ones responsible for Resonance of Fate, Eternal Sonata, and the “good” sequels to Final Fantasy XIII.

Star Ocean has always suffered from its status as an off-brand JRPG franchise, a reputation that isn’t wholly undeserved despite lasting 25 years (twice as long as Suikoden, two and a half times as long as Wild Arms.) While the lineage of Tri-Ace as a studio makes Star Ocean the Hydrox to Tales’ Oreo, it’s also been the sort of mid-profile series that never quite broke out in the same way Namco’s did. The first game is one of those late-era Super Famicom technical showpieces that doesn’t actually play all that well, the second game is the one people actually remember fondly (more on that later,) Star Ocean 3 is best remembered for its bonkers ending, 4 for being the ass end of Microsoft trying to get japanese gamers to buy the 360 (also for being overshadowed by Tales of Vesperia), and no one really talks about Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness. I get the impression it’s not great. So I’ll probably play it at some point.

In true series fashion, Star Ocean 6 starts out as a JRPG take on your average Star Trek Prime Directive episode, with a guy from space desperately trying to not let the primitive JRPG yokels know that he’s from space while solving their extremely JRPG-flavored problems. Raymond is perhaps a bit more cavalier and freewheeling than your average Star Ocean protag, and the opening dynamic between him, secondary protagonist (headstrong anime princess) Laeticia, and Uptight Anime Butler Albaird is a pretty fun one. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before, but there was a nice, comfort food straightforwardness to it. Admittedly, I played three hours of what is apparently a nice healthy 40+ hour experience, so I have no idea if it develops anywhere more interesting, but someone I know has called it “One of the most mediocre JRPGs I’ve ever played.” If that’s not enticing, I don’t know what is.

Like several other recent action-JRPGs (such as Tales of Berseria) there’s a God Hand-ish “create your own combo strings” method to combat, which combined with the seamless transitions in and out of combat on the overworld gives the entire thing a very breezy feel. This breeziness is improved even more with the early introduction of D.U.M.A., a drone that lets you do a bunch of hover-y, air dash flanking shit in and out of combat. It gives the whole thing a lot more mobility and verticality than it would otherwise have, which is good because the rest of the game is extremely PS3 core. I don’t mean that as an insult. Mostly.

Unlike Valkyrie Elysium, which had extreme PS2 energy, Star Ocean: The Divine Force feels like a PS3 JRPG woke up from cryosleep and got to run at modern frame rates and resolutions. Towns exist in their most utilitarian, classically JRPG town forms, side quests involve collecting things from enemies or hidden in the environment, and grinding is mostly optional right up until you run into the first real boss and have to actually try. The character models sometimes have that uncanny doll look to them, especially when they start doing stiff, canned animations in cutscenes like it was a Yakuza game. There’s something endearing about that, but it’s also the same look as Star Ocean 4 and 5, which also would have benefitted from more stylized art direction.

For something that was ostensibly meant as a hail-mary, it’s also more than a little conservative. Maybe that’s more a budgetary restriction than anything else, but there’s a surprising amount of competition in the Mid-Budget Action JRPG space these days, which is why this feature exists in the first place. Would I play more of it? Yeah, sure. I had a pretty good time. Unfortunately, I had a better time with some of the upcoming games on my surprisingly established list. You’ll have to check in the next time I bother to write one of these to find out what I mean.