The Wheel of Dubious RPGs Episode 33-34: Star Ocean III and Anvil of Dawn.

Before we start, I want to thank everyone who watched and/or donated during my Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run stream. Thanks to your generosity we managed to reach our $15K team goal, and I personally managed to raise more than $680 on my own personal page (which hey, if you feel like making me revisit a previously played dubious RPG you could always donate to reach my goal $800.) I also played through all of Devil May Cry 2 again, which... boy, fuck that whole mess. DMC 2 remains one of the worst games I've played to completion. I also played through all of Project Snowblind, which may or may not end up getting its own little bonus section in the next blog. That game is... a thing.

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

Till the end of time is just the mostJRPG SUBTITLE imaginable

Developer: Tri-Ace

Release Date: Feb 27, 2003

Time Played: A little over four hours

Dubiosity: 1 out of 5

Should’ve played: Star Ocean IV instead, apparently.

Would I play more? Yes, maybe once I work through this pile of Tales games first.

So we’ve reached the first game for this season that I actually feel the need to eat crow on. Star Ocean has always taken space in the back of my mind as one of those B-tier JRPG series that burnt out during the HD era, which made it seem like the prime candidate for some dubious video game streams. For as much as that still seems to be the case, at least if Star Ocean 4 and 5’s reputations are anything to go by, I clearly picked the wrong game, because Star Ocean: Till the End of Time seems a-ok. Whoops. Accidentally put a normal video game on this here wheel.

Listen man I'm not going to play bedroom police or anything, but to be clear this girl absolutely called your parents "uncle" and "aunt" and you'd have to excuse me if I derived some implications from that.

I’m not going to overstate how good it is, because it seems like a pretty “of its time” PS2-era JRPG, but aside from this game’s infamous ending twist there’s nothing especially “dubious” about Star Ocean III. After the introduction, where extremely JRPG protagonist Fayt Leingod and his girlfriend and/or cousin(???) Sophia escape a dramatic space inciting incident it kinda immediately turns into a Prime Directive episode of Star Trek but JRPG. Listen I’m not the biggest trekkie in the world, but there’s some fun to be had with a good “Don’t let them know you’re a spaceman even though you crashed in the middle of their city on a spaceship” plotline. Throw in a little bit of anime and boy howdy you’ve got an exciting combination right there.

One of the more interesting revelations I learned from this stream is that Tri-Ace was actually founded by key members of the Tales of Phantasia development team, who left Wolf Team after disagreements with Namco. That explains… a lot about how Star Ocean plays, which really does give it the “Hydrox to Tales’ Oreo'' vibe. Of course, Star Ocean went full 3D long before Tales did, which didn’t really introduce free movement until this season’s Tales of Zestiria, but the fundamentals are astoundingly similar. You have basic attacks that can chain together with proper timing (that I didn’t figure out) or cancel into skills (which I did figure out) and could theoretically engage in the kind of combo and juggle hijinks one would expect from this kind of action-RPG. It’s a bit clonk in the way something like Tales of Symphonia (which came out a year later) is a bit clonk, but I could see said combat eventually getting “pretty good.” Admittedly I’m currently playing Tales of Berseria so it all feels like it’s moving in slow motion tbh

By the end of my four hours with this game I had gone from goofing on Les Cousins Dangereaux and making fun of the audio mix to accidentally getting invested. The english voice acting is occasionally, uh, of the early 2000s Toonami ilk (like, seriously, Wendee Lee is there literally just doing her Faye Valentine voice.) and as mentioned before the Matoi Sakuraba soundtrack is just mixed extremely loud. But even knowing what I know about the absolute batshit ending twist of this game (seriously, it’s the only thing I knew about this one before I played it) I cannot in good conscience say it deserves to be in the company of most of what I’ve played here. Congratulations Star Ocean, you instead get to be part of the same designation as… Nox, earning the coveted(?) 1 out of 5 rating. You’re welcome, and I’ll make sure to find a worse video game to make up for it.

Anvil of Dawn

It's extremely weird that New World Computing was involved in this game somehow.

Developer: Dreamforge Intertainment

Release Date: October 31, 1995

Time Played: A little under two hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Dungeoncrawliosity: Maximum

Would I play more? Potentially.

Coming from the same developer responsible for that surprisingly neat Ravenloft game from last season comes Anvil of Dawn. This is another game that… probably falls more into the “weird and obscure” part of the Wheel rather than the “questionable” part. I’ve said before that I’m vaguely a fan of the “Real-Time, rock-dropping, side-stepping, square-dancing Dungeon Crawler” (or “Like Eye of the Beholder/Dungeon Master” if you’re boring) and Anvil of Dawn sure seems like a pretty middle of the road “one of those.” However, unlike Stonekeep at no point does it involve FMV or puppets, so I think by default it’s a less interesting/dubious title (even if it sure does seem like a *better* dungeon crawler.) It has some pretty good "vibes" with its combination of detailed spritework and pre-rendered backgrounds, as befitting a mid-90s PC game that managed to avoid the trap of early polygonal 3D.

The way dudes will just turn into skeletons when you kill them is very metal, very good.

Doing this survey of games has more or less cemented that my preferred stance on this sub-sub genre is that these kinds of puzzle-heavy real-time dungeon crawlers are better off being party-based than having a solo character, even if the end result involves a lot more plate juggling. Unless the puzzle solving holds a significant amount of prominence, I think encounters are a lot more interesting with a varied party than they can be with one character. Playing through Grimrock II last year sort of cemented that idea for me, and it’s one of the reasons why I fell off Vaporum before the end (the other being… that game kinda just runs out of steam halfway through?)

To its credit, Anvil of Dawn’s mechanics are pretty straightforward, with more of the emphasis placed on its very… very involved dungeon layouts. I’m not joking when I say that the starting dungeon took the vast majority of my two hours with the game, and it sure did seem like the second dungeon was going to take longer. That was Mento’s problem with this game, if I recall correctly, and it sure does seem like Anvil of Dawn is Maximally one of those dungeon crawlers. Still, it hardly seems like a bad time, and should I ever get on a serious Dungeon Crawler kick (and, I dunno, play Lands of Lore 1 or Eye of the Beholder or something) this is certainly An Option.

I apologize for the non dubiosity of this batch of video games, and I hope to rectify that with some of the quality video games we have coming up next. If you'd like to see my streams of these games or the archives of said streams, consider swinging by my twitch channel. We have fun here, and if you want to spend an hour watching me agonize over character creation in a game I've described as "Peak CRPG" then I highly recommend you tune in sometime this or next week.

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