I'll come right out and say it: I pre-orderedStar Ocean: Integrity & Faithlessness. Yeah, I know, either I am a weird anime person or I am one of the few people who kept liking JRPGs since they 'died' roughly around the time Call of Duty became a console 'thing'. So, I pre-ordered this game for $47.99 (Amazon Prime) and received it on June 28th, 2016. I played one hour of the game then immediately sold it on Amazon for a total loss of $12.99 after shipping and fees. I didn't even think to touch it again for 337 days, 92.3% of a full year, when I decided to finish the game for the sake of never again wondering if it was a good game that I judged too quickly. This meant purchasing the game for $13.49 (again, Amazon). To date I've spent a total of $26.48 on the fifth main game in the Star Ocean series. Keep that number in mind as I explain how much time I spent with the game, because I'd like to take a serious look at JRPGs and the value of the experience being objective vs my own subjective opinions of the 'piece'. And oh, what a piece it is.

This'll take a while. Here's the games excellent soundtrack: Star Ocean: I & F OST Playlist

Why should the Star Ocean series of JRPGs matter? Most people would say that it is a low-budget, slip-shod set of Japanese RPG games that never evolved beyond the innovation of the first two games. All that I really have when talking about anything is my own personal opinion. An opinion informed by playing console video games since roughly 1990. The first game I played was Duck Hunt. I think the first time I felt truly lasting rage for a video game character was the first time that dog fucking laughed at me for missing. The first game I bought with my own money for the NES was Final Fantasy. The box art was amazing, the moment I saw it I began imagining all the awesome shit I'd do in the game. It was hard and confusing, the booklet was huge but it wasn't that helpful. I was about 9 years old and it was kind of a mess to read with a lot of mentions to things in game that were abbreviated in the actual game. I knew how to level up, just keep fighting, and eventually just kept leveling up. I leveled up more and then I could make it through a dungeon, I leveled up more because the game got harder again. I lost progress and that sucked. I leveled up more and more and more and months later I was able to beat the game. It felt great, not unlike the feeling of beating a hard boss in a Dark Souls game. Final Fantasy was the Dark Souls of my JRPG childhood.

Fast forward roughly seven or eight years. I'd played every single RPG I could buy on the SNES (favorites were: Lufia II, Final Fantasy 4 and 6, Secret of Mana) and I couldn't yet afford a Playstation or a copy of Chrono Trigger. I was about to start high school and there was no way I was going to spend a dime on anything until I could get that shit-hot PSX. What did I do? I got on my 56k dial-up internet and used Yahoo to search for Chrono Trigger. Lo and behold, I discovered emulation. At the time the premier emulator was ZSNES. My older brother and I took turns playing through the game using a keyboard, it was amazing because we'd probably played through Final Fantasy III (VI) three times at that point and this was arguably more visually interesting and free. I'm not here to condone piracy at all, just relay some real experiences. It turns out there were hundreds of SNES games that I'd never heard of and most of them were in Japanese. Translation patches and such were in the works for all of the hottest and biggest SNES games, mostly RPGs. The first, biggest translation + ROM release of the era? Tales of Phantasia. The first game in the Tales series was incredible as it played like a fast, beautiful traditional JRPG with excellent music and a battle system that had nuance similar to fighting games. The direction you pressed in tandem with a button and the distance between you and your target (plus whether they were flying or not) determined which attack or spell each character would perform. It blew my mind that this game was so incredible, huge, beautiful and impressive but it never made it to the US (all of the posthumous ports GBA/PSP etc. are terrible and mangled). I moved on to Seiken Densetsu 3, an incredible sequel to Secret of Mana that was five times as large and replayable between six main characters you could choose a group of three from. Needless to say that was my favorite SNES game of all time besides Super Metroid. Uh, wait man, so when do we get to Star Ocean?

Japanese video game developers tri-Ace formed out of backlash against Namco's corporate restructuring in the mid 90's. During the end of Tales of Phantasia's development in 94/95. Most of the team left Wolfteam (now Namco Tales Studio) to create tri-Ace. The result, after the unhappy development of Tales of Phantasia, was to create a new story with familiar gameplay assets: Star Ocean felt much like Tales... albeit with a different battle system and a science fiction storyline. Star Ocean was absolutely one of the most impressive SNES RPG games ever made eclipsing the already impressive Tales of Phantasia. The late release (1996) and use of a specialized chip prevented it from coming overseas. By the time there was an emulator enabled translation patch released for it, I had purchased a Playstation and was elbow deep into my first two games: Final Fantasy VII and Star Ocean: 2nd Story. Its a shame that I have never played Star Ocean, but it is important because missing out on the game created an empty feeling that I'd missed one of the coolest SNES things ever. It compelled me to play 2nd Story, which was only marginally related to the first game anyhow. 2nd Story is a decent JRPG that uses a strange combination of pre-rendered backgrounds, a 3D overworld map with 2.5D free-roaming battles. It was the first RPG I played that had any voice acting and it definitely felt like a game made by the folks who made Tales of Phantasia, using a lot of the same signature sound effects that tri-Ace uses to this day. It is definitely an ugly game, the 2D sprites have an odd color palette and seem pulled from an SNES game, but the story was actually pretty interesting despite its simplicity and the amount of mystery surrounding the first half of the game made it really fun. It was certainly ten times as coherent as Final Fantasy VII's story. The important thing was that I was into Star Ocean, for all the jank and anime it was worthwhile. Where could things possible go from here? The Playstation 2.

This post isn't just about Star Ocean and what it means to me what really matters to me is tri-Ace and their occasionally incredible catalog of JRPG games. Valkyrie Profile was the studio's next game. Holy shit. Valkyrie Profile is one of the best PSX games ever made and easily the best PSX JRPG in hindsight. Star Ocean wouldn't return until 2003 and in those five years a lot had changed both in video games and in JRPGs in general. The Tales of... series took off, and other IPs like Grandia had refined the action-style combat tri-Ace had spearheaded to keep things interesting and development of Japanese RPGs was riding a building-sized wave of success on the late PSX/early PS2 era. People were buying millions of JRPGs all over the world and the decline in interest had already begun once Star Ocean: Til the End of Time was release. The issue was simple: Anime. I honestly didn't care anymore because JRPGs had enough graphical capability to work with on consoles that they were finally revealed as Battle Systems with intermittent Anime in between the level grinding. Final Fantasy X sucked, it was unbearable to sit through. King of Fighters started to look and feel horrendously anime beyond what was imaginable, and Street Fighter III went ultra-anime. I'm not anti-Japanese animation at all, some of my favorite animation comes from Record of Lodoss War, Big-O and I beat Persona 4 before it was a cool thing to do. I stuck it out, I put in my time and despite the awful QT-pie anime nonsense, it was a fun game. The battle system added blocking, parrying, and ease of switching between abilities/spells and characters. It was a fully 3D version of what they'd done in the second Star Ocean game. It really felt like progress and the game as a whole was better written and performed than the Tales games of the day. The combat was sharp enough to carry the game despite the formula still feeling stuck in the 90's. As shallow as some of the personal relationships were, there were honest story moments that kept me interested in the anime tropes. It was a relevant game at the time as it reviewed well despite some issues with the Japanese release. tri-Ace would then go on to make two really impressive games afterwards, they were on a hit streak with Radiant Historia and Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. Oh wait, actually nobody really cared about those games. It's a shame because if you went back and played Silmeria today, it really is a fantastic game with a mind-boggling tactical-action combat system. Honestly, I'm going to get to the point here, eventually.

I didn't get to play Star Ocean: The Last Hope because it was only released on XBOX 360 when it came out in 2009. I didn't care one bit, because that year I was playing games likes Demon's Souls, Arkham Asylum, Killzone 2, and *sigh* Final Fantasy XIII. Lets start getting really really real here, I didn't want any more anime RPG games. They'd become so childish, so grating, that I couldn't do anymore "12 year old helpless twee girls needs to be saved" stuff. I'm just not -that- guy at all and when I started playing JRPGs I was saving women like Rydia and Terra who were absolutely strong and developed strength as the story progressed. So, I bought Star Ocean: The Last Hope International Edition when it came out on PS3 and of course, they'd replaced the anime UI with more realistic renderings. It was an attempt to 'fix' a poorly received game with new music, new art, and more options. It was a decent game. The big problems I have with Star Ocean: Integrity & Faithlessness start with the fact that it is a follow up to The Last Hope. Not that The Last Hope was great, but it was an improvement on the previous game with a battle system that rewarded dodging, parrying, and not just blocking. It rewarded the player with different post-battle boosts (EXP, currency multipliers etc.) if they avoided getting hit with multiple/critical attacks. You could hit a button and run while in dungeons or in the overworld. Brilliant, and hey the story was awful anime. Finally, we're here: Star Ocean: Integrity & Faithlessness is the worst JRPG I have ever played (1990-2017).

There are many, many things wrong with Star Ocean 5 that are completely subjective gripes and while I won't dismiss every nagging issue I have with the game I will try to stick with somewhat objective issues that the game has. Since I've been a little negative when talking about the two previous games I'll start with the positives:

• When it comes to character design, presentation, and the modeling and animation for the characters tri-Ace has done a beautiful job of bringing an adorable anime cast to life within a video game. Sure, they're stiff and flap their openings when talking but they move like cartoon characters in a completely nice looking way. I don't know what, if any, difference it makes when played on a PS4 Pro and 4K HDR TV but I did notice it was better looking and faster loading than when I'd initially played the game on a standard PS4 and a 1080p television. The games presentation does have major flaws, the lack of cutscenes is a major oversight and scenes play out like MMORPG dialogue where you have control of the camera and once the cast raises to seven you'll never see half of their faces.
• The game's soundtrack is classic Star Ocean and feels like a continuation of the style found on the previous game. Each town has it's own theme, there are several battle themes, and the games sound design isn't any more of less of a mess than any game previous. Character's voices do overlap in battle and they often talk over each other when announcing their spells/attacks but that is standard for all Tales of... and this style of game.
• There is a mountain of side quests to go through and regardless of their quality there is always another reason to be grinding other than just leveling up your skills, specialties. There is always something to do and a huge number of things to learn, more than the game can actually use within the fairly short story. Enemy types change as the game progresses and they seem to at least change color palette to indicate strength and as a result they drop more rare loot/resources to accommodate the alchemy/crafting quests. There are just endless amounts of menu diving you can do once you've done a couple hours of grinding, you could grind for 100 hours and probably still have a few things left to craft or farm in the world.

Ok, now that is reason enough to play it for most non-cynical JRPG fans. I mean if you made it through Tales of Berseria or Final Fantasy XV you would think there would be value in a game like Star Ocean 5, right? I posit the notion that your time and money would be better spent playing a myriad of other games because this game was made without enough time or money to create a salvageable gameplay experience and it should not have been released in such an under-produced state. Instead of directing the camera for cut-scenes and placing the characters in view of the camera you're given camera and character control, reduced to walking speed and limited in movement by an invisible barrier as the dialogue happens. You're too far away to see facial expressions or see who is talking at all, they're all animated well and the lip sync isn't bad at all... but you can't see it at all. Why go through the trouble of animating and syncing dialogue when the player has no viable way to experience it? Budget cuts? Rushed job? Well, then where did the team put the time? The environments are all low polygon for even a PS3 game. It was originally intended for PS3 so I'll be fair and compare it to The Last Hope and still the backgrounds are less detailed than the PS2 game. So, the money and time went into the battle system which was touted as a return to Til the End of Time? Producer Shuici Kobayashi explains their intent:

EGM: I’ve played the first three Star Oceans, and I was a huge fan of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (Star Ocean 3). I guess, one point about this game I’m a little concerned about—maybe not necessarily concerned, but I don’t know how to feel yet—is the combat. I didn’t enjoy the combat as much as I was hoping to. I’m looking forward to seeing if, as I play the game more, those feelings change. Because, being fair, I only had a short time getting to play it.

Kobayashi: I personally likes Star Ocean 3 the most as well. Its battle system was really different from Star Ocean 5, where there are big attacks, smaller attacks, and then the guard. They all are in a relationship with each other in a rock, paper, scissors type of harmony. The guard itself works differently from Star Ocean 3 to Star Ocean 5, so that would probably make you feel like it’s a completely different game, and a completely different system in itself. At least this time, because battles involve such a large party, we had to figure out how to make that work, how to incorporate that idea. Also, I think that the battle systems for Star Ocean 3 and Star Ocean 4 had become a little bit too difficult, especially for newcomers. They were really hard to get into. I wanted to lower that kind of difficulty level so that anyone could get into the game. In Star Ocean 5, we wanted to create a title that’s like a reboot of the Star Ocean series, and make combat a little simpler, a little easier than the previous recent chapters. So, I think it makes sense that you might feel that way coming from Star Ocean 3.

The reality is that having seven characters on the battle field made the game too easy. Most of the time you outnumber the enemies you fight and the game doesn't require grinding to finish. You can beat the entire game by powering up the first battle skill you get and just using it repeatedly. It doesn't make any sense, as a fan of this series, to dumb down the battle system to the point that it takes entirely no skill because most players come to the series for the battle systems that tri-Ace creates. The battles are even less complex than 2nd Story and I'd venture a guess they're more or less the SNES game with a block button added. If you can micromanage your menus correctly, you'll find yourself over powered and breezing through the game. Again, folks play these dumb anime games because the battles are the best part... and it sucks in this one. You might as well be playing Touch My Katamari.

The story is a note-for-note retread of the previous game. Small girl shows up, she's insufferably bewildered and shy, and you have to save her to save the world. She has a great power and yeah, you end up saving the world and saving her. The main story arc is just terrible and involves weakly communicated interplanetary and intergalactic political conflicts. The scale of battles are tiny and fighting human enemies is never challenging. You could burn through the main story in 15 hours (most of that is just because you don't get fast travel until later). Where the story shines occasionally is the personal moments you'll have in each town as you stop and partake in "private actions" a series staple that allows 1 on 1 dialogue that fleshes out the personalty of each character. It was brilliant in the second and third game and here it shines as well. When the characters aren't talking about the awful plot they are funny and quirky in a dopey anime sort of way. Fiore, the witch looking woman insists that you're gay for about half the game until you profess you'd like to shack up with Miki a longtime sister-figure. I thought it was funny, anyhow. Unlike other games in the series you won't see other worlds or planets, you'll see two space ships and one other-dimensional final boss fight area.

Most of the game is spent repeatedly circling the main planet of the game over and over again doing fetch quests. It is basically the first few hours of any MMORPG repeated for 40 hours, you do small quests and run around while exposition happens. This was intentional in production, the producer wanted the game to get away from the gameplay-movie-gameplay-movie drag of JRPGs as he states in an extensive video interview. The actual result is gameplay-no movie-gameplay-dialogue-no movie-gameplay, and the gameplay was intentionally dumbed down. All of this is explained as an attempt to feel more retro but made for the modern gamer that wants a seamless experience. This is where I call bullcrap! This was an unfinished or at least incredibly unpolished and lazy game that had to be released in whatever half-finished state that it was in. Star Ocean Integrity & Faithlessness is an incomplete game, and if it truly wasn't unfinished then it was the laziest flaming pile of garbage tri-Ace has ever released (keep in mind they made Infinite Undiscovery, and the 2nd and 3rd Final Fantasy XIII sequels.)

Am I way off complaining about a game I paid less than $14.00 for? I spent 40+ hours playing it over the course of several weeks, I did the majority of side quests and even worked to get several trophies for the game. I certainly got my moneys worth, and might have even if I paid full price for it. I'd wonder if more dedicate JRPG fans see far less wrong with the game? Maybe I'm just a jerk who expected too much from a series that had delivered so well in the past. All things considered I'm still a big fan of JRPGs in general. I rarely hesitate to buy Japanese games in general, games like Nier: Automata, Nioh, Persona 5 and many others have outclassed most other releases this year. I'd like to know what JRPGs people have been playing these last few years and what I might have missed on the Vita that might rid me of the foul taste of Star Ocean 5.

Terrific write-up. You can and should expect more from your JRPGs. I haven't played this entry, but I've played most of the others and your assessments are spot on. Dumbing down ROGs isn't what Japan needs - it's a change in the formulaic anime trope stylings and characters that would reinvigorate the genre for the west.

Entertaining read! I've never jumped in to Star Ocean (I might have played ~20 minutes of 2nd Story at a friend's house?) but have always wondered about it.

Your mentioning Tales of Phantasia and all the buzz around that game in the SNES emulation scene at the time definitely brought a lot back :) That was one of the first games I ever emulated as well.

Saw you mention something about JRPG's you may have missed on the Vita, so I wanted to mention Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 2. I like those games a whole lot. They are also on PS3, so you may have played them there, and Trails of Cold Steel 3 is coming for PS4 later this year(in Japan). Hopefully, it gets released over here at some point.

Only other Vita game I can think of at the moment is Ys: Memories of Celceta, which I also really liked. Oh, and Persona 4 Golden, of course, but I assume you've already played that(or standard Persona 4, at least).

Edit: I just noticed the bit where you did say you've played Persona 4.

I played the third Star Ocean but remember little about it. I did not like the fourth on 360 very much at all, though I have a soft spot for Infinite Undiscovery so what do I know.

Have you played Lost Dimension on Vita/PS3? I really enjoyed that one.

As for getting your money's worth, I reviewed a couple recently that I got sent for free and still had a terrible time. Akiba's Beat and Dark Rose Valkyrie. After the shallow fun of Akiba's Trip Akiba's Beat was just a boring slog (steals the Tales of combat system actually). Dark Rose Valkyrie is better but I think the main issue with it is every battle taking so long, the characters and story are actually pretty decent.

First of all, Final Fantasy is not the Dark Souls of the NES. Every game was Dark Souls on the NES, or even worse. The whole thing about Demon's/Dark Souls was trying to return to some of the more challenging gameplay of earlier game design so I resent applying a label of a throwback to the very original thing those games are throwing back to! Not that FF itself was particularly hard, but still...

More relevantly, JRPGs are (mostly) anime bullshit right now because that's kind of what they've got to differentiate themselves. The whole point of the JRPG genre was to get story (and to some degree RPG mechanics) into games that were on tiny little cartridges and generally didn't tell a story or create a sense of place. It wouldn't really work to try to do that with an action game because of the constraints (Ninja Gaiden may have been the first console game with significant cut scenes but they were still pretty crappy) so they created a whole genre that focused on story over gameplay. This made sense through the PSX era (the PSX could do story and gameplay as shown in Metal Gear Solid, but most PSX games struggled with gameplay in general and the camera specifically to the point where a turn-based game was often more fun to play than a super-awkward action title) but from PS2 on the two could be integrated a lot more successfully. Action games could tell stories effectively. JRPGs arguably peaked during early PS2, running on their ability to do spectacle very well with awesome new graphics, and the love for the genre on PSX, but their relevance quickly began to fade. By the time the PS3/Xbox 360 came around the genre was on life support and while those systems do have some significant entries in that genre, they're few and far between. The Western RPG adapted by merging action gameplay fully into itself (Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout 3) but the JRPG did not, for a variety of reasons.

So what did the JRPG have to offer? The answer for a lot of them was anime bullshit. They leaned in heavily to waifus and super convoluted stories to appeal to a niche of gamers who weren't looking for the mature, interesting, stories that were moving into the action genre. They also started to have even longer periods of storytelling and text cut scenes, and also more convoluted battle systems to appeal to the small niche of gamers who were buying the games and didn't want the same turn-based combat they'd played literally dozens of times before. Like any genre that stops trying to appeal to new players it became more and more hostile to them and more and more impenetrable.

That's not to say there aren't any good JRPGs after 2010 or so. They've started to evolve with things like Xenoblade Chronicles X bringing more action and dynamism to combat, and throwbacks like I Am Setsuna trying to clear away a lot of the cruft that built up over time, but if you don't like anime you're only going to get a few options a year if that. Anime is what the genre offers to a large degree at this point, and its what the real audience expects.

TL:DR After action games got good stories JRPGs went up their own butts with anime bullshit in order to offer something different to their fanbase. Now there are very few games coming out in the genre that are appealing to people who don't want that. It's kind of sad, but it makes business sense.

To me Star Ocean has always been a series I wish was better than it actually is. Granted I've put spent very little time with second story which is usually considered the best one.

As for Vita recommendations, gonna bang the Trails of Cold Steel drum (and by extension Trails in the Sky). They're anime rpgs done right.

I don't know that changing the formulae is necessarily the answer. For me, part of what attracts about a JRPG is that unique Japanese-ness. I got into Star Ocean with 3 and have played all of them but this one. Played nearly every FF and Tales game. What Japanese devs need to do is give a shit about what they're making. They need to up the quality, both in writing and gameplay, and incorporate a few (mostly quality-of-life) elements that we take for granted in 'modern' games. Lower the runtime and scope and up the production values on what's left, and for god's sake ship on-time.

Take Final Fantasy XV as an example. It doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game, nor does it feel terribly too much like a traditional JPRG. They dudebro-ed the cast up in an attempt to appeal to western audiences. They alienated Japanese fans in the process. The phoned-in half the game; the plot's execution was a shambles. They make a clunky action battle system that felt shallow and unrewarding to play...for the sole stated purpose of "doing something different." They need to do better, not just different for the sake of it. The big Japanese devs seem to be adrift without direction lately, ever since the so-called 'death' in the 360 era. I think that's why we're seeing so many HD remasters from them lately.

Edit: @bigsocrates: I also wanted to utterly reject this notion that action gameplay is somehow the superior evolution over turn-based gameplay. Some people prefer turn-based games (one of the more beloved FF games is X, a game without any active time elements). And contrary to the popular conception, it was not hardware limitations that enforced turn-based battle systems.

I think JRPGs have always been anime adjacent, it just became more obvious over time. There's plenty that are bad but I really enjoy Valkyria Chronicles (the og), Xenoblade Chronicles, Tales of Berseria, Dark/Demon Souls, and Ni No Kuni. I emjoy their anime bullshit more than not.

This game is straight up garbage. I'm surprised you even listed the soundtrack as a positive since a number of the tracks are just lifted right out of 3 and 4. I gave up after dying once against the human commander guy where it hits a big difficulty spike and never finished it but I feel like I played enough to be justifiably offended by it's existence.

they were on a hit streak with Radiant Historia

I think the game you're looking for is Radiata Stories. Radiant Historia is a DS JRPG made by Atlus.

I agree, I felt like tri-Ace set a high standard for battle system complexity in the PSX era and there isn't any good reason to dumb things down. A game like Nioh is accessible, despite several complex systems and gameplay mechanics, because you can still find success if you ignore most of those intricacies. As for your point about anime tropes, I was going to point towards Persona 5 as a step in the right direction... but there is so much of the game I haven't seen I could be way off.

Man it was so exciting to hear the spoken word intro / full vocal j-pop song for the first time. As corny as it was, it was bonkers for a non-CD game.

I don't have Lost Dimension but I'd certainly give it a try, PS3 games are pretty cheap right now. Akiba's Trip was on sale at a GameStop a while back, didn't buy it because normal people were looking, lol. I was looking up Exist Archive on Vita, which I guess is tri-Ace in some capacity. Wondering if that is any good?

I'd say you're spot on, really. I mean you could argue that Grandia II and a few Tales games did it better, but they also did it even more anime. I'll definitely start the Trails of Cold Steel games, since they're highly recommended in general... but if I play as a teenage girl I'm gonna be pissed.

Can we talk about how this entire franchise is STILL in denial about the story contributions of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time to the series? This franchise has yet to have a game which addresses that godawful plot twist.

It's practically been fifteen years since Till the End of Time was released. It's time to talk about this canonically in the games.

I know, the Dark Souls thing was a joke. ^_^ tee hee. I couldn't agree more, technology and adaptability created stagnation in the style of Japanese RPG development. On one hand they have steady jobs and don't outsource at such a high rate, on the other hand a lot of modern Japanese game development seems to be expensive and disastrous with questionable results. Xenoblade is a series I've always been desperate to play, it looks like it was made for me, but the barrier for me is not wanting to buy another Nintendo system until it has well proven its worth. First party titles aren't enough for me. I hear I Am Setsuna's creators are making a new game Lost Sphear that appears to improve upon the first games issues. I guess I need to get over my anime issues, it isn't impossible. I watched Seven Deadly Sins, that's a start right?

True. All amazing games. Being one trophy away from a Ni No Kuni platinum still haunts me.

See, that's basically what I was saying in many more words. I was trying to be nice, I don't think they even re-recorded the tracks from SO4, just pasted the files in. It also felt like the battle animations were directly lifted from that game, too. You do all the same moves and the new ones take a ton of quest grinding to learn.

Yes. My brain is melting like cheese in the microwave.

@zombiepie: Am I confused, or didn't the end of the 360-era one kind of give it a brief nod? I know the twist you're talking about and I assume we're far enough out of its release that we're not going to offend anyone by talking about it openly.

Ugh, I'm personally still in denial of this. At one point I figured (hoped) I had made that part up in my head while dreaming. Actually, maybe this game felt like a cheap offline MMORPG because it is -that- canon? Any intelligent 'creator' has backups of his MMORPG universe thingy, right? Kotaku ran a story last month after it came to PS4, kind of validating it in the worst way.

From what I can tell, 4 was a prequel to 1, and 5 takes place between 1 & 2... So as far as we know, the ending of Till the End of Time is how the Star Ocean universe rests currently. Practically speaking, I'm not sure what the chances for a Star Ocean 6 look like at this point, given that 5 was apparently already a long shot within Square Enix, and it seems to be reviewing quite poorly. We may never get any better answers.

It's kinda a bummer, too, because a JRPG with a scifi twist was always a excellent idea, Tri-Ace just never managed to completely nail it.

You can reject whatever you want but the market has kind of spoken here. Personally I agree with you. There are times I love a turn based system, and I played through I Am Setsuna a couple weeks ago precisely because it scratched that itch. But there clearly isn't much of a market for turn-based RPGs outside the anime niche right now or there would be more of them. We're down to a few big series that started over a decade ago (and so have built up fanbases) and even they are moving away from turns.

And I also disagree that tech didn't play a big part in turn based design. It obviously did when the genres were starting. There were other influences, to be sure (D&D and its turn based systems for example) but technical limitations have always defined game design.

My post may have come off as anti-JRPG but I'm not. I like the genre (though I don't really have time for 80 hour behemoths) and I wish there were still more AAA versions being made. There's something uniquely absorbing about a great RPG with an endearing cast of characters and cool visual spectacle layered on top of a deep and fun battle system. I totally get the appeal. But it's clear that the audience has shrunken to the point where outside the pillars of the genre there's not much of a model for big traditional JRPGs being economically viable.

So what you get are a lot of games that are cheaply made and focused on a very specific niche of players who want very specific things. And I am not one of those players.

I thought after Star Ocean 4 it's confirmed that everyone in SO-verse are just characters in some asshole's video game!

As for the OP itself, could've used a little less filler at the beginning, maybe save it for a more general "what JRPGs are to me" post. Otherwise, this was a good read, as I've been a little hesitant to buy this game even on sale. Then again I did pre-order Valkyria Revolution and I'm very tempted to write a similar post once I complete it (or sell it off to someone else in frustration, as you did with SO5).

I think the resurgence of the isometriccRPGthroughKickstarter, the revival of old franchises like Xcom and Wasteland, the current renaissance that the Fire Emblem franchise is enjoying at Nintendo, along with the surprising reveal of the tactical nature of Mario x Rabbids would all seem suggest that we were merely in an action-focused phase during the 360 era. I definitely can see the trend of big publishers action-ifying every game they can get their hands on (Bioware being a big offender here, and Beth with the 3D Fallouts), but turn based and tactical games are far from dying. You might even call it a comeback.

The Star Ocean and Tales franchises always had their real-time brawler combat systems as a key differentiator compared to the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. It's part of why I'd say Square Enix has lost their way with FFXV by chasing after that style of combat (as well as Western-inspired open worlds). They fumbled bigtime with FFXIV's launch, too, though. In Danny's recent doc they go into some of the hubris they had going on at Square in the early 2010s that had them thinking they could do no wrong.

But did eventually get around to my point. What they need to do to revive the JPRG genre is quit making the games so low quality. Stop cutting corners, hit release dates (squeaking in at the end of a console cycle like FFXII or FFIV isn't good, and where is KH3?), and write more interesting characters and plots. Focus on what makes the JRPG unique, and execute on it well.

@freedom4556: Kickstarted games are a sign of a genre's niche status, since it means publishers aren't funding them anymore. Is there a crowd that loves this type of game? Of course. I'm one of them and I've backed turn based games on Kickstarter. But that's a very different thing from being a "mainstream" genre. Tactical games are receiving some big budget published releases, but that's also a different type of game than the JRPG and is focused on deep systems, not story. Fire Emblem is, admittedly, closer to a JRPG, but it flourishes mostly on 3DS, which has technical restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how it does on Switch.

I don't know if I agree that "just make them better" is the answer to the JRPG's genre woes. I think that some of the genre's conventions have to be reconsidered. I don't think most people want to grind in 2017. It's just not fun. Likewise, I don't think the games should be 80 hours long. They could take a Skyrim/Fallout approach and have hundreds of hours of CONTENT with a story that can be finished much quicker, but length is generally not a selling point anymore. Even Persona 5 is annoying people with the grinding and the length, and if Persona can't get away with it then other IP can't either. Finally, I think the games generally need to modernize. Save anywhere (or at least anywhere out of combat.) More voice acting. No multi-hour throat-clearing intros. Clear away the junk that's accumulated in the genre over time and I think it will be more approachable for new or lapsed players.;

I think I Am Setsuna actually did a lot of this well, but was ultimately betrayed by its low budget nature. JRPGs will never be the kings of console like they were in the late 90s/early 2000s again, but it's a good genre and I think it can rebound. But only if it evolves in some ways.

This, a thousand times this. Furthermore there are multiple directions for JRPG to go, but by going towards one could potentially drive away fans of another, and the fan base is divided as it is (although you could say that about gaming in general). Animu vs Non-animu, turn base vs action, grind vs no grind.

I too prefer turn based combat more than action/real time usually, this is especially true as I grow older. I am also done with grinding and any random drops/craft/farming mechanics that pad out gameplay time, to me they are detrimental to the pacing of the story, but there are players who love to deep dive into all the combat and level mechanics of a game. In one of the 8-4 Play podcast someone mention playing Persona for its combat and systems while tossing the story aside, that sounds insane to me, but yet I could totally understand the appeal. Yet I find Persona 2, 3, and 4 to be too grindy already.

Tri-Ace work have always been a bit hot and cold. Their focus on combat systems while interesting it is at times conflict with itself. Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria could be finish in less than a day if it isn't for the grind. It has an interesting story, the story telling could have been tight and really drive the characters forward if it didn't get separated by significant chunks of grinding in between. That's not to say the gameplay system is bad, because it totally isn't, yet the two parts of the game get in the way of each other. SO4 is a classic rpg story in disguise. The number one thing people said about it was that it is cliche to a fault. In some way it isn't necessarily bad, it is pretty much an old fashion rpg in (then) modern tech, which should have pleased all the fans who always go on and on about wanting a the same old school game with updated graphics, yet here we are...almost as if players don't know what they really want. In one of the early trailer of SO5 it shows the timeline of the SO games, SO3 is still at the chronological end I think.

The whole lower budget spectrum and high budget AAA in JRPG is going to be difficult to handle, there's just not enough buzz in the genre (are there genre anymore?) to warrant a high budget JRPG. FF is still the closest thing we get; cutting corners, "quality"(whatever that means), and hitting release days go against each other.

I know of two animu that share a similar title. If one doesn't change your mind you can try the other No you shouldn't, you absolutely shouldn't.