I've never had a great experience with the Star Ocean series, I've always found the games a little on the meh side. The most interesting one I played was The Second Story and I really didn't like the battle system. But it had an interesting story and when it began I was intrigued. I sunk around ten hours into it before I finally quit (this was years ago, so maybe I should retry it and see if my opinion will change), frustration overcame intrigue and that was that. I love sci-fi and time travelling/alternate dimension stories and so when Second Story began it was ticking all the right boxes.
Jump forward to present day and I slide the latest Star Ocean into my PS4. The logos appear and fade and then there's this exciting full motion video of a spaceship hurtling past asteroids and strange planet in the distance. The main menu opens up, "Galaxy" mode! Ooh, space, sci-fi and wonder!...
The game starts, there's a picturesque town on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The camera pans in to two young men dueling and then the game dumps a ton of text boxes on you, explaining the basic controls of combat. You spam your attacks and work your way through the tutorials and then the fight is over. There's some light chit chat and you walk around the town seemingly aimless until you bump into this girl you both know. She spotted some strange people and everyone is worried, so they go see the mayor who is that stereotypical spineless town official. Then afterwards it's night time and bandits attack. More fighting, then with no grand finale the bandits flee. The next morning you remark that the town cannot survive another attack (despite very easily dispatching the bandits). Then you selflessly decide to head to the nearby kingdom to request reinforcements. You leave and are joined by the girl you met earlier, she is atypically defiant in the presence of the overbearingly protective hero who is convinced within a single sentence that the once perilous journey this vulnerable girl (who can cast fire spells! Really vulnerable right?) could not possibly join in with, is permitted to follow.
From here I went on into a fairly large environment fighting blobs, crabs and wolf men, accruing experience and skill points. Eventually everything culminated in a boss fight with a large blob, which was pretty easy but apparently we needed saving by some chap (by this point my attention span had diminished).
I turned the game off after this, popped it back into it's sleeve and sent it straight back to the rental service.
This must have been the most blandest and vacuous beginning to a videogame I have ever played. The first thing that bothered me, is the game seemed so impressed with it's own visuals, showing off the town and the nearby coastal area in it's splendid 60 FPS beauty, that it totally forgot to properly introduce us to any of it's characters. It also forgot to give the player any context or meaningful purpose.
I like an introduction, show me something about the characters that tells me they're interesting, that gives me some hint on their personalities. What is the world they inhabit, who is the bad guy, where might this story be going? I've played many games, even slow burners that take a while to get into themselves but nothing like this, this game literally sticks two fingers up to characters, story, plot and cohesion.
Look at a game like Final Fantasy X, the introduction to that is slow. The very beginning is watching people around a fire with a ruined city in the distance. But the game shows the personalities of several characters immediately. Kimarhi can be seen standing stoically, Tidus rests a caring hand on Yuna, she leans in affectionately and comforted. Then Tidus stands upon the mound and makes that declaration: "Listen to my story... This may be our last chance".
In just a couple of minutes the game has caught my attention, what is Tidus' story? Where are they? How did they get there? Why does everyone seem so somber? There are questions to be answered and I'm genuinely interested. What follows next, the Zanarkand section at the beginning is a mix of character development for Tidus (we even get a creepy appearance of a Fayth) and then when Sin arrives it kicks off and it's exciting and enthralling. The simplicity of the battle system at this point is overshadowed by the eventfulness of everything going on.
I could go on and on with other examples of how a game should start, but I would only be stressing my point. Star Ocean lacks integrity and I had no faith in it to continue. It couldn't even hold my attention for one hour with it's bland introduction into JRPG mediocrity.
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