[PSP] Star Ocean (PSP), Star Ocean 2 (PSP), Star Ocean 4 (Multiplatform confirmed. Yay.)

Originally Posted by Cetra

What a wasted effort on Microsoft's part. Why don't they make steps to acquire Final Fantasy if they are truly serious about the Japanese market.

A Microsoft exclusive of SO4 is just going to hurt the future of the series due to bad sales and a multiplatform release is going to accomplish nothing as the Japanese just wait out for the PS3 release.

I wouldn't be so bitter if it wasn't so obvious that this is nothing but the result of a money exchange rather than a decision based on the merits of the system.

Because the 360 clearly is less good at running JRPGs than the PS3. Right.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Kairi Li

But back to SO4, I've never really played the series, but I have heard good things about it, and this game looks beautiful graphically so far, so this could be my way to get into the series. The main character's design sucks, but what's to expect from the land of pretty feminine boys? I like the girl's outfit though, wish I can have that outfit for my character in PSU.

The gameplay was nice. Ask anyone who made it most of the way through the story to discover the worst plot twist in the HISTORY of gaming...

Spoiler:

Essentially discarding any sort of original storytelling up to that point, the story suddenly goes "Oops, you were in the Matrix this whole time" and stops making sense.

And that's about 40+ hours into the game. SUCH a pissoff.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

That trailer makes the game look absolutely GORGEOUS. If they can keep the framerate steady, I will drool all OVER that game.

Incidentally, I watched the Infinite Undiscovery trailer right after watching this one... the games gameplay-wise look pretty similar, but it's shocking how washed out IU's textures look compared to SO4's.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't IU announced for 360 before SO4 was? It's almost like IU was "Oh, let's give them something KIND OF like Star Ocean" before deciding to just bring over Star Ocean.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by PunyPeon

Not really, how don't my examples apply? I'd like to think Viva Pinata is a port with a few added features unless you're one of those people who like to believe a PS2 game ported to the Wii with motion controls is a new game. It's essentially the same game, just using the touch screen to enhance the gameplay.

How someone like yourself was able to become a moderator here amazes me. Unfortunately for you, calling people retards on a message board won't stop your multitude of problems in real life. Wake up.

I'd just like to point out that the Viva Pinata and Blue Dragon DS games are nothing like the games they're based off of.

I'll repeat what Skills said for emphasis. Is it possible that something in the IU universe will make it to another system? Yes. Will IU get ported? Fuck no. IU as a game is Microsoft's IP, they aren't likely to give it to someone else.

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I've been impressed with the depth of the gameplay in SO4 so far, but the storytelling has been lacking immensely. The plot itself seems kind of interesting, but it's told in a rather ham-handed fashion, and the pacing starts out really funky. Graphically, though, the game looks pretty good except for the awkward movements people have mentioned. Not quite as bad as Eternal Sonata's, but close.

I have a question about the Battle Trophies, actually. They're tied to individual characters this time around, and I'm curious, is there a way to tell which, if any, trophies you need to earn while controlling the character? I'm having trouble figuring out if I'll need to control everybody to get the trophies or if I can pick some of the accumulative ones (Do x hits total) while not controlling those characters.

The number of trophies is absolutely retarded, but at least the actual difficulty of them doesn't appear to approach the levels of SO3.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Let me just say, after playing for 20-some hours now, that this game had better thank its lucky stars that its core gameplay is as fun as it is, because jesus CHRIST the story is just awful. The dialogue is badly written, melodramatic to a fault, and makes characters stand around repeating the same plot points 5 times once they figure them out 15 minutes after the player did. The actual animation quality is god-awful. The environments all look great but the actual characters are animated in Barbievision. It's horrendous!

The plot itself at first appeared to be a change from the norm of "Here is the bad guy, 5 minutes in. You will see him 50 hours from now!" by basically not telling you who the bad guy was. That strategy kinda worked in SO3 but where I'm at in SO4 it's clear that the story is not written forward-thinking at all. Or if it is, it's being incredibly obtuse about it. You jump from planet to planet, solving cliched plots like "There is a sickness, please find the cure" and shit, and once you leave the planet you go back to the stars, and... nothing happens in the main plot. If there is one. So far it's felt like little snatches of bad plots strung together by a spaceship.

The voice acting doesn't help things. The budget has to have been about $5 for all the voice acting, because everyone mangles lines, reads things with the wrong emotion, and in general sounds like they read the lines completely out of order, in a complete vacuum from context.

And yet... I'm still playing the game. The battle trophies are quite addictive now that they don't go to nearly the retarded lengths that SO3's did, and the core fighting mechanics are solid and fun to play. The dungeons are enormous, and sadly, even though that's great because you get large pockets of gameplay, it's also another issue I've got with the story because the pacing is so god-awful. It's literally 30 minutes of cutscenes, 3 or 4 HOURS of dungeon, 20 minutes of cutscenes, 2 hours of dungeon, wash, rinse, repeat. I never realized just how good the pacing in other RPGs like Vesperia or Blue Dragon was until I saw the pacing in this game.

At least when you skip cutscenes you get a textual summary of what happened. I've already skipped one incredibly maddening plot development that way, I'm glad I didn't have to FFFFFFFFF through 5 minutes of whining at what EDGE MAVERICK did at one point.

If the best scenes in the game are the ones with Welch in them, who is by far one of the most gratingly chipper characters I have ever encountered in an RPG, you know you've got issues. Holy shit.

Fun game is fun, but atrocious story is atrocious.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I haven't had CONSTANT issues, but every time I go for 2 hours without hitting a save point I seem to hit a freeze. Stupid game.

FELIPE NO