After disappearing in the vast reaches of Square Enix’s vault for seven years Star Ocean is back. Star Ocean 3 made quite an impressive mark on gaming as one of the most baffling and insulting plot twists that retro actively ruined the first two games with it. It didn’t help that Star Ocean 4 was filled with its fair share of problems. Now, after all this time Square tries to reinvigorate the series with the newest installment in the franchise. Is it the newest Star Ocean worth a look? Or is it best forgotten?

An underwhelming adventure.

Most Japanese RPGs tend to have a big, epic adventure and story about saving the world or universe even. They always try to draw players in with great characters, epic and grand stories. Star Ocean has none of that. When the player starts they are thrown into the game with a pan-shot of a village then immediately lock on to the main character sparring with his friend. From the gate, the game shows it has no ambition or interest in telling much of a story. The story follows Fidel and his group of kind of friends trying to help a mysterious little girl with mysterious powers and find her parents. There are virtually no cut scenes in the game and what little cutscenes there are, are very limited in animation. Most cut scenes revolve around just characters talking and avoiding action based scenes. When the game doesn’t use cutscenes it brings the game to a screeching halt. Players will be running around only to come to a stop to listen to some dialogue. During the characters narratives, the player can slowly walk around a bit and move the camera which makes it look like most things said aren’t of importance. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is pretty bad. The story isn’t engaging in the slightest and all the main party members have no character or have no development and this makes them dull. Perhaps one of the more baffling things about the story is that it seems like even the main character don’t seem to care much. The setting is a medieval/fantasy setting where most characters have lived all their live. At one point the Star aspect of Star Ocean comes into play and characters arrive on a spaceship with advanced technology and none of the characters seem to be impressed. Even when the party unexpectedly is taken to space in a highly advanced ship that should be beyond the party’s comprehension they never seem impressed or bewildered. If the main characters can’t even manage to be involved in the story then don’t expect the player to be.

The story is delivered in the most lackluster way possible.

Rock, paper….shoot?

Integrity And Faithlessness keeps the Star Ocean combat formula. When walking around on a map the player will come across monsters which they can fight on the map itself. A small ring appears around the player and the monsters in which they can run around freely. Attacks are done by pressing the light attack or heavy attack button and attacks change depending on the player standing in close or long-range. Special attacks can be set to either the light or heavy attack and can be set to long or short-range distance to be activated. Players can also block incoming attacks. This game’s rock, paper, scissor element is based on whether you want to block weak attacks, break enemies’ guard by doing heavy attacks or do light attacks to interrupt heavy attacks. The main problem with this rock,paper scissor mechanic is that scissor isn’t really a factor in the game. When in combat the action can get hectic and players might have trouble seeing enemy reads. And since there isn’t really any punishment to not blocking it will be ignored in favor of attacking the enemy. The combat is not incredibly engaging and there are only a handful of battles that are actually fun. Other than that Star Ocean is your fairly typical RPG. You get gear, assign jobs, complete quests and fight monsters to level up. Despite the fact that gear has a visual appearance in the shop and inventory when equipped to a character, they still keep the default clothing and weapons they have. It’s just one of the many points on a huge list of disappointments. Areas are either fairly linear with straight lines that occasionally branch off or big open areas that are barren and don’t have too much to do. The main combat of Star Ocean is broken and not that exciting while almost everything around the combat fails to impress or even be engaging.

Combat can get messy and often lacks depth.

At least it looks nice… kind of.

Visually Star Ocean looks alright. The game has some nice colors and while fairly generic its monster and area designs are nice. While most character designs look good some characters seem to have made a bad transition from artwork to 3D models. Animation in cut scenes are stiff and awkward and any action comes from the gameplay because there are no action scenes or no spectacle to see in cut-scenes. The effects that come off of special attacks look neat but clutter the screen making it hard to read enemy tells. The voice acting is standard stuff. It’s not that bad with the exception of some characters and the bad writing makes it sound worse than it actually is. Animations are stiff and awkward and manage to suck out all emotion out of scenes. While areas tend to be fairly linear they look nice and sometimes tend to look downright beautiful. The soundtrack is very energetic and sounds good. Expect a lot of violins and tunes that do manages to intensify the scenes they are in. Star Ocean has some nice designs, models and music but fails in the animation and cut-scene department.

The game does have its moments of serenity.

Closing Note:

Integrity And Faithlessness has no ambition to be the next Star Ocean game or even a traditional JRPG. It seems like the game doesn’t care about anything at all. It’s a game that’s destined to be forgotten since it’s not even so bad it’s good or anything can be learned from it. Its story is a lackluster drag where nothing happens and nobody cares. Its combats’ rock,paper, scissor mechanics are broken since scissor is absolutely useless. The RPG mechanics feel half-assed and its presentation is dull. Star Ocean is almost literally nothing of a game. It’s not good or bad enough to warrant a look back at it in the future and it’s not so bad as to be enjoyable. Star Ocean Integrity and Faithlessness doesn’t have integrity nor does it even have faithlessness. It has nothing.