The flawed Star Ocean games constantly change, but rarely improve. With a new title on the horizon, The Divine Force, developer Tri-Ace must reimagine its gameplay and storytelling foundations to forge a new path.
The Star Ocean franchise suffers from an identity crisis. Imagine a Japanese RPG series that’s heavily inspired by Star Trek, packed with Judeo-Christian iconography and doomsday elements, and infused with intense action-focused combat. Now, duct tape that to a framework featuring terribly written and poorly developed characters, obnoxious melodrama, inconsistent art styles, and some of the worst plot twists in the genre, and you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect from a Star Ocean game.
However, rather than addressing these weaknesses, developer Tri-Ace is content with remixing the melodrama and reinventing the gameplay to spice up the experience. With the announcement of the upcoming series entry, Star Ocean: The Divine Force, it seems that more gameplay reinvention awaits, but whether the story elements, visual assets, and characterization improve remains to be seen. For Star Ocean to truly soar, here’s what must change.
But First, Some Background
Star Ocean developer Tri-Ace broke off from Wolf Team in the mid-1990s, after developing Tales of Phantasia. Star Ocean was the studio’s first title, and is something like a sister series to the Tales franchise. They both share core gameplay elements, including action combat and involved interactions between party members. However, the Tales series found its footing early on, developing a formula for its gameplay and story tropes that remain consistent to this day. Star Ocean is decidedly less consistent, with its gameplay, plot, and visual quality greatly varying between games. This is unfortunate, because Star Ocean is amazingly fun when it nails the fundamentals. The problem is, it doesn’t usually do that.
Star Ocean struggles to define its own gameplay, too. Action-focused combat is the series norm, but the rules drastically change between games so that they play differently from one another. Worse still, some gameplay systems feel like relics from the SNES era that weren’t ironed out during the transition to 3D models and arenas. Add to that the messy story attached to each game, and you have an inconsistent, mixed-bag of an action-RPG series. Yet, it can be fixed. Here’s how.
Tell Better Stories
In space, no one can hear you cringe, which is perhaps why Star Ocean’s storytelling is so terrible. As a Japanese RPG, one can expect some degree of anime-fueled melodrama and character cliche: it comes with the territory. That’s a bit of an overstatement as there are many anime programs that tell great, sci-fi space dramas, such as Macross, Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, and Outlaw Star. The truth is, Star Ocean leans heavily on anime clichés to characterize its cast, rather than interesting development, interactions, and growth.
Tales games are guilty of overusing clichés, as well, but the series often tweaks the character or scenario to create interesting story beats. Luke is your typical bumbling, spoiled hero in Tales of the Abyss, for example. But watching him commit a horrific atrocity due to his own stupidity, and subsequently face abandonment by everyone he knows and fought with previously, is a genuinely interesting twist. Yuri is a cool protagonist who lives on the edge of the law due to his hands-on approach to justice, but watching his actions escalate to vigilantism and ultimately cold-blooded murder later in the story is a shocking, and thoroughly engrossing development.
On the other hand, Star Ocean’s cookie-cutter characters, lack of development, stilted dialogue, and genuinely dumb plot points, particularly with later games in the series, mar any motivation to follow or care for the story. Imagine the party learning the truth about our universe’s origins by spilling out of a TV panel into another dimension. It’s subpar storytelling, yet is never treated as such. If Star Ocean is dead set on telling a serious story, it desperately needs good writing and character development to go with it.
Fix the Range Combat System
Star Ocean utilizes a bizarre range system to modify the attacks that your character can perform at a given time. When you are at long range, pressing the attack button performs a long ranged attack. When in melee, the same button performs a close-range attack. This seems sensible on paper, but in execution it means that if you ever want to perform a long range attack, you must move away from your target to initiate it. It’s especially awkward when playing as a melee fighter. For example, in Star Ocean 3, protagonist Fayt has a fantastic uppercut attack combo that can juggle most enemies for good damage.
Unfortunately, this attack can only be initiated from long range, so if you want to set up said attack string, you must run away from your target to do so. In the heat of battle this is unfeasible, and feels needlessly clunky. The problem could have been remedied easily by giving range and melee attacks dedicated buttons, or by giving you a modifier button to switch between attack types. But to date, no game in the series does this: they all use the awkward range system instead. This absolutely must be corrected in The Divine Force.
Pick a Battle System and Stick With it
Combat mechanics greatly differ between games. Star Ocean 3 introduced a defensive shield ability, which could only be used when standing still. This mechanic created an interesting dynamic that encouraged you to remain in neutral and carefully weigh your options rather than wildly attacking. Enemies could shield, too, and attacking their shields reflected your damage back to you. Star Ocean 4 threw shielding out the window, and introduced the Blindside flank maneuver. This worked functionally like a charged dodge maneuver. With it, you held the dodge button, and input a direction during an enemy attack to slip behind the target for a free critical strike.
Unfortunately, Blindside was poorly implemented, and would not work against area-of-effect attacks. Later enemies could counter it, too. So, of course, Star Ocean 5 removed the Blindside and introduced a dedicated block button, which worked like a weaker version of Star Ocean 3’s shield. Based on the footage revealed of The Divine Force, Blindside makes its return again, though how it functions in this iteration is unclear yet. It is incredibly frustrating that these games constantly change core combat elements, so Tri-Ace really needs to sit down, pick the combat elements fans like, and expand on those rather than flip-flopping every other game.
Give Us Aerial Combat Already
Star Ocean games have a weird, auto-jump aerial system similar to Final Fantasy VII Remake or Kingdom Hearts that causes characters to automatically jump to hit targets out of their immediate range. It feels restrictive and clunky. If the games don’t let you manually jump, and aerial targeting is cumbersome, then don’t put flying enemies out of reach or give players an intuitive way to reach them.
Tales of Arise highlights aerial combat’s fun, and uses it to great effect. In Arise, you could jump or launch enemies into the air, and then open up a secondary set of basic and special attacks that effectively doubled your move list in a given fight. Star Ocean would greatly benefit from a similar feature, and The Divine Force’s expanded mobility would be the perfect setting to introduce it.
Collaborate With Another Studio
The Divine Force’s exploration appears more robust than in other series games, but exploration was never a Star Ocean problem. The recent gameplay footage reveals expansive areas with impressive verticality, but the truth is, floating around big maps and dive-bombing enemies Xenoblade-style has never been Star Ocean’s schtick. Considering Tri-Ace’s knack for introducing half-baked gameplay elements into the meta, it’s worrisome to see this new direction. That’s not to say that Tri-Ace can’t properly implement a new gameplay style that matches the environments, but I would be more at ease if the developer announced that it was working with a studio like Monolith Soft to build these environments. After all, Monolith’s work with Nintendo produced the excellent Breath of the Wild.
Hire Better Modelers
As much as I dislike disparaging other people’s work, there is no nice way to say this: Star Ocean’s character models are ugly. So much so, in fact, when I first watched The Divine Force’s trailer, I realized it was a Star Ocean game well before the Tri-Ace logo flashed on screen. Star Ocean has always had questionable presentation. Despite often featuring character work by famous artists, such as Meimu and Katsumi Enami, the in-game visuals tend to look quite different than the art that represents them, and this is as true today as it was during the sprite-based Super Nintendo and PlayStation days.
I was shocked to learn that the artwork for Star Ocean 5 and 6 was done by Akira “Akiman” Yasuda, renowned artist of Street Fighter fame. Sure, the characters wear the same outfits, have the same hair, general style, and so on, but the models miss the mark. One might attribute this to anime exaggerations, such as the large eyes and tiny, nondescript noses, but these models are sculpted in ways that look nothing like their artwork. This has been a problem at Tri-Ace since their jump to 3D: the more complex and detailed the art, the less faithful the finished model looks by comparison. Tales of Arise uses bright-eyed anime character designs with detailed models to represent them, and these look great in screenshots, as well as in motion. It’s high time Tri-Ace hires some competent modelers to adapt the designs.
Climb to the Stars
It’s difficult to watch a new trailer for a franchise you enjoy and not feel excited, or worse, feel critical about the footage. Star Ocean is a series I have put countless hours into. Star Ocean 2’s soundtrack hits me with waves of nostalgia to this day. I sank hundreds of hours into Star Ocean 3 because the combat was so incredibly addicting. But rather than improving what was established with the early games, Tri-Ace went off the rails with Star Ocean 4 and 5, delivering messy, slapdash adventures that don’t improve on anything that came before it, and tell worse stories.
As disparaging as it may seem, Star Ocean should take more inspiration from the Tales series to address its core gameplay mechanics, before taking inspiration from other franchises. Xenoblade is an excellent series, without question, but taking Star Ocean in that direction without first correcting or addressing the flaws from earlier games seems like a grave oversight. It is still too early to tell how Star Ocean: The Divine Force turns out, but we can only hope this new entry elevates the series to its place among the stars.
Keyword: 6 Ways Tri-Ace Can Redeem the Troubled Star Ocean Series