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Did you guys like Star Ocean 6?

I’ve played every Star Ocean game. 1 and 2 are pretty dated gameplay-wise, but last I played them, they were enjoyable little romps. 3 has some clunky gameplay and tedious design decisions, but it’s an ambitious game, can be fun, has a pretty big budget, and is a super memorable experience. 4 has a trash female cast but I found it to be a really fun experience + it’s really pleasant presentation-wise for me. 5 was the most forgettable game I’ve ever experienced.


6….


I just completed it today.

I will say that, movement-wise, the game is a huge step up from prior games. DUMA is fun to use. Combat also feels less clunky, though also simplified from 3 and even 4. Es’owa was a fun mini-game.

Unfortunately, though, SO6 was ruined by what was probably the most boring story I’ve experienced in quite some time. At the 2/3rds mark I really just wanted the game to be over and it felt like torture to keep playing the game.

The game has a ton of cutscenes, as expected from a JRPG, but almost none of them are even remotely interesting. The dialogue is extremely wooden for a majority of the characters. Most cutscenes (as in, probably around 96%) are just characters standing and talking for a very long time. There are many stretches of the game that will have you sit through a 5 minute cutscene, go somewhere 100 feet away, sit through another 5-10 minute cutscene, go somewhere 100 feet away (or maybe an Inn), sit through another 5 minute cutscene.

And the plot of the game is just not interesting. At all. It’s basically an uninspired semi-rehash of the first portion of SO3 without any of the ambition or anything to make it interesting. It takes forever for the conflict to even actually begin, and then it feels like it never really takes off. It feels like nothing happened the entire game.

In addition, outside of Raymond and maybe Elena, all the characters have the charisma of a plank of wood. I just couldn’t care less about any of them. I don’t like how Private Actions in the series are handled in the first place, and I certainly didn’t feel like going out of my way for these characters. Too many cast members spoke in a very stiff manner. Albaird, Theo, Laeticia, Malkya, and Midas all sound exactly the same.

The sci-fi portion of the plot was also completely uninspired and was tied to the rest of the game in such a half-assed and flimsy manner. It also didn’t help that once this portion of the plot kicked in, the cutscenes used the same background track for a majority of the cutscenes.

The game never felt like it had any actual drama or high stakes. Just like with Star Ocean 5, I think spaceships were shown for a grand total of 30 seconds. 20 of those being in the opening cutscene for Raymond. It was seriously so funny how, in the later parts of the game, there would be abrupt cuts to a spaceship for literally 1 or 2 seconds. What’s the point? Outside of that, there were soldiers from kingdoms 200 feet away from each other that fought for like 30 minutes total, and, uh… that’s it.

So, while I love cutscenes, lots of cutscenes are a huge problem for me when the plot is uninteresting, the characters lack charisma, and the cinematography is nonexistent. And that’s definitely the case for this game.

Outside of that, the soundtrack was yet another typical phoned-in Sakuraba soundtrack, the game also ran like total gutter trash on a base PS4, and for some reason if characters are talking outside of cutscenes you literally cannot do anything until the convo is over, which is stupid and annoying.

The game was quite buggy, especially in enclosed environments. It was very common for me to encounter an enemy that the game wouldn’t register as an enemy, and the game would sort of bounce back and forth between activating combat mode and not.


So, while it’s better than Star Ocean 5, almost anything is, so that’s not saying much.

I think it’s much worse than Star Oceans 1-4 despite gameplay being improved in some aspects.


I hope that, if tri-Ace makes a SO7 (which they might, seeing as they’ve been hiring lately), they don’t play it safe and phone it in with the story and characters, and I also hope that they either have a higher budget, or they at least allocate their resources a little better.
 
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I bought it the other week for £20. I only got it because people on this board said it can be broken very easily and the male MC looks like a chad.
 

NahaNago

Member
I've yet to play it. I did play the last 3 so I was originally looking forward to this one but that male main character's looks just killed my hype for the game.
 

[Sigma]

Member
It's on my list to get around to still. It just hasn't been high priority enough for me right now as I would rather get around to many of games more currently.
 
extremely bland game. I thought things couldnt be worse after 5, but it did.
I mean, it’s definitely better than 5. 5 was just an asset reuse of SO3 and 4 put into a game with a few locations mixed in with Infinite Undiscovery’s seamless battle transitions with a large party. But, yeah, SO6 is still not good.
 
Idk but I came to hate the art style in Star Ocean after a while. Last I played was 4... So I don't know how much it have changed since then.

But look at this art:
gorgeous-visual-for-star-ocean-6-v0-c0537oem71o91.jpg


And their 3D rendering of the male MC...
52435515483_684cb9b338_h.jpg

My man has a face built like a school boy that it's not even funny.
 

Roxkis_ii

Member
As a fan of SO 3 and 4, I wanted to look pass the short coming of this game so bad, but it is just so boring outside of battle. I think I got to 2/3rd mark and I can't find it in me to keep going.
 
Idk but I came to hate the art style in Star Ocean after a while. Last I played was 4... So I don't know how much it have changed since then.

But look at this art:
gorgeous-visual-for-star-ocean-6-v0-c0537oem71o91.jpg


And their 3D rendering of the male MC...
52435515483_684cb9b338_h.jpg

My man has a face built like a school boy that it's not even funny.
The 3D modelers made Raymond’s face wider and his chin much smaller, which is…. odd. I think Raymond is still a good looking dude, just much younger looking.
 
As a fan of SO 3 and 4, I wanted to look pass the short coming of this game so bad, but it is just so boring outside of battle. I think I got to 2/3rd mark and I can't find it in me to keep going.
You’re not missing anything. At all. I wish I dropped it at that point, too. The “sci-fi” portion of the game is incredibly disappointing, and if anything, the pacing gets even worse when the game already had too many boring cutscenes occurring too frequently in the earlier portions of the game.


I straight up just skipped the final boss and ending cutscenes. I no longer cared.
 
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Dr. Claus

Banned
I would say SO 1-3 are 10/10 games. SO4-6 are solid 7/10 games. They aren't anywhere as good as the original trilogy, but they are still very fun JRPGs that I enjoyed going through.
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
I was pleasantly surprised with SO6. I thought it was decent.

Combat is the best in the series. Every character feels different and interesting to play, with lots of skills to experiment with. And most importantly it’s FAST.

Raymond looks like a total douche but he quickly became my favorite protagonist in the series. It’s nice playing as a grown ass adult with a functioning brain. That’s pretty rare for a JRPG.

Agreed with a lot of what was said about the story, though. I don’t think it was terrible but it’s a little bland and stretched too long. The last 1/3 felt like they were running out of budget.

Overall I’d say :
2 > 1 > 6 > 4 > 3 > 5
 

kurisu_1974

is on perm warning for being a low level troll
It was OK but to be honest all the SE games that came out around that time felt a bit low tier and ditto budget. Still I enjoyed it, more than Tales of Arise for example which looked better and more polished but was a slog.
 

YeulEmeralda

Linux User
I did. But the whole play the game twice with two characters nonsense didn't work out.

These are 70 hour JRPGs nobody is gonna play them twice for a few scenes.
 

SiahWester

Member
No and for the same reasons. It's a bad story and I'm not a fan of the characters. I wish Tri Ace and Star Ocean could have a comeback, but this isn't it.
 
I enjoyed it. Glad I supported it.
I’m definitely glad I supported it because it’s safe to say that I’m a fan of tri-Ace. I’ve played and completed SO1-6. I’ve bought SO3 twice and SO4 three times. Resonance of Fate is one of my all time favorite games. Valkyrie Profile 2 is amazing (I’m one of the few that doesn’t really like Lenneth much). I loved Infinite Undiscovery.


I want to see tri-Ace win!!

But they need a bigger budget.

I’m glad they were able to make improvements to their gameplay this time around (whereas SO5 was a bad rip-off of SO3/SO4/IU), but they played it totally safe with their story because of budget limitations.
 

PanzerCute

Member
I really liked the first 25 hours but, as you mentioned, the remaining 10 were sometimes terrible and filled with walls of bad cutscenes.
 

Doom85

Member
Total newbie to the series, but I had fun. Yeah, in the second half the marriage rescue part and the initial going into space and being stuck in your spaceship for an hour was way too heavy on cutscenes and the only gameplay being “go from point A to point B”, but once you got to the other planet, it picked back up again. So, a flawed game, but overall enjoyable. Characters weren’t deep, but were charming and had good chemistry with one another.
 
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