Star Ocean 4: So bad, yet so good

Back then when I used to play so many xbox 360 games, I've finished Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope TWICE, including beating both Gabriel Celeste and Ethereal Queen during my first playthrough. My second playthrough was to clean up most other trophies/quests/items I missed during my first play, unfortunately a game freeze glitch occurred when I was 6+ hours into my first Wandering Dungeon run in my second playthrough totally put me into total frustration, and since then I've never touched the 360 version : (

Well almost 1 year after, I finally decided to play the game again, this time for PS3 - Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope International. I know that someday I would replay the game again, hence I've pick the game together when I bought my PS3 early last year. And it was not until recent weeks that I started playing (after platinuming Dragon Age, then stopped midway to play Resonance of Fate).

Title: Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope International
Developers: Tri-Ace
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3)
Genre: role-playing games
Release date: Feb 2010

The PS3 version, in short is just the slightly enhanced port of the 360 version, with few changes that made the game slightly harder. Among the notable changes include: Japanese and English voice option; Multi language text option; option to pick classic or modern interface; option to mute character/enemy's voice (god I LOVE this feature); and several in-game changes. These includes contents and element locks of some chests, addition of new treasure chests, and changes to some item creation recipe. I cant believe the simple Sacred Spear now required Crystall Skull to create -__- And lastly, the change to some Trophies, namely the Trophies for Battle Trophies. In 360 version, we're given a Trophy for each 10% of acquired BTs, but in the PS3 version, it's one every 15%, making the total Trophies for BTs collection to 7 (15%, 30%...90%, 100%) rather than 10 (10%, 20%...90%, 100%) in the 360 version.

One notable post-game change is that now Arumat's ultimate skill, Dragon Roar is now locked in a FLAME chest rather than Light in case of all other character's ultimate skill. Which means we now must travel all the way down to Gabriel Celeste's room to get the Water Ring before we can use it... I guess Tri-Ace knew how insanely strong this skills is that they decided to change the chest to flame so that players wont use cheap tactic of spamming Dragon Roar to clear the 7SD. Well didn't matter much to me, since I was mainly using Edge, Meracle and Sarah to run through 7SD, with the 4th interchangeable between Arumat and Reimi, and Bacchus in case of farming exp/fol against the Metal Scumbag, and Myuria in case of farming magical clay.

I'm using the Japanese voice throughout my run so far, and although they sound slightly better than the English version, some of the character's voice still annoyed the heck out of me. The option to mute character's battle voice certainly helped a lot to ease my annoyance toward the voice used. Guess who did I mute? Lyme, Sarah (For god's sake her character alone is quite annoying, luckily she was very dependable healer in battle) and Edge. I find Meracle pretty annoying in the English version too, but her Japanese voice isn't that bad, especially because she sounds a lot like one of my favorite seiyuu, Kitamura Eri (although it looked like she was voiced by different person with similar voice). I just wish we could also mute Welch's voice, OH AND MAYBE ALSO BRING SO3'S WELCH.

So Bad, Yet So Good

Yes, the game is that bad. A giant ball of cliche story, terrible plot twist that comes out of nowhere (hello Alternate Earth), lousy character and voice acting (hello Lymle and Sarah), awful dialogues that made me facepalm in every cutcenes. And yet here I am, still playing it and now sunk about 120 hours total into the game. Star Ocean 3 was terribad in in the 2nd half of the game, but Star Ocean 4 was 10 times worse - the character, the voice, the story. Yet the gameplay was so addicting that it somehow managed to make up for the catastrophic story/characters. The gameplay is just THAT good, probably one of the best JRPG battle system in recent years, maybe second only to Tales's (eg Tales of Vesperia) gameplay. The quests was massive, the item creation and equipment customisation were endless, and the extra dungeons were massive, added with some of the most difficult boss battles. I definitely had a lot of fun playing the game, I mean the gameplay. I guess Tri-Ace is just not good with developing good story but rather excels with gameplay (much like eg. Valkyrie Profile, Infinite Undiscovery and Radiata Stories), which alone warrant a reason to play SO4.

There's one scene/quest in this game that really touched me, made me sad comparable to the sadness of watching some of the sad scenes in NieR: the very last normal quest of the game, when we're asked to deliver a letter from someone in Nox Obscurus to his wife in EnII...really touch me that it almost made me cry to be honest.

Platinum Difficulty: 9.5/10

And the Platinum...well all I can say is getting Platinum is virtually impossible for me to get. Not because it was overly difficult- it's just that it will take extremely long amount of time to get Platinum - 400-500 total hours minimum simply because of the BT Trophies.

2 most broken skill in the game: Arumat's Dragon Roar and Reimi's Savage Sparrow, closely followed by X-Claw. Edge's Raging Strike is ridiculously powerful allowing you to deal max damage easily, but as it was a 1-hit skill, the damage is always capped at 99999 no matter how strong you are. Dragon Roar meanwhile can easily go over 200k damage in total, much eclipsing Raging Strike's damage output. So did Savage Sparrow too, which was even better considering the skill homes at almost all enemies in battles. And the most stupid ultimate skill: I'd say Lymle's Trinity Blaze and Bacchus's Godslayer.

p/s: Tri-Ace made awesome job selecting voice cast for Resonance of Fate (Both English and Japanese voices), I wonder if different people were in charge to select VAs for this game and RoF.

BT proress: Edge 78%, Reimi 78%, Faize 57%, Lymle 57%, Bacchus 69%, Meracle 72%, Sarah 66%, Myuria 67%, Arumat 61%. Total 605 BTs, 67% completion.
Quite a bit before I could reach the next BT trophies at 75%, aka 675 BTs.

Related Link:
Star Ocean 4 for xbox 360