Pair of 7/10 RPGs - Star Ocean 3 & Crystal Project
Over the past couple months I finished some RPGs, and these are two I feel like talking about. I don't know if I have enough for a full review of each. They both are very interesting, but also very flawed, so I think it'll be interesting to talk about them together. So today I'm going to talk about Star Ocean Til the End of Time and Crystal Project.
I went into both games with different expectations. Star Ocean is a game that I played back in high school in the mid 00's, but never finished. I got close, but never finished. When I say "close" I mean "I fought the final boss, realized I was short on supplies and was going to backtrack out of the final dungeon to stock up and level up". I never got to do that though because that was the PS2 memory card that got corrupted, so I flushed 120 hours down the drain. Whoops.
Crystal Project was a mostly blind game. I heard recommendations of it on a forum, and through a bit of a search, saw it had a Final Fantasy V-esque job system, so I was sold.
I'm calling them both 7/10 RPGs because they're not bad games. They have these points where opinion on them can vary from person to person, drastically. Some of them could even be dealbreakers for some players.
Lets get to the meat of these one at a time.
Star Ocean Til the End of Time
This game hits right into a genre I'm finding myself liking more as I age: Sci-Fantasy. You follow Fayt Leingod, which let me say, Tri-Ace in this game threw subtlety out the window baby, a college student on vacation, heading to a resort town with his friend. The transport ship is attacked, leading to a bunch of chaos that leaves you in an escape pod, landing on a planet that is less technologically advanced. Knowing his history and having watched Star Trek, his goal is to blend in and not advance the technology.
Through a pretty basic start, you end up in a gonzo plot leading to a discovery that leads to Fayt and his party killing god (natch, for an RPG), but it's such a funny twist to get there, I can picture many people just going "Oh come the fuck on" when they hit it part way through Disk 2.
Star Ocean games seem to feature this arena based action combat where you can program long presses of the light and heavy attack buttons to activate skills, using both Short and Long range as modifiers to initiate them. This lets you mix in up to 4 special moves with your basic attacks. Skills cost HP to cast, while a few abilities and your spells cost MP. What Star Ocean does that I don't see in a lot of other RPGs though, is that MP depletion can end with a party member knocked out. MP death also works for enemies too, so if you set skills that damage MP, or use items that damage MP, you can take out a boss hilariously easy if it has a bad MP pool. It's great. It's caused me to turn over an idea in my head on how to transport that to a tabletop RPG.
That is one of the pain points that I can imagine drives players off though. Since you can only control one party member at a time in an active combat, sometimes the party members just eat a bunch of damage without evading. Other times the AI breaks and your party member just sort of runs away from all the enemies, even when they could be healing and they're not targeted. The MP death possibility makes using spells a risk, same for skills, which some people are opposed to. The sort of "how dare my HP be a resource I have to use" sort of dislike. There's also a cooldown timer on using items in battle, so you can only use one every like, 5-10 seconds or so.
Continuing on with items, there is a crafting system in the game, but it's so obtuse and opaque that it can drive you mad. When creating an item you place up to 3 PCs/Recruited NPCs in a row, pick the discipline that you want to work in (NPCs are only trained in a single skill), and it generates a random money call per pass for the project. When you decide that it's acceptable, you click start and a time meter fills, and every time it fills you find out if that is successful or not, via the portraits of the selected characters. If you succeed multiple times before manually ending the production, you can get multiple copies of the item. The problem is: You don't know what you're making before you make it. You can go "Well this costs more so it should be a better item" but then it's also harder to make usually. And sometimes, to get the best items, you need specific characters, at a specific price. The only time you know what you're making is with the Specified Plan option, where you take an existing item you have and basically Refine it, giving you a new revision.
I find this very funny and fun. It's great figuring out you can make something that heals 60% of your party's HP for cheaper than buying a different item that only heals 30% for the party. It rules. It's funny to get a really strong weapon ahead of the shops.
This game falls right into the sweet spot of shit for me of like, fun sci-fantasy, a big swing of a plot twist, a crafting system that isn't overly involved, and a combat system where you can chain your abilities together for damage multipliers. It's a goofy time and it's just a fun PS2 era RPG.
Crystal Project
The Crystal Project is a 2022 turn-based RPG where you are playing a group of adventurers in a new world where Adventuring For Crystals is Law. If you're an Adventurer, you're supposed to go out and find Crystals because it's fun and what the Gamemaster of the world says. It plays in a lot of the tropes of an MMO, with Banishing happening to adventurers who stop going after Crystals or fail to meet quotas, but it's treated not like "oh my character is done" but more like 'I'm done". Even the term Gamemaster to describe the person who sets the rules of the realm lean into that, but it's played straight.
Crystal Project is ambitious in its own way. There's a ton of classes, the equivalent of chocobo breeding, fish racing, and a lot of exploration to do. When I say ton of classes, I mean 24; 6 starting classes and 18 unlockable ones. You can learn abilities from them, levelling your stats based on the class equipped, setting a sub class to take learned ability from, and passives from all classes, up to 10 skill points. This does scratch the same buildcraft itch I felt with Final Fantasy V, which was cool.
Now onto some of the friction parts. There's a lot of platforming here. CrossCode had this problem too, where it can be hard to see where you need to go to advance because you need to find the ledge you can hop on to get to where you need to go. There's also shockingly little guidance in this game. You're told to Go Get Crystals and then you're let loose, relying on your own abilities of navigation and unlocked mounts that enhance your mobility around the map.
Battles are another spot where people can either get obsessed with it, or get frustrated to high heaven. Unlike a lot of turn based RPGs, just mashing attack won't get you through later random encounters. Once you hit 50 or so, with 60 being the cap, you'll frequently encounter enemies that can wipe a character in just two hits, even if you've been focusing on tank classes. So what you need to focus on are status conditions. Buffs and debuffs are really important in this game for surviving. Stacking damage over time abilities because the best way for you to inflict damage, while bolstering your defenses and lowering enemy attack become vital. Battles become little puzzles that you have to hope you're set up for. Sometimes you hit a fight that makes you go "well, shit, I need to adjust my party composition huh."
Star Ocean worked a lot better for me than Crystal Project. I didn't HATE Crystal Project, it was just an OK game. What settled on me calling it a 7/10 game was reading Aura's review and seeing how well the game worked for her. For me though, it was alright with a lot of parts that left me on the border of quitting, but I held out and pushed through. It didn't keep me locked in like Star Ocean did, but it kept me just engaged enough.
Started playing Rogue Galaxy recently, well, the first 15 minutes, but looking forward to getting into that more. That's another RPG I have heard highly recommended around and looking forward to seeing if it captures the same vibe of Star Ocean, since it looks a bit sci-fantasy right out the gate.