Star Ocean 4: Beaten. General spoilers for everything follow.
Overall, I loved the game. Unlike SO3 which I was kind of indifferent to on the first playthrough and grew to love later, I liked this one the whole way through.
The gameplay was a step up from SO3's all around. Blindsides and Rush add a lot to the normal combat scheme without being overpowering. Overall difficulty was down from 3's (no MP death for starters), but it still felt like you had to work for most of your wins.
Characters:
EDGEVery believable as a main. He gets thrust into a leadership role by virtue of being the only uninjured man available. He makes some good decisions and bad decisions as Captain. Then he makes a colossal mistake on alternate Earth and turns emo. But it's justified emo - he destroyed his home planet. That was the exact opposite thing from what he was trying to accomplish. He realizes he's in way over his head and not qualified for the position he's been put in. It's up to his friends to pull him out of his funk. Now they did probably drag on the emo-ness longer than they should have, but overall I didn't find it unrealistic for the situation.
In battle, Edge was surprisingly bad. The game seems to favor long-range combat overall, and he just didn't have the tools to compensate for that.
REIMIReimi was a pretty good Girl Friday. She took over leadership when she needed to and kept people focused on the mission. Someone complained about what she did on Roak as being bad, but in my mind it wasn't. She was trying to be strong to give Edge time to recover. And she knew about her built-in disease resistance - she had no reason to believe her body wouldn't fight off the infection on her own.
In battle, outstanding. Probably my MVP for the game. With Critical Hit bows, Critical Hit skill, and Focus, she was a crit monster. Pretty much always kept the bonus gauge filled with her around.
FAIZEI see what they were trying to do with Faize, but they needed to give it more development time. His whole situation was far too rushed to work. He shows up on Aeos and immediately begins worshipping Edge despite having no reason to do so. He becomes disillusioned when Edge loses his will to continue, which is fine. Then he randomly falls in love with a girl he sees for all of two seconds riding by on a bunny. His eyes start changing colors when he finds out she's dead. This scene was hard to understand. I thought he had been mind-controlled by a Grigori until I read his dictionary afterwards. Anyway, he worked as a villain - he just needed more time to develop prior to that point.
In battle, he was on the weak side. But he gets Stone Rain early and that's a pretty godly spell.
LYMLEOkay, here's the one people seem to complain about the most. But I thought she was an excellent character. The whole thing about her being 15 years old and stuck in a 6-year-old's body really lent a lot of depth to her. Admittedly, you wouldn't even know about the 15-year-old thing unless you read her dictionary entry, so I imagine a lot of people missed this. So basically you have someone who knows as much as a young adult does, but doesn't have the emotional maturity to deal with it properly. She's attracted to Faize, but doesn't know how to express herself. She draws protective wards on the ship, but doesn't realize she should explain her actions to Reimi. All in all a very fascinating character. And yes, they did overdo the "kay" thing. But that is pretty much how 6-year-olds talk so it's not that ridiculous.
In battle, she was very useful. Early multi-target healing is great, Firebolt spam like you expect from Star Ocean mages, and Hatchet Reel can do some sick crowd control damage. She was the only character I never removed from my party.
BACCHUSNot a very good character, because they conveniently forgot he was a cyborg after his introduction. Oh look, we're in a prison cell. How about Bacchus walk through the wall like he did on the Cardianon ship? Hey, look a Grigori. How about Bacchus blast it with his super cannon like he did before? Yeah, his plot powers just evaporated.
In battle, very good. Like Reimi, he's a great ranged character. "Jumping" shots are stupidly useful. And the game continuously supplied him with new weapons and equipment, moreso than any other character. So he was always current on gear.
MERACLENot a really important character plotwise, and kind of annoying in general. Pretty much only good for getting things from talking to cats.
In battle, another close combat character which the game doesn't favor. Great at stunlocking though with the number of hits she gets.
MYURIAI didn't care for her much as a character. Her whole "kill Crowe" thing was half-baked to start with, and she didn't really display a good reason for sticking around after her theory was shot full of holes.
In battle, useful, as all ranged/mage characters are in this game. Thunder Flare is the same great stun-locker it was in the previous game.
SARAHI certainly wasn't expecting her to join the party. I have to wonder if her whole concept was changed during development. Her small status portraits look so beautiful and wise, and she sometimes says some really profound things. It's like they started to make her a smart character and then did a 180 and went dumb blonde with her. I didn't like her at first because of her voice and the ditziness, but she grew on me and I ended up liking her. And yes, I cried when she flew to save Reimi at the end.
In battle, it's kind of unusual for a game to give you a dedicated healer so late, but she caught up quickly enough. Great healing magic and not too terrible at close combat. Guess the closest analogy would be Rena from SO2.
ARUMATBlah blah I'm death you're all gonna die blah blah. Pretty terrible character. Albel from 3 was a much better version of the tough guy role.
In battle, the best close-combat character, due to his strength and durability. Diabolic Edge->Bloodstorm Revolution->Unholy Maelstrom is the bomb.
The only other character worth mentioning is Deputy Director Shimada, who gets the best comeuppance in video game history. "This meat isn't even cooked!"
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Item Creation was kind of weird. It was really easy to get recipes, but you couldn't do anything with them due to lack of materials. I'm sure there's some really broken stuff you can make if you farm rare materials from enemies for hours, but you're not going to see any of that on a normal playthrough. The only notable things I made were the Laser Scythe for Arumat and the
? bow for Reimi which wasn't even that good.
Final boss was a decent challenge. I used Arumat, Bacchus, Lymle, and Sarah. No gameovers but I really had to work swapping back and forth between characters and juggling item and spell use. Great fight overall. Got the special endings for Lymle, Bacchus, Myuria, Arumat, and Sarah. Surprised I didn't get Meracle's, I did quite a few private actions with her.
The game did have some faults of course. Welch was horrible - whoever thought doing that to her would be a good idea needs to be shot. The cutscenes were way too long, especially during the middle of the game. Luckily the sceneskip function is much improved from the previous game so you don't get lost on what to do on subsequent playthroughs. And disc-swapping to travel to different planets is terrible in this day and age. I haven't tried loading the game to my hard drive; maybe that will alleviate disc swapping?
We'll see how well the game holds up in postgame and subsequent playthroughs. But right now it looks like it's going to be #6 on my top-ten RPGs of all time.
So anyway, the game is great and screw all of you who didn't like it. My opinion is better than yours.
