Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness Review

I'd like to open by saying this game had a lot of potential. For the first like 10 hours I thought I was going to be in for something good. I kept thinking 'wow, this is just the first planet still! I can't wait to see where else I go!'

Of course, some number of hours later, watching the % of my completed quests climb and how the story was progressing, it became obvious that I wasn't going to another planet. I open with this because it is the single biggest detractor of the game in my opinion. What fun is a space story that takes place on (pretty much) just one planet? I thought I was going on a space odyssey...

This game had a lot of potential. I like the characters for the most part. But they totally blew it in the environments. The towns there are fine for the most part, but with a whopping three it leaves you wanting more. Add in the non-town map areas and the number climbs, but it still leaves you wanting more. None of them are very big or have very many paths.

Now, to be fair they did pack a lot to do into the environments there are, but it's too repetitive. Too much back tracking through the same places.

With that out of the way, let's look at some other area.

Music isn't too bad. Could always do with more, but that's true of almost anything.

Battle is rather fun. There are several characters you can take control of to fight in whatever way you prefer. The rock/paper/scissor battle scheme is also kind of interesting.

Graphics aren't too bad for the type of game it is.

I dislike the English voice acting and subtitling. They shouldn't have Miki call Fidel 'Fiddely', as in the Japanse version she is calling him Fidel-ni, which means older brother Fidel. They should have just translated that bit as is. The actual quality isn't that bad though, but it's better in Japanese.

Have to take some points of for difficulty trophies not stacking too. To platinum this game you have to beat the story at least 3 times, as you can't play on the hardest difficulty the first play through, and completing harder difficulties doesn't unlock lower trophies. If I can beat the game on Chaos (which I did) I can beat it on Universe, so why make me do it anyways?

This game is a grind. It's not necessarily difficult to get everything, but very time consuming.

Over all this is a decent game that could have been so much better.

5.5/10