Six years after Star Ocean: Honesty and Disbelief disappointed fans of the sci-fi JRPG series like myself, Star Ocean: The Divine Force feels like a long-awaited return in many ways. Its revamped combat is great fun, it’s evolved a bit over time, giving fresh life to a system that definitely benefits. Other areas, unfortunately, are stagnant, like their lackluster visuals and dreadful UI. But a respectable story filled with cute characters makes this a sequel whose stars I’m still very happy to have sailed through.
Divine Force tells a stand-alone story that isn’t directly connected to other Star Ocean games, but contains quite a few references to past events and characters that are rewarding to be caught up in as a series veteran. This particular story follows a sensible young space trader named Ray with a really bad haircut when he crashes into the underdeveloped, medieval-like planet of Aster IV. There, he meets Laeticia, the first and true princess of the Aucerius Kingdom, and agrees to assist her in fending off a nearby empire in exchange for help finding her missing crew mates. I enjoyed that the story started on a smaller scale than you might expect from a space adventure, but things only grow impressively from there, as conflicts on this backwater planet have had astronomical consequences that go beyond the stars.
A great twist is that you’re actually given the choice between following Ray or Laeticia as your main character, with a handful of instances where they leave and you only see what happens on the side you choose. Either way, you’ll be able to follow the overall story just fine, but there are some minor moments that wouldn’t make much sense without knowing what happened to the other side. For example, I chose Ray’s path, and at one point there was talk of an arranged marriage between the two nations where I had absolutely no context. However, if I had chosen Laeticia instead, I might have understood this conversation but potentially missed something else. While it’s not enough to make up for the lack of a New Game Plus option, it’s an interesting storytelling mechanic that encourages you to come back for a second playthrough of the roughly 30-40 hour campaign. I would love to see the story highlights I missed in Laeticia, but not being able to convey my team’s levels, skills and equipment is a real deterrent.
Star Party
The Divine Force’s cast is a vibrant group of both Aster IV natives and people from off-planet. The dynamic among your main group is particularly fascinating because half of them come from a civilization that hasn’t even discovered the concept of gravity yet, while the other half are incidentally familiar with warp-driven engines that allow spaceships to travel light-years. This results in lots of fun and unexpected moments, as the party tries to find a cure for a disease that decimated Aster IV’s population. Elena, Ray’s robotic but surprisingly endearing first-in-command, can create an antidote based on a few bird dropping examples, but this also includes teaching Laeticia and her comrades the concept of bacteria.
You can also learn more about each character through Special Actions, which are cute cutscene moments that you trigger by talking to your party members while they’re scattered around towns around the world. Special Actions show off a character’s many personalities and quirks, giving them the opportunity to talk about more than just the main story events. In particular, I really enjoyed learning about Laeticia’s knightly guardian, Albaird Bergholm, and her fondness for sweets.
But the problem with Custom Actions is that it is very annoying to find. Just like in past games, Special Actions are pretty well hidden and you’ll have to go out of your way to sniff them out with no icons or indicators to let you know when a new one pops up. I hated wasting so much time quickly traveling to other towns, running around them, and talking to all my party members in hopes of triggering a Special Action. Chats were usually worth doing when I found them, but I wish this feature was more streamlined.
It’s also disappointing that the character animations and faces don’t keep up with the beautiful environments you find yourself in. In the expressions of the characters there is this doll porcelain look that is always unintentionally a little spooky. This contrasts sharply with Akira Yasuda’s gorgeous 2D character art, which appears primarily on promotional materials and box art. Almost none of this is in the game itself, and it’s frankly surprising – the clear lines and sharp, realistic details on the eyes and lips are so aesthetically pleasing, I wondered how 3D models could look so bad. compare.
War Evolved
Star Ocean’s previous combat system has been almost completely overhauled in Divine Force and worked for the better. Here, it plays very similarly to the action-battle of a JRPG like 2009’s Tales of Graces was ahead of its time with a wide array of flashy skills at your disposal. Divine Force lets you assign up to three combat skills to each face button in turn, and pressing a button three times during a fight will allow you to perform all three moves in the order you listed. This new system feels much more flexible and seamless, especially compared to past games – previously, thanks to the old Capacity Points system, you could only set a few skills and in battle you would spam the same two to four skills as someone else. conclusion. But now that problem is completely gone, and the wide variety of different combat abilities you can equip makes battles feel like they’re obsolete. (This is aided by the excellent soundtrack that makes the fights even more exciting, with Ray’s battle-themed electric guitars.)
But the real game changer here is the DUMA system, named after the party’s robot friend. The party member you control with DUMA will be able to quickly defeat an enemy and close the gap between them at high speed. You can even change direction while rushing, and if you get out of sight of your target, you activate a Blind Side – a returning feature introduced in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Blindsides are as powerful as they are fun, momentarily paralyzing enemies and letting your entire team scream at them. And DUMA can also be used defensively while adding a ton of adrenaline and momentum to combat. For example, you can change your rush ability to allow DUMA to reduce the amount of damage your party takes. Being able to switch between modes instantly in this way makes battles more dynamic and exciting.
DUMA is not only invaluable during fights, but also plays a role outside of combat. You can use DUMA as a kind of jetpack to help you climb buildings in the city or mountains in the wilderness. While doing this, you can find hidden purple gems, fun collectibles to hunt, that help level up DUMA’s different abilities. This semi-open world exploration feels natural when flying in DUMA, but the landscapes are also a bit empty and lacking in personality. Vast environments have lots of wide open spaces, but they look big just for the sake of being big. There is no major change in elevation and the fields are mostly flat with no obvious markings. The environments and skyboxes may at least look nice, but the layout of each area isn’t quite as demonstrated by a game like the impressive Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on Switch earlier this year.
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Menus don’t like to look at either. You will encounter boring and dull black boxes on the party member screen. Worse still, when you hover over a character, the mediocre 3D model is shown instead of those beautiful 2D portraits. For all of Honesty and Disbelief’s flaws, one aspect it did well was its menu, which showed huge 2D drawings of party members around each other, very similar to the ones on Tales of Arise’s menu. It’s a shame that Divine Power didn’t try to copy this style.
Perhaps surprisingly when it comes to menus, the biggest culprit is actually font size. Honestly, the smallest font I’ve ever had to read in a game in my last memory, and I literally had to squint to read the subtitles, tutorials, and skill descriptions legibly. Most games nowadays come with the option to increase the font size, but The Divine Force does not. I really hope Square Enix fixes this issue in a post-launch patch because it’s really distracting and not having even the most basic edits for accessibility is unacceptable.
That said, the UI issues aren’t so bad that I’m looking forward to optimizing my party’s hardware for the post-credits content that Star Ocean games are known for. Each character has a specific Item Crafting ability, such as Ray’s Smithery’s natural affinity for crafting weapons and Laeticia’s Combine skills to make medicine. The process is simple and easy to understand – for example, combining two blueberries makes a blueberry potion – which keeps progressing from feeling like a chore. It’s not a big deal to get the most out of this craft during normal campaigning, but I know that if I want to properly prepare for the toughest fights Divine Power has to offer, I need to spend time mastering the system.
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