Star Ocean: The Divine Force (TDF) is the sixth title in the long-running Star Ocean series, following on from the incredibly underwhelming and forgetful Integrity and Faithlessness from 2016. Reaching back into the ocean of stars, Star Ocean: The Divine Force sees us back at the helm of a ship and travelling outside of the introductory planet, something sorely missing in the previous game. Is Star Ocean: The Divine Force able to drive us out of the dark space that Integrity left us in?
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Ocean of Stars
The Divine Force starts us off with a small introductory cutscene, showing us the crew of the merchant’s vessel Ydas. Going through space as any other delivery company, Raymond Lawrence and crew are on one of many delivery missions. However, they are abruptly halted in their trip by an attack by the Federation.
Shot down, and escaping to an underdeveloped planet, we are now set up for a true Star Ocean experience. Bringing in technology thousands of years their senior, Ray must find his shipwrecked crew on the planet Aster IV before the natives burn them at the stake or have them quartered.
The story continues this whole trope of finding your friends, but like many other RPGs, you’re eventually going to be working on bigger things, such as aiding the Kingdom of Aucerius against the Vey’l Empire. Will there be a mighty fight with a god at the end? Who is to say, you’ll have to find out for yourself.
A component of Star Ocean: The Divine Force is that you’re able to select your main character. Either Raymond, the space-faring merchant, or Laeticia, the princess of Aucerius. This choice allows you to see their viewpoints throughout the entire game, and around seven or so splits where they are not together. Games such as Tales of Xilia have done this before, and gamers who have experienced this in the past will know what to expect.
Your first run of Star Ocean: The Divine Force will take you around 40 hours, with a sizable chunk of side-missions, gathering, and Es’owa fun. If you take out all side content, however, Star Ocean: The Divine Force can be completed in around 20 to 30 hours depending on your skill. Without any form of new game plus, your second run won’t be much faster. A second playthrough is enticing though, with another protagonist to play as being the main pull.
Blast into the Scene
Star Ocean: The Divine Force takes yet another small step for itself and a large leap for the series with its combat gameplay. Making transitions between the sedentary models on the map to fighting them in high-octane shows of prowess. There is zero loading between each fight, though ending them may come with a tad bit of lag as it loads in a few assets.
Getting close enough or attacking a foe will engage them in battle, allowing you to begin using your skills to take them out. Each character has a chain combo set up on X, Y, and B (Xbox controls), with 3 moves each and a held action. All of these can be changed in the menus, with new skills being unlocked via the skill tree.
Characters like Ray and Laeticia who uses swords up close will have varying slash attacks and charges, while casters like Albaird and Midas will channel their spells from afar to blast their foes down. You can change who you control in battle at any point, adding to the hastiness of combat.
Adding a new mechanic into the game, Star Ocean: The Divine Force introduces D.U.M.A, a robot that can attach to your back and allow you to dash on the ground or in the skies. Using this new dashing feature, you’re able to blindside enemies from above or behind, stunning them for a short time and increasing the damage you deal.
Any time you load your game, your AP is set to 5, with attacks generally taking 1 or 2 per skill. You gain AP when you hit a blindsided or surprised foe, to a max of 15. This is your main aim when loading a save, as having 5 AP feels sluggish and horrendous. This was quite a baffling decision to my mind, especially when the game crashed 3 times during my playthrough, forcing me to be weaker because of the game itself.
Just like with any other RPG, Star Ocean: The Divine Force comes jam-packed with weapons, armour, and accessories to empower your team. Each member of the party has a particular weapon, though all can wear most of the same armour. Accessories come in the form of bunnies that stop you from dying to rings that increase your damage.
With said equipment, Welch also makes a return to aid you in your crafting endeavours. Limited though they may be, it is a welcome mainstay to be able to change materials into gear with random factors to make a build just for you. Each style of crafting is dolled out after every boss or so, meaning you are still limited as you play, but with the low amount of control over each crafting style you won’t be missing much.
One of the most enjoyable additions to this entry is that of the card/model game Es’owa. This game brings me back to the days of Final Fantasy VIII and IX with Triple Triad and Tetra Master. You place your cards on a board of 4×4, 6×6, or 8×8, and the aim is to reduce your opponent’s health from 3000 up to 10,000 down to 0. If your cards are surrounded they are removed from play, with a skill to revive them if you picked it.
Set Engines to Fun
A surprising twist that came with the soundtrack for Star Ocean: The Divine Force was how close to Phantasy Star it sounded. While both are sci-fi romps, they usually had rather varied OSTs that differed from one another. I constantly listened to new music that I felt like “Wow, this sounds like Phantasy Star”. Outside of the similarities, the OST for Star Ocean: The Divine Force was amazing to listen to. Traversal was accompanied by wonderful tones and battles had just as energetic tracks to go with its high-speed attacks.
The beginning of the game has a rather steep learning and difficulty curve to it, however, with a few levels and skills the game becomes a cakewalk. Laeticia has a skill that can grant everyone double experience, with accessories stacking with it up to and beyond 300% for your main character. I was up to 30 levels higher than new party members as I got further into the game with these in play.
Setting aside the levelling issues, if they are one, a lot of difficulties will come into play with your gear setup and the random factors applied via the crafting systems. I eventually got myself close to doubling my attack rating with gear, killing most foes in one hit. Combined with the Es’owa cards being accessories with some grand factors too, the game gets that feeling from FFVIII in its draw and card systems allowing you to break that game.
Talking about the traversal to other planets earlier in this article, Star Ocean: The Divine Force features a few ships for you to explore, though small they may be, plus a stint aboard a destroyed ship. With the other planetary exploration, Star Ocean: The Divine Force brings the series back into space travel over the fantasy game that was named Star Ocean with Faithlessness. While there isn’t an overabundance of planets to explore, like with the 8 or so planets of Last Hope, or the 10 of Til the End of Time, it is enough to feel like this is a Star Ocean title.
I would have preferred some more exploration of other planets, alongside towns on such, but as the graphic fidelity gets higher and higher with the newer consoles I can understand why they are limiting those numbers. At least the story of Star Ocean: The Divine Force was designed in a way that allowed the use of locales of the main planet and melded the events around the first rather tightly.
As I mentioned earlier, Star Ocean: The Divine Force crashed on me three times. Outside of those crashes, the game had quite a bit of an issue with lag, freezing, and general choppy play. This was reported to be happening on many other PCs, with the loading distance being not much further than 20 feet on Xbox. The game does look beautiful with its landscapes and colours, but I doubt it couldn’t have been optimized better than it has.
A final mention on the graphics, the faces and hair are terrible. With everyone having some unique outfits of high quality and rather good models to boot, the faces make everyone look like dolls with wigs attached to them. You can get used to this after a dozen or so hours, but it is so distracting to have such great graphics to then be put into a face-to-face conversation and be brought out of the immersion. The lip-syncing is also very poor.
Overall, Star Ocean: The Divine Force gets an 8/10. It is a wonderful return to form for the franchise that is held back by its optimisation, character design, overuse of backtracking, and jarring nature of cutscenes. If the game spent a few extra months in development I am sure they could have optimised it much better, but as for the faces, it’s too late for that.
Publisher: Square Enix
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows
Developers: tri-Ace, Square Enix
Reviewed on PC, Grab your copy here https://store.steampowered.com/app/1776380/STAR_OCEAN_THE_DIVINE_FORCE/
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