What are your thoughts on the Star Ocean series?

5 is an empty shell of a Star Ocean with little effective decision making and absurdly linear progression.
4 was alright, not great, just alright. Still fairly linear but at least you felt more like you were travelling around universes and the post game dungeon was better.
3 had the worst plot twist ever. But the game was fun; Albel was the shit; punchy blonde woman was a thing; combat was fun; and the 2 post game dungeons were cool.

Series is dead. At this rate next game will be noseless chibi couple are joined by the spirit of bdsm the mage and scarface the pangalactic womanizer to save a plot twist from recycled enemy designs and magic tattoos.

>3 was a damn good game
This. There was so much shit you could do. Item Synthesis, Horse betting, some weird chess game, the ranked colliseum, Sphere 211 post-game, those other extra dungeons, recruiting inventors, that multiplayer mode. Is there any game that comes close?

"Muh Tales Phantasia!!!" the series.

Pretty bad series overall, to be honest. I'm amazed they have put out as many games as they have when they only keep getting worse and worse.

It's a shame, because it really could have been something good.

same here but i never went back to the series, considering how shit 4 was said to be and 5 was half assed, i think i lucked out.I'll just go back to Open Imperium Galactica and have my grand space quest through that.

It really is the worst design I think I've ever seen. The series hasn't been worth caring about since 3 though, which despite being probably the best game in the series has the worst plot-twist of all time.

After the complete trash that was 4 I wrote 5 off for the designs alone and had no interest in playing it.

I honestly don't understand how people can like 3 as much as they do. I forced myself up until you unlock crafting and just dropped it. There wasn't a single thing I enjoyed about it.

5's private actions already make it better than 3 and 4

how so?

Loved the first 3 (still didn't like the TWEEST), everything after has been very underwhelming.

I wanted to do this, but I kept on going. I don't think a game has ever gone from "wow I really like this" to "this is fucking stupid" as fast as SO3 did.

A lot of the love for me comes from the worldbuilding that was in the dictionary and stuff in-game you could examine. Combing through Aquios, for instance, leads to a lot of neat stuff that applies in-game "science" to magic mechanics as well as decent enough information on other agents we never even see or hear about in-game. Like apparently Albel has a relative on his father's side in the Aquarian army (Van Nox), just really minute shit like that.

Loved 2, thought 1 was pretty good, and after getting ahold of a copy of 3 and playing it for 20 hours I had to drop it, it was just so fucking shitty.

retard shitposters who like cocks shouldnt post here

Offensively Japanese.

overall mediocre series

4 in particular is one of the worst JRPGs I've ever played. Because of that, I haven't touched 5 at all.

I loved 2, 3 was alright, and I haven't felt like trying 4 or 5 since they look so bad.

Played 5 for a bit, but couldn't finish it. The writing and skits hovered between somewhat interesting and dry. Everything else about the game was disgustingly tedious.

Traveling between towns took ages, and the game holds fast travel hostage. Open areas between towns are giant, fill with trash mobs, and often have large stretches of absolutely nothing where your party just runs though. Having to deal with quests that send you two towns over is suffering.

Combat is more annoying than anything. Every enemy is absurdly damage spongy and only a few in the entire game will ever pose a real threat. No matter how you set your party up, they're competent enough to wail on everything and autoheal, but nothing ever seems to make wading through trash mobs faster.

The game has some interesting crafting and skills system, but feels like they were nerfed into irrelevance.

As a whole, it feels like a pile of wasted potential and bad design decisions.

Star Ocean needs less weeb and more fantasy. tri-Ace know exactly what to do but clearly the publishers just want to fund weeb.

youtube.com/watch?v=6cuXgRVMvZ0

>Star Ocean is dead
>Wild Arms is dead
>Mana series is dead
>Grandia and Suikoden are both dead
Are we going to be left with just Final Fantasy and Compile Heart games in the end?

There are officially more bad entries than good entries with the release of 5