Thinking about picking this up. Whats the consensus?

Oh, forgot something important

The characters are all nice and interesting except for the bland on purpose MC.
Private actions are good overall.

MGSV was pretty long. It was incomplete, but it wasnt short.

>It's alright, hell of a lot better than 4, probably same overall quality as 3.

You must be mixed up because the games use subtitles instead of listing the number

3 is "Till the End of Time" and a pretty alright game
4 is "The Last Hope" and a steaming pile of excrement

>Want to 100% everything post-game
>"Oh you needed that item from a certain mob? He doesn't spawn anymore except in the post-game dungeon."

Damn it.

This guy is full of shit. Let me go over everything that makes the game shit.

>7 person battles are a clusterfuck, there are so many effects going on on top of the enemies acting as well that you can barely tell what's going on at any time, and to balance the 7 party members in battle all bosses just completely resist stun and are massive HP sponges
>Battles are nothing more than alternating holding X and O to switch between your equipped attack skills for the damage bonus each time since everyone has massive MP pools, there's never any reason to guard outside of wanting to get the SP bonus, and the bonus gauge now goes up insanely slowly and is expended for a super attack which is only ever worth using for the retarded escort missions where Anne will 100% die if you don't use it right away
>The camera in battles is shit and constantly drives itself into the ground when a higher view would be far more helpful, it even causes your view to get blocked by grass in fields, and since there's no battle field transition any area with walls causes the camera to shit itself
>The frame rate in battles is shit because of all the bullshit going on
>Party skills are fucking shit, half of them just add more recipes to your creation list with each level, others increase how much is gathered from x point each level, others are to increase how much you damage each enemy type per level, only a few are actually unique things like Oracle, and it's nothing like SO2's party skills, the whole thing is basically just an incremental SP sink
>Item creation is dumbed down completely, it's now just recipes with the required ingredients that you pick to make, it's boring as fuck and rigid as fuck
>Roles were actually a good idea
>The characters get fuck all attack skills, each character only has a small handful and the game is instead based around incrementally levelling them up for slightly more damage with skill books

>Fields are boring as fuck, there's nothing to do in any of them except open a few chests, tap X when you walk over gathering points, and run into monsters, and occasionally you'll find locked chests that you have to come back to later once you have the lockpicking skill
>Fields have a bunch of one-way drops that make them a massive chore to explore, particularly with all the game's backtracking
>There is a lot of fucking backtracking, you spend most of the game backtracking between the same few field areas, and you only get fast travel for a very short period until the end
>There are practically no dungeons in the game, the story dungeons have nothing to do in them just like the fields, the only difference is special "dungeons" you can find as warp holes in fields that are just gauntlets of enemies with a reward at the end
>The game constantly blocks off your freedom with arbitrary red lines on the field that you can't cross, you rarely have any freedom to go where you want
>Towns are shit too, they're fucking tiny and have pretty much nothing to interact with
>The story is boring as fuck, literally the entire first third of the story is Fidel walking back and forth trying to figure out where the loli came from (spoilers: she's from space), and repeatedly rescuing her
>The story's presentation is absolute garbage, the entire game has you on the sidelines of events that are described to you instead of shown because the whole thing is budget as fuck, there's this big war going on that you never see along with spaceship battles that you never see because they couldn't afford to animate any of it (see youtu.be/lnUZXwY14l0?t=329 ), in the whole story there's only maybe 30 cutscenes that are actually animated at all instead of using their shitty real-time system

>The real-time cutscenes are utter shit, it's literally just the characters standing around and repeating the same few hand waving gestures for hours of the fucking game, and sometimes you get other characters off in a corner talking between themselves where their dialogue will pop up above their heads so if you're not looking at them and trying to read two sets of subtitles at once you'll miss it
>Alternatively you spend ages standing around watching Welch spaz out like a retard youtube.com/watch?v=VgqUtD1Ps6c
>All PAs in 5 use this shitty real-time system, each time you activate PAs in a town there'll be 1-3 available where you find a character, they talk for all of 20 seconds, and then it's over, there's very rarely any choices to make at all, they're all short as fuck, characters rarely ever interact with other party members aside from Fidel, and every time you view the available PAs you have to enter and exit a house or the town to trigger new PAs
>The characters are shallow as fuck too, every one of them is boring as shit and only has one or two defining traits; Fidel is MUH FATHER, Miki is MUH FIDEL, Fiore is MUH BOSS, Viktor is MUH KINGDOM, Emmerson is MUH WOMEN, Anne is MUH GAP MOE, the loli is MUH COMPLETE LACK OF PERSONALITY OUTSIDE OF BEING INNOCENT AND SOUNDING CUTE
>The game's sidequests are all just MMO-tier shit that you get from the notice boards in towns where you're told to get 20 bunny asses for some shit or defeat a strong monster in exchange for a new skill book, they're just more tedious fucking padding

There is nothing good about Star Ocean 5. Nothing. The combat is a simplified and shallower version of 3's, the characters aren't as painfully stupid and obnoxious as in 4 but they're just fucking boring instead, the story is middling and completely forgettable and suffers heavily from the shit production values, the field and dungeon design have absolutely nothing on 3's, the skill system is a hollow imitation of 2's, and the PA's are as garbage as they've been since 3 killed them in the first place.
Star Ocean 5 is fucking shit and it's probably the most disappointing game I've ever played. With any luck these posts will prevent a few people from ever making the mistake of playing the fucking thing.

Seriously though, 90 percent of what this guy says is true

I even beat the maze post game and all I had to do was just hold down x, literally. For 30 minutes. Just holding X while doing other things

It's short and tiny as fuck with one dimensional characters and you spend half the game listening to space politics that nobody could possible care about, the other half of the game is rescuing Relia about 10 times.

I was actually enjoying the game for a while, then it became apparent that the game just doesn't expend on what you see in the first few hours, like you just never get out of what feels like a really long prologue.

I think he's saying that SO3 is a lot better than SO5, user.

Which it is.

I was saying that both 3 and 4 are a hell of a lot better than 5. Saying that 5 is "probably the same overall quality as 3" is just fucking insane. And as shit as 4 was it at least had much better combat and field/dungeon design than 5 did.