Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness Review

While I’m no stranger to JRPGs and have reviewed many under the banner of DYEGB, I have surprisingly never played a Star Ocean game before. I do know that there is a lot of love for this series, which was evident by the hype that started to circulate about a month before release.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is a semi-open world JRPG developed by tri-Ace and published by Square Enix (the same guys who published the recent Tomb Raider reboots and develop a little series called Final Fantasy) and is the fifth entry into the main Star Ocean series. While many areas of the game are enjoyable, such as the fun combat and nice art direction, the story suffers from a lack of excitement and some questionable pacing.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is set on the planet Faykreed (pronounced fake-read) which is about 6000 lightyears from Earth. The game mainly follows the travels of Fidel Camuze, a young fencer who is a protector of his little village. The game starts off slow, introducing you to all the mechanics and controls within the first few minutes, bombarding you with text which explains every little detail of gameplay in the most convoluted and extensive way possible. After this initial tutorial phase you are guided to events which lead to you actually being able to learn the combat, where you fight an antagonistic gang who don’t appear to be very nice people (as evidenced by the fact that they try to kill you). After basic progression you are brought to the only real standout moment in the game, the moment where a giant, seemingly cloaked spaceship crashes onto your little planet. This is where you are introduced to Relia, a little girl who has a remarkable ability to manipulate time. The plot is based around Relia and the war between two super advanced species of humans from other distant planets. One side seeks to protect Relia and beat the antagonist side who seeks to capture her for the remarkable talents she possesses. The story itself can be a bit of a drag as the “interactive cutscenes” are often slow and boring, not to mention they lack the ability to be skipped. This only adds to the pacing issues that the story already faces.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness features a relatively smooth and simple combat system, X being your light attack and Square being your heavy attack. On top of this you have your special moves which are initiated by holding down the respective attack button (light or heavy). These attacks deal a larger amount of damage but come at the cost of stamina (which can be easily replenished by consuming specific items). Even though the combat is fairly simple, that doesn’t mean that it is easy, there are various enemies that will quite happily knock down most of your health in one hit and then obliterate you within a second. This is where switching characters comes into play.

Throughout the game you have a maximum of seven characters in your party at once, and each can be controlled by you at any given time should you so choose to change, or are forced to change as the character you were controlling ran out of health. Each character has a unique move set and skill set which have their advantages and disadvantages. To this end, the gameplay works very well, but the fact that there are frequent random encounters becomes an annoyance. Due to the design of the game, you spend a lot of your time backtracking, and you’ll find yourself walking through the same areas over and over again and facing the same enemies. This quickly becomes tedious and you end up try to avoid combat if possible. That being said the combat is definitely the game’s strongest suit.

When it comes to levelling and the development of the character (strength-wise) the game doesn’t really rely on levels aside from determining how much stamina and health you have. Your defence and attack stats are determined by the gear that you equip, this includes weapons and armour and abilities. The grade of weapons and armour that are available for purchase is determined by how far you are through the story – the further you are the better gear you can purchase. To this end Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness correctly approaches levelling and progression in a different way as there isn’t some form of delta scaling reminding you that you need to git gud. Obviously grinding can be a part of the game and it is slightly recommended for specific points in the game, allowing you to power level and have a large health pool and increased stamina. However, it is by no means a prerequisite for progression. Given the nature of the game, it would be safe to assume that there are side quests which can help alleviate any possible avenue for grinding, and while side quests are something that Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness attempts to use well, it ultimately fails. Implementing a pretty standard bulletin board system for acquiring and completing side quests, the game fails to overtly inform you if you have completed any of your assigned side quests, so you can spend hours doing something you finished in 5 minutes. Another mishap with the design of these side quests is that to turn them in for completion you need to go to the exact same board where you picked it up from. Given that there are many bulletin boards to receive side quests from, this can prove to be meticulous in its design. This hampers down on the fact that completing side quests can offers some serious gear that can give you a decent upper hand.

All of this aside, there is one facet of Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness that makes playing the game nigh unbearable and that is the massive inconsistencies in difficulty. As you play through the game, you’ll very often find yourself stuck at random difficulty walls. These crazy difficulty spikes can occur without warning and at any time, so that rather than being an even challenge, the game goes from bordering on unfairly difficult to being ludicrously easy seemingly at random. I’d let something like this slide if the difficulty walls were boss fights of some sort, but these were just simple tasks like “protect <insert name here> while they <insert verb here>.” I understand making these moments a challenge, but at least increase some of the overall difficulty afterwards to give an idea of the pacing.

From a visual standpoint, this game opts to not use the black outlining on textures that most JRPGs use. For this I have to give credit as they did manage to achieve some beautiful landscapes and detailing to go with this art style. It is definitely refreshing to see a well-known art style taken in a slightly different direction. To compliment this, attacks are flashy and thrilling to watch, adding to the fun of the combat system. Seeing enemies drop in a flurry of colours is always a pleasure, whether it be from a comedic or aesthetic standpoint. However, when it comes to optimisation on the technical side of things, this game definitely falls short. While in most areas the frames remain fairly stable, there are some areas like in cities and towns where the frames drops dreadfully low and often gave me mini-headaches just from looking at it. Worst part of this was that there really was not much going on in the screen either, it just seems unpolished. Mind you, they’re not as bad as Lichdom: Battlemage for the consoles or Homefront: The Revolution, but they’re still pretty bad.

Final Thoughts

I do really wish there were more positives that I could point out about Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, but with its negligible story and slow pacing, inconsistencies in difficulty, frame drops, poor design in traversal from place to place for progression and bad side quest design I struggle to see anything incredibly standout with this title. The competent combat system and solid art direction are simply not enough to counter the slew of issues, and this is not a JRPG I would willingly recommend.

Reviewed on PS4