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Post by shelverton on Apr 17, 2015 12:31:04 GMT -5
I...kinda don't get why Chrono Trigger would be something you'd even think of when it comes to Star Ocean, especially in a thread talking about the Star Ocean franchise getting a new game. it just seems a random complaint, like watching a Spider-Man movie and screaming out "Where's bloody DareDevil!?" I mean, they're both RPGs, but...that's about it. It just seems a bit silly to bring up a dead franchise every time the company thats owns an IP you like releases a game. It's just how my mind works. Though I don't think I "bring up dead franchises every time the company that owns an IP I like releases a game". At least I hope not? Sometimes a certain thing makes me think about other things that I would prefer, and the new SO announcement made me think a lot of CT for some reason. I've never talked about CT before as far as I can remember? And yes, resource managment is interesting and sometimes confusing to me. Many companies make perfect sense in their decisions, while others do not IMO. But I agree this thread is not the place to discuss CT really, so I apologize for derailing things. Carry on!
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Post by LouieBee on Apr 20, 2015 11:27:47 GMT -5
Off-topic but did Chrono Trigger ever need a sequel at all? Alot of the problem with Chrono Cross is that it invents a very paradoxial (and confusing) story to try and explain what happened to Schala when she was absorbed into Lavos. I appreciate that they tried knotting up a loose end but in the process of doing so Masato Kato ended up retconning the canonical ending of Chrono Trigger itself.
I also still can't get over why (or how) someone like Crono and friends would lose their lives to a joke villain like Dalton - Absolutely absurd given they killed Lavos!
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Post by Scylla on Apr 20, 2015 18:09:44 GMT -5
Well, this topic has gone in some strange directions, haha.
So, uh, YEAH, new Star Ocean! I heard about the teaser site just before the news broke, and I was half-expecting it to be something completely unrelated to Star Ocean, especially given the Nepro buy-out. But I knew that if it was a Star Ocean, tri-Ace would be involved (contrary to what some people were predicting). I'm still very curious about the circumstances of it all. Considering it's 30% done, I'm guessing the project got the go-ahead before Nepro came into the picture, so is this the last game tri-Ace will make as a third-party? Or did Nepro arrange things with Square Enix and we may see more sequels to tri-Ace franchises in the future?
Whatever the case, I'm really looking forward to this. tri-Ace has let me down with multiple games, but never with Star Ocean. I know a lot of people don't like SO3 and/or SO4, but I had a ton of fun with both. Now to just buy myself either a PS3 or PS4.
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Post by Sac (a.k.a Icaras) on Apr 21, 2015 3:38:46 GMT -5
The news of this game actually inspired me to finally start playing first departure on my PSP. I intend to go to the remake of 2nd story afterwards, tho I recall being disappointed with the new voices (Not that they were bad...they were just different, and as such didn't sound right to me. I suppose that's only to be expected, I played through 2nd story on the PSX like 3 or 4 times).
I remember a little while back there was some talk floating around that Tri-Ace didn't acknowledge SO3 as being canon anymore, but based on the trailer which shows each game's place in the Star Ocean timeline, that seems not to be the case. It does have me hoping we'll get a sequel that attempts to deal with the aftermath of the SO3 twist.
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Post by Scylla on Apr 21, 2015 11:30:54 GMT -5
Second Evolution is pretty disappointing all around, the voices being the least of it (considering the original dubbing was god awful itself, though hilarious). Adapting to the PSP's resolution make the graphics all blurry, the new art is crap, the localization annoyingly fusses with stuff that didn't need to be messsed with, combos ruin the balance of the difficulty and usefulness of killer moves, and they completely stripped out some cool elements like combining spells. I mean, it's still very playable and fun, but if you have the original there's no point in playing it. Same kind of deal as Valkyrie Profile on PSP, really.
Whoever told you SO3 wasn't acknowledge as canon anymore was just talking out of their ass. tri-Ace has never shown any indication of having a problem with what was established in that game. More likely it's just some fan's wishful thinking because they're bitter about the plot twist. tri-Ace has, however, made comments about SO3 being the end of Star Ocean, which were originally interpreted as there being no more games, but what they really meant is that it's the end of the timeline (obviously, given the twist). So, no, I don't think we'll ever see a Star Ocean set later than SO3. There's really nothing to work with there, they wrote themselves into a corner.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2015 17:05:59 GMT -5
I tried booting up SO3 earlier today. It's been over a decade, maybe I was wrong all those years ago. Jesus H. The art style. I take back everything bad I ever said about SO4, by comparison.
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Post by Scylla on Apr 21, 2015 19:13:05 GMT -5
I don't really get what people want or expect from the art style in Star Ocean. I see a lot of people complaining that SO5 has too much of an anime aesthetic, but then I also see people complaining that SO4 was too realistic. There's just no pleasing people. All the games have a fairly consistent visual style in my opinion, even with different character designers each time around, and it's always been more anime-ish than most of their other franchises. I thought the models in SO4 looked pretty nice, I just didn't like the ugly CG portraits in the menus (which wouldn't have been an issue if the US 360 release didn't remove the option to use the hand-drawn art). SO3 models were far creepier looking, but that's a combination of being less proportionate and it being a PS2 game and all. It was also tri-Ace's very first fully 3D game. But I thought it was very visually impressive for its time. That is, early 2003; it didn't come out until late 2004 in the US so there were more games that were comparable or better looking by then. tri-Ace of course did better yet graphically with the later PS2 releases Radiata Stories and Valkyrie Profile 2.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2015 19:49:01 GMT -5
The PS3 version of SO4 thankfully corrected the portrait problem. The models themselves weren't awful, though. Not great, either, but serviceable. The creepy heads and enormous hands in SO3 are just disgusting, though.
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Post by Sac (a.k.a Icaras) on Apr 22, 2015 3:26:39 GMT -5
Meh, if they really wanted it's easy enough to write around SO3. Hell, it'd be easy enough to just retcon the 4D beings and say "Oh yes the SO3 characters were tricked into thinking the SO universe was an MMO, when it really wasn't, lol. Anyway 100 years later...." or whatever.
I can see where you're coming from re: SO3...but I do want to get around to re-playing the game, and while crusty, the graphics wouldn't put me off.
I also was glad I had the option to change to the anime style graphics for SO4, I tried a few times to set to the other style, but WAY too ugly. In game, the models didn't bother me at all. In fact, character wise, I seem to be in a minority, as I liked Lymle, but it seems most folks don't. I was glad to get a few character endings, as I got lumbered with the "alone" ending in SO3 (Which surprises me as chck my old save it was at 80+ hours, yikes!)
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Post by Feynman on Apr 22, 2015 3:36:41 GMT -5
Second Evolution is pretty disappointing all around, the voices being the least of it (considering the original dubbing was god awful itself, though hilarious). Adapting to the PSP's resolution make the graphics all blurry, the new art is crap, the localization annoyingly fusses with stuff that didn't need to be messsed with, combos ruin the balance of the difficulty and usefulness of killer moves, and they completely stripped out some cool elements like combining spells. I mean, it's still very playable and fun, but if you have the original there's no point in playing it. Same kind of deal as Valkyrie Profile on PSP, really. Yeah, the PSP port's character art is terrible. The original Star Ocean 2's character portraits have a great, hand-drawn look. Second Evolution tried to modernize the character portraits and they ended up looking super generic.
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Post by kaoru on Apr 22, 2015 9:56:16 GMT -5
I remember the SO3 chara designs being one of those where the drawings just did not translate well into 3D models at all. At least until you get used to them. But that's hardly only a problem in SO3, just look at Xenosaga 1 for example, those in game characters are creeptastic too. But that's pretty much just early PS2-tech trying to reproduce anime drawings (non cel-shading) for you.
Second Departures redrawn artwork reminds me very much of the newer Ys I&II ones. It's just so... blah.
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Post by Scylla on Apr 22, 2015 11:42:36 GMT -5
The SO3 character designs weren't very good to begin with, in my opinion. I think of all the Star Ocean games, that one has the weakest art. I mean, Fate looks like a frickin' monkey: static.zerochan.net/Fayt.Leingod.full.334906.jpgGetting Akiman on SO5 was a nice move. He had a pretty illustrious career with Capcom. The art in Second Evolution will always perplex me because they got Production I.G on both First Departure and Second Evolution, but the art in First Departure is just leagues better on a technical level. And Production I.G usually does impressive work in general (they've done animation for other tri-Ace games too), so I don't know what happened. It's as if they dumped the Second Evolution character designs on some newbie or something.
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Post by Échalote on Apr 22, 2015 11:45:33 GMT -5
The real question is "Why does Rena looks like she's ten at best when she's in her late teens ?"
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Post by Scylla on Apr 22, 2015 12:21:01 GMT -5
The most hilarious part of that is that in the English release of Second Evolution they even bumped her up a year in age from Second Story (from 17 to 18).
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Post by Allie on Apr 22, 2015 12:35:32 GMT -5
The SO3 character designs weren't very good to begin with, in my opinion. I think of all the Star Ocean games, that one has the weakest art. I mean, Fate looks like a frickin' monkey: static.zerochan.net/Fayt.Leingod.full.334906.jpgGetting Akiman on SO5 was a nice move. He had a pretty illustrious career with Capcom. The art in Second Evolution will always perplex me because they got Production I.G on both First Departure and Second Evolution, but the art in First Departure is just leagues better on a technical level. And Production I.G usually does impressive work in general (they've done animation for other tri-Ace games too), so I don't know what happened. It's as if they dumped the Second Evolution character designs on some newbie or something. Mentioning Capcom artists just makes me think I want to see a JRPG with the art direction done by Shinkiro, and the in-game graphics made to match his style. I think people's faces would melt.
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