Star Ocean: The Divine Force is coming out next month! To build more excitement for this particular game, Square Enix has released a demo of it for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles. I took some time to give it a hands-on try. I am very skeptical about this game from the trailers, so I wanted to give it an honest try. Honestly, I am really glad that I did. Let me give a proper rundown of my thoughts and what I am excited to see more of.
The Story
So the story of the demo obviously is not going to give too much substance on what to expect. You start out getting a choice between playing as Raymond or Laeticia. The demo only lets you choose to start out as Raymond, much to my disappointment. You see a cinematic of Raymond getting told to go into an escape pod as a mysterious ship starts to blast into the big ship Raymond and his crew is on.
He declines and rushes to a storage door, trying to find something. He asks Elena for help opening the door, but she just pushes him off to a mysterious compartment nearby. Turns out the mysterious compartment is an escape pod. It shoots him off to the planet below the ship as he tries to look for a number of escape pods. The onboard AI gives him a number of 9 escape pods that are heading somewhere to the planet below. Finding the escape pods then becomes Raymond’s top mission.
There’s Some Gameplay
When you crash land as Raymond, you are found by Albaird and Laeticia, who hands you a sword to fight some enemies nearby. This is when you get to see the combat of the game. I have to admit that the game is smooth when you play it. There are moves that correspond to your character with the Square, Circle, and Triangle buttons.
Starting off, you begin with a small amount of AP or Action Points. Each move you perform reduces the amount of Action Points you have. You can dodge with L1 and the left analog stick. Regaining Action Points just requires you to not be dodging or performing moves, so I just ran around in a circle or two to get my Action Points to recharge to full, then went back to kill the monsters. After that, a scene started, and I could see a new escape pod touch down in some ruins nearby. Since it was released after Raymond’s, he assumes it is Elena’s escape pod. You then get the option to play as Albaird, Laeticia, or stick with Raymond. I went with Laeticia, since she was rocking a pair of double blades, which I liked very much.
Playing as any of the three characters, you can switch to the other ones whenever you press the up or down directional buttons on the D-pad. Eventually, after traversing the ruins area, you find the escape pod. Apparently, Elena did open the storage door and sent you the contents in the escape pod, D.U.M.A. The DUMA gives you a whole new way of traversal and fighting mechanics.
You can blindside enemies by using the DUMA to fly up shortly in the sky and quickly go down on a separate enemy than the one you are alright in combat. You can also use it to provide extra shielding to yourself and teammates nearby. You also get a ton more AP for doing blindside attacks or Surprise Attacks. It makes combat so much more engaging than running around in circles recharging AP.
Verdict?
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Star Ocean: The Divine Force, but I will say the characters’ designs just don’t seem to fit the aesthetics of the world. The world, the textures, and the environment look fantastic and realized. The characters have cool designs, but the models in the game don’t necessarily reflect those designs as well as the art that they have of them. The animations of those models outside of combat are wonky too. At the beginning of the escape crash, Laeticia throws the sword, it is all through really bad cuts.
It cuts to them arriving; Laeticia has a sword in her hand, then she says have this and does an animation from the back. It cuts to the sword than just landing on the ground. Then it cuts to Raymond looking at the sword. A cut to Albaird questioning why Laeticia gave him that, then in the next scene, he just has the sword in his hand.
There is no throwing of the sword, or even reaching to grab the sword. It is a scripted cut scene that you would see in PS2 games to make up for the limitation of the models. It is weird to see a cinematic from a game at this scale use that old-fashioned cut script writing. Still, It doesn’t take you out of the experience, it is certainly something that is awkward to see with the defined in-game models and fighting animations.
I’m still skeptical about the game, but dang, did I have fun in this world and fighting with the DUMA system. Though, I’ll probably wait until the game goes on sale before I eventually pick it up.
Star Ocean: The Divine Force releases for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam) on October 27, 2022.
