It’s definitely Star Ocean, but it could be better

Star Ocean: The Divine Force was revealed last year in the State of Play of October. It warranted a divisive reception because of how the game looked out of the gate. We then got a release date trailer that seemed to polish up some of the combat criticism quite a bit. It is finally here, the next entry in the Star Ocean series! Now we get to look at how it holds up, and everything it accomplishes.

Game Name: Star Ocean: The Divine Force
Platform(s): PS4,PS5(reviewed),Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S,PC
Publisher(s): Square Enix
Developer(s): Tri-Ace
Release Date: October 27th 2022
Price: $59.99

I tried the game’s demo last month, and it gave me a good idea to how the beginning of combat would be. Luckily it enhanced further the farther into the game you get. Sadly the story takes a while before it becomes something very engaging. The character models in combat have fantastic animations. However, in the cutscenes, the models are janky. You get to choose between Raymond and Laeticia as the protagonist you follow throughout the story. I chose Laeticia since I chose Raymond in the demo, and very little changed in the beginning. It does change quite a bit in segments where the party splits up. Sadly that doesn’t happen very frequently. The parts focusing on exploration, and gameplay is where the game shines—everything else kind of falls by the wayside.

D.U.M.A

You get a total of four playable members in your party. You can get guest characters that join you but can only offer assistance with fighting. One thing that I found awesome is how different all the characters play. For instance, Raymond has a variety of slow but strong close-range moves, Laeticia has fast, and weak attacks, Albaird has mid-range combat moves, and Elena has a lot of crowd control moves that make it so enemies get juggled. Combat deals with chain combos where you assign skills to Square, Circle, and Triangle. You can change the moves based on holding it or in what placement it is in for the combo. There is a lot of customization you can use for your characters the more skills, and abilities you unlock. I will say I didn’t really use a lot of combos till much later on in the game since it took me a while to understand, and how to deal with certain enemies, and I mainly just became a button masher. Button Mashing doesn’t help during boss fights, though.

Bosses show weaknesses in the battle system. The party members are pretty much useless against bosses since they will always get attracted to the big AoE blasts that occur. It almost feels like I need to solo them actually to beat them. Honestly, a few bosses I did just solo them, since I couldn’t get my party members to do anything besides die. This game could benefit from something akin to the gambit system from Final Fantasy XII for allies. That way if they are targeted by attacks or are too close to enemies, they can move away due to a system in which the player can choose tactics for them. Luckily Nina, who is the healer in the game, is very focused on reviving people when they do get knocked out or will heal when party members are low. Nina was a must-have party member for every encounter.

D.U.M.A is a probe-type droid who changes up the combat quite a bit. You can use it to fly in combat, add extra damage reduction in combat or even use it as an ultimate move that deals a ton of damage when you have your Vatting gauge full. I actually think this adds a lot of strategy to the combat. You begin the game with 5 AP points to use in battle that refreshes pretty quickly as you just walk around the enemy. When you use D.U.M.A to do surprise attacks or blindside the enemy by attacking behind them during battle, it adds more maximum AP points to your combat bar. Using a lot of strategies allows you to use more moves and abilities at a time.

There is a lot of side quests in Star Ocean: The Divine Force, however, there is one giant problem due to this. There is no quest log. I had to write down side quests, and side quest details I would want to complete. Which there are some side quests that I really needed to pay attention to not just what they were saying, but the layout of the maps, and even the location of characters in the world. This resulted in me doing a lot fewer side quests than I probably would have done.

Speaking of side quests, there is actually an interesting minigame showing up this time around. The game is called Es’owa. Basically, it’s a board game that had an 8 x 8 grid point that resembles a mini Go board. You draw your peons from your collection, and have three figurines at the start where you draw a new figurine each turn, and can place one anywhere on the board. If you surround your enemy’s pieces, you can capture and erase the figurine from the board. It is a good way to ensure you have the strongest pieces on the board. You win when your opponent loses their health points. Each figurine on the board deals damage to the enemy after every turn. The problem with this is only certain NPCs will battle you, and if you don’t rank high enough, some NPCs won’t even give you the time of day. To get your rank higher, you have to keep finding NPCs to play Es’owa with. When you win and beat a certain amount of NPCs you get a higher rank and can play with other NPCs at a different rank than you.

Doll Syndrome

Star Ocean: The Divine Force has some really funky character models in the game. When you see the art of the posters and the 2D renders of the characters, they are solid pieces of art and something to be proud of. The 3D models in-game did not transition all that well for every character in the game. I would say the characters that looked less like humans transitioned much better to 3D. The characters that were purple-skinned, and had horns did not look nearly as awkward as the main cast did. Though Elena looks fantastic.

During battle, the animations are fantastic and show off a lot of the skills of the minds behind the game. Whenever the characters are doing anything but battling, though, they do not mesh well. Characters have unique animations for talking during cinematics but when they need to grab literally anything, they have to do it off-screen. There is a lot of moments that would have looked really interesting or impactful but weren’t because of the limitation of the model. Things like shaking hands or writing signatures, or even just throwing a sword don’t have animation in the character models. They have to use a lot of screen cutaways to further the story or events when characters do the smallest things.

Star Ocean

Throughout the first half of Star Ocean: The Divine Force, you are basically tied down to a very linear type of game where you can only really go to three towns, and a bunch of maps between those three towns. It also feels empty in terms of what you accomplish. However, the second half of the game really shows the story can be interesting, and the characters can have depth. There is a lot that opens up to you, and places you can go. Also, you get a large portion of party members that you can customize—having different teams for range, close combat, or just semiomancer teams. There is a variety of skills, abilities, and items you can give to characters. This game is best when it is about playing the game how you want to.

Divine Force

Overall this game is extremely enjoyable. The fighting mechanics are fun, the systems they have with the D.U.M.A are engaging, and having the ability to customize the character you use helps add variety to fighting the hordes of enemies you encounter. The problem comes from the character models, the first half of the story, and how the game hinders your own desire to play it. You can’t find everything you want without quest logs or even a way to look at what you need to do for side quests. The party members still feel like they need something to help them accomplish anything in fights if they aren’t Nina.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force will release on October 27th, 2022, for PlayStation Consoles, Xbox Consoles, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Star Ocean: The Divine Force was provided to us by Square Enix for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games, and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.

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