TRI-ACE

I honestly feel like they peaked with Valkyrie Profile. Haven't really been impressed with them since, nor have I felt too inclined to really get behind them as much since.

That's what I was afraid of. Looks like if I want a proper oldschool Phantasy Star-esce game, I better make one myself instead XD

Hehe, thanks.

Yeah, I'm not really interested if it's just like an offline version of an MMO. Ah well.

Back to the topic at hand, I never did finish Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. I should go back and replay it from the beginning; it seemed promising! A friend of mine semi-spoiled part of the plot (which was prolly part of the reason I stopped playing it) but the characters were interesting enough to want to see what happens.

I liked the humor of Radiata Stories, but the game seemed to steadily get worse after they split up the team of Lego-head/love-interest/other-guy.

*Edit: Come on, somebody tell me that Gantz does not look like he has a Lego head.

I used to be a huge tri-Ace Fan, I collected everything from them and told everybody about them all day. I love all the Star Ocean games, I love both Valkyrie Profile games and I also like the Tales of... games they "secretly" worked on under the Wolf-Team name (well technically Tales of Phantasia is completely by them).

Lately, they've been disappointing me mostly, though. I still liked Infinite Undiscovery, despite being super hard (I gave up midway through game, though), but Radiata Stories was really really horrible. That day/night mechanism just overcomplicated everything and 90% of your time you're just running around town looking for friends and items, soooo boooring. Resonance of Fate was also disappointing, some good ideas but the execution was just so bad and many things were just overcomplicated (for example field effects and having to builds your own guns). What used to be a company that was making purely reaction-based games with very simple gameplay turned into a company trying to create more and more unique and complex mechanisms and that didn't really work too well with me.

On the other hand, Motoi Sakuraba split off from tri-Ace and made his own company tri-Crescendo and so far I loved every single game they were involved in (Baten Kaitos, Valkyrie Profile 2, Eternal Sonata, Fragile Dreams). I guess the people that fit to my taste moved there or something (I never really informed myself too well).

Oh well... now everybody is just making games for handhelds which aren't really for me. =/

author=RyaReisender
Lately, they've been disappointing me mostly, though. I still liked Infinite Undiscovery, despite being super hard (I gave up midway through game, though), but Radiata Stories was really really horrible. That day/night mechanism just overcomplicated everything and 90% of your time you're just running around town looking for friends and items, soooo boooring. Resonance of Fate was also disappointing, some good ideas but the execution was just so bad and many things were just overcomplicated (for example field effects and having to builds your own guns). What used to be a company that was making purely reaction-based games with very simple gameplay turned into a company trying to create more and more unique and complex mechanisms and that didn't really work too well with me.

On the other hand, Motoi Sakuraba split off from tri-Ace and made his own company tri-Crescendo and so far I loved every single game they were involved in (Baten Kaitos, Valkyrie Profile 2, Eternal Sonata, Fragile Dreams). I guess the people that fit to my taste moved there or something (I never really informed myself too well).

Valkyrie Profile 2 and Baten Kaitos had some sweet battle systems and graphics, but, man, they both had some of the worst writing considering how great everything else was about them. That really killed it for me--especially the reliance on twists. I sprained my eyes from rolling them too much.

You're right: most of Radiata Stories is spent recruiting people--but the world is so convincing, charming, and alive that I really got into it. The battle system is simplistic but it still engaged me due in part to constantly getting new and better characters, and the game's actually pretty funny. Outside of Ridley, most of the characters weren't particularly round, but they were still charming (and plentiful) enough to remain interesting. It was one of my favorite PS2 games.

I have a quite different opinion about that than most of you seem. I think tri-Ace has ALWAYS been bad with stories and characters and I personally don't really care much about story (which might seem strange because my main genre is RPGs), in fact in most RPGs I don't even read the dialogues, I just skip through them most of the time unless it seems that there is some important info in the text (like where to go next).


For the Star Ocean series, I actually think Star Ocean 3 had the best story of all. Okay the first half (except the very beginning) was a bit disappointing because it wasn't really much sci-fi and it stretched out for too long without anything really happening but the second half was amazing. The plot actually fits very nicely to my own "religion", so I was pretty amazed that tri-Ace came up with something similar.

But I don't really play tri-Ace games for the story anyway. I played Star Ocean 1 in Japanese not even understanding a single word, and I still enjoyed it until the end. Star Ocean 2 also didn't really feel too special story-wise except for Ashton. I mean the whole story seems like someone just came up with reasons to move you through really fun dungeons and battles. Star Ocean 4 is kind of hilarious, like a parody game, but really, its awesome gameplay made it the best of the series for me. Not to forget its amazing sense of planetary exploration that really was missing in the previous 2 games.

Which brings us to gameplay. I think Star Ocean 4 completely mastered the battle system which was now actually challenging and fun at the same time. Star Ocean 1 basically was just "set up your skills right and then chain spam them forever". Star Ocean 2 was mostly "Press X repeatly". Star Ocean 3 instead moved to a challenging system where you couldn't just spam buttons anymore. You had to be cautious and calm and look exactly at which attack the enemies uses. While this was a nice challenge, I felt it made the combat a bit too slow and made it lose a bit of its charm. Many battles in row became annoying rather than the endless fun the other games of the series offered. Star Ocean 4 then used a mix of both and mastered it. In fact Star Ocean 4 is designed so you can play it any style you want. You can play it by spaming skills, you can play it Star Ocean 3 style by standing around and blocking all attacks and you can go for counterattacks too. That's what the whole "Mode" system is about, you can set up the game so it plays how you enjoy it most.

I'd probably order the games like this:
Star Ocean 4 > Star Ocean > Star Ocean 2 > Star Ocean 3

But of course I'd agree that if you are playing those games mainly for story and good characters that you probably would put Star Ocean 4 last.


As for Valkyrie Profile 2, it really has amazing gameplay, I didn't think that it's actually possible to improve the VP combat system even further but the whole dash thing worked really great. I loved it. The story has nice plot-twists too, but then again like for all tri-Ace games I don't really play them for story. At the very least VP has my favorite character in a game ever: Lezard Valeth, so that gives bonus point of course.

Baten Kaitos has a great world. Most RPGs just steal from real life... they have grass and forests and mountains and that's about it. Baten Kaitos is different, it thought of unique landscapes that don't exist in real life. Isn't a great world and settings also part of a good story? I really wished more RPGs would think of unique places like this game.

Radiata Stories just wasn't for me at all. It was a generic setting, sure it had a nice "disney-esque" feeling to it, but what does it help if the gameplay is super boring and most of the time you aren't even fighting? Nah. I play RPGs for dungeon exploration and combat and this game couldn't offer that all.

You know, one of these days, since I still have my old Gamecube hooked up, I gotta pick up Baten Kaitos and give it try, since I’ve heard so many good things about it.

author=Tau
Haha, nah Tri-Ace are horrible now. Went downhill with Star Ocean 3, probably the second worse jrpg I've played(XIII would be #1) just because of how bad that story was, bland characters & environments. Ok music and combat, but whoever came up with those dungeon designs is seriously.. *sigh*

I rather enjoyed Star Ocean: Till The End Of Time and all its wacky characters and its rather unquestionable plot twist at the end. But I will agree with you that the dungeon designs are rather crap. It just felt so…big and empty with nothing seriously interesting to do in all of them. I also really hated the whole map competition mechanic where you had to, literally, run into walls and hug every single nook and cranny just to complete the map. At least Star Ocean: The Last Hope dropped that whole dumb aspect, I’ll give you that.