Integrity and Faithlessness employs this tactic relentlessly and excessively, and it did much to drain my interest in bothering with optional events in towns that flesh out the backstories of my companions.Ĭombat, too, suffers from this clash between good ideas and poor implementation. The design also fosters awkward silences when a character performs an action I may not initially see on my screen, thus leading me to realize the "cutscene" is still in play only when a red line pops up to bar my path. Seeing expressions thus requires that Fidel moves around to look at their faces, and the approach lacks the emotional punch traditional Star Ocean cutscenes sometimes deliver. Ocean's SevenOther signs of trouble reveal themselves early on, such as the relative absence of many traditional cutscenes in favor of voiced dialogue between characters as they stand around looking at each other in the normal gameplay perspective. (She also has amnesia, because of course she does!) Space remains distant - regardless of the series' title, this is a decidedly earthbound adventure, with the few jaunts to space and back lasting only a little longer than a round-trip flight for a SpaceX rocket. I'll even admit a fondness for Fiore, the supercilious sorceress whose greatest magical feat appears to be her ability to keep her porous getup from ever slipping out of place.Ī pity, then, that the plot quickly falls into a pit of tired clichés, particularly after Fidel and his childhood friend Miki start hunting for the parents of a mysterious young girl who escaped from the fallen spacecraft. There was fertile ground for a great story here, and it even had the advantage of being filled with likable characters like Fidel, a young swordsman who gets caught up in an interstellar war after seeking aid for his besieged village or Emmerson, a captain from space who roleplays a crossbowman out of honor for his government's Prime Directive of sorts. Take the fantasy-meets-sci-fi premise: It's one I admire greatly, being a fan of writers like Gene Wolfe, Mark Lawrence, and Joe Abercrombie. Sadly for those of us who've held out hope in the seven years since Star Ocean: The Last Hope, it's a struggle that never really resolves itself. It's also an unfortunate metaphor for Integrity and Faithlessness itself, as virtually every good idea this uncharacteristically brief JRPG brings up finds itself clashing with the complications of a poorer one. It's a powerful, Columbus-style moment a clash of technology and world views. we know the feeling mate.The key moment of Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness happens about an hour in, when a hulking spaceship roars out of the skies and crashes near a spot where the world's fantasy-themed locals are hacking at each other with slabs of steel.
It explains that the obsession of finding all the stashes has left him too exhausted to go on.
It doesn't have any legendary loot, but there is a shard on a nearby chap who unfortunately drowned while hunting for the final Smuggler's Cache.
If you head to the bridge connecting Heywood to Pacifica, you can find another one in the water. Three barrels, floating on the surface of the ocean, with tantalising loot within. If you played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt through to completion, you'll remember the pain of hunting down Smuggler's Caches in Skellige.