That's not why it's bad.Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover
It's bad because the combat did a complete 180 in design philosophy. It completely missed the point of all the changes they made in SO3. Fury, MP damage and anti-attack auras were there for the express purpose of discouraging button mashing. They wanted you to play smart. On the higher difficulties, you actually have to. Those elements were implemented as a reactionary measure to the way people played SO2, and they didn't want Star Ocean to be that kind of game. It's the same kind of thinking that went into what made Bloodborne good and different from the other Souls games. SO4 disregarded all of that and went for nostalgia.
They replaced all your defensive options with flashy gimmicks like blindside and rush combos. Blindside is a "defensive maneuver," except you only use it for offensive purposes, and it boils down to "that thing you use when you can't figure out how to hurt the boss." Rush mode and rush combos are an "I win" button. The BEAT system is pointless. The bonus gauge was somehow made even more convoluted than it was in SO3.
There was no reason to go back to 4 character parties (naturally, going to 6+ in SO5 is not a good idea). On paper, having 4 characters sounds good, but until they figure out how to either program competent AI or let you program it yourself, the more characters you have, the more bad AIs you have to fight with. Micromanaging is already difficult with 3 characters, it's going to be a complete mess with 6. The only thing that would make that work is a gambit system and a Dragon Age: Origins style tactical camera. It works in turn-based games because they're turn-based. Real-time action combat demands relatively small party sizes. Online co-op would be a good thing.
The item creation took 2 steps forward with being able to make exactly what you want, and then 5 steps back with how you could synthesize items onto other items to increase their base stats and still have free factor slots. You could do that forever (albeit abusing a programming oversight), until your armor gave you +9999 everything. No real reason to play the endgame if there's no such thing as specs/setups/builds. There's a reason Dark Souls has a community-dictated PvP level cap even though you can go to 999. If you don't abuse the oversight, there are at least 3 characters in the game who can permanently stunlock the entire screen.
It's cool that they brought back stuff like pickpocket and harvesting, but they neglected to implement the most interesting aspects of SO2's item creation. There was no using reverse side to buy inns and get free heals there for the entire game. You didn't have characters who had to craft items to learn their own battle skills, there was no publishing/writing. Then they took away one of the the biggest things in Star Ocean: optional characters. If the shallow battle system and broken synthesis didn't do it, now you really have no reason to play the game more than once.
But hey, I'm not here to make you apologize for liking something. I just have actual reasons for hating that game, ya dig?
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