Part I: My Star Ocean Credentials
When it comes to RPGs, you could call me something of an "old hand". My first RPG experience was Dragon Warrior on NES, and though I had a lapse of RPG play for much of the 1990s, I most certainly was a very dedicated RPG player from 1998 onwards, starting with the PC version of the well-known first PS1 entry to the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy VII. As such, I am definitely both well-informed about RPGs and have a definite bias in their favor. I fully intend to keep this bias in check as best I can, however, for the sake of review integrity. Please call me on it if I make a particularly egregious slip-up.
As for Star Ocean, my experience with the series has centered largely around the PlayStation entry, Star Ocean: The Second Story. To say that I like said PlayStation entry is a bit like saying that outer space is really big, in that it's such a gross understatement that you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more ridiculously inadequte description for something in less than 5 minutes. Star Ocean 2 is my longest played PS1 game, hands down, with over 20 files played and well over 1,000 hours clocked across my many saves. My bias towards Star Ocean 2 borders on the fetishistic, as you may have gathered, which I knew was going to cause some problems in this review. Curbing my SO2 love will be no small task.
In terms of my RPG preferences, I've played just about every kind of RPG there is out there, and tend to favor free-movement 3D action RPGs (which Star Ocean games just happen to be). So again, I have an undeniable bias in favor of the game right there. So you're probably wondering, after all this, what the odds are that I can belt out a low-bias or even no-bias review of this game. That's what this little experiment is largely about. This review is as much for me as it is for you, my readers. If you find that my review becomes overly fanboyish or canonizing, I encourage, nay urge, you to call me on it immediately.
Overall, this review is a huge test of my ability to think critically, because it is far harder to be objective and critical of something you love than it is to be objective and critical of something you merely like, are indifferent to, dislike, or hate. The drive to sway too heavily in one direction or another in this kind of circumstance has scientifically been proven to be almost insurmountable. What I am undertaking here is nothing short of fighting the very nature of humans to not look fairly and justly upon something they hold dear. Wish me luck, I will need it.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
