DUMA, the futuristic, thingy-doobry flying device, gives this an extra star out of whatever by itself. Once you get it combat gets a lot more fun and it really helps whipping around the world. It raises an otherwise dreadful game into something I definitely... played.

The rest is a mess. Ignore anything saying this is a return to form for Star Ocean. That's laughable after just playing the done up second one recently. Everything other than zipping about hither and dither is boring! The story is drivel, all the characters are dead inside, and the cutscenes where all the plot are stored are amaturish.

I got through this game by skipping entire cutscenes. They're all needlessly wordy blah blah that add nothing. Barely plot, definitely not character. I don't know why they were even cutscenes, it was just character models standing relatively still with some basic camera scans. This could have been all chat as you keep traversing one end of a map to another in what makes for the bulk of the game. But they probably didn't do that because when that happens half the game functionality doesn't work! No pause menu, no map, no scanning for stuff. Shut the hell up, I got stuff to do!

It's got a massive cheapness to it that is distracting. It's hard to go to this after playing Tales of Arise that is a relatively similar game, with a similar budget and team, taking fairly similar shortcuts too keep that down. But where they knew where to skimp and where to polish, this just looks like ran out of time and money.