decent game

i just cleared the campaign

heard mostly negativity abt this game but i have enjoyed it so far, will probably 100% it at some point. but i can see why some dont like it

not a review or anything but
good

• decent graphics/visuals, but i thought the texture work was quite a bit better in SO4 but that was the PS4 remaster i played
• solid 60fps framerate which is fantastic
• strong emphasis seamlessness as advertised, and decent action combat
• full party on screen is super cool and should be a standard
• game is not too long
• role system is decent and fun to play around with, i experienced real trouble in the 2nd to last dungeon or so and playing around with different skills and roles to power up (i chose) Victor with Berserker and ATK and Critical% related roles and spamming Diabolica Blade proved very effective. i can imagine more elaborate strategies are required for the higher difficulties ofc and havent played around much with other characters and skills
• didnt have to grind at all, and managed to clear Galaxy difficulty with no problems or game overs

not so good:

• anime character design for some characters (the eyes on some of the characters like miki and relia are a bit cringey), ive been less tolerant of anime character design as of late. as a red blooded male like any other i have to say fiore's over the top design may appeal to some but i preferred anne much more
• music is standard sakuraba stuff, nothing really that interesting, to compare with previous titles i enjoy his work in SO4 a lot more
• level design is unsurprisingly poor as in previous games and also (j)rpgs in general, final dungeon just boring linear corridors, while previous titles had more interesting exploration in the final dungeon
• you can tell the game got a lower budget/resources than previous works, not really the devs fault, they did what thery could with what they had i suppose
• PA's i thought werent as good as SO4, there were some really funny ones in that one. again im guessing budget restraints and the focus on seamlessness has to do with it (bc it leaves less room for cinematics)

a decent 20 euro experience for a casual player like me but i can see long time fans who shelled out full price for this might've been disappointed (or not, i dunno)

I just got this two weeks ago and finished the main story a few days ago.

It's basically a giga low budget fanservice mashup of SO3 and SO4 that failed to deliver, imo.

It wasn't a terrible game, but it was still the worst Star Ocean, and one of the worse jrpgs I've ever played (and I've played a lot).

The world is a tiny, it's only one world, there's an extreme amount of backtracking, how to activate PAs was bad and uninspired, talking to npcs was annoying, the camera bob made me sick at the start, and the 'seamlessness' aka the lack of cutscenes, with everybody just standing/walking and talking, made the story lack impact most of the game.

But to be fair, the battle system was slightly fun, the music was all right, the characters themselves were unexpectedly enjoyable, and the content of PAs was better than the main story.

Everything about the game screamed a lack of budget to me. It's the Star Ocean formula, but done cheap. They tried a few new things (for the entire genre, even), but ended up mostly failing.

As a standalone RPG, SO5 isn't terrible. But as the 5th game in a long running franchise on current gen hardware, this game is trash.

Everything about it is just cheap, uninspired and low effort. Nearly aspect of the game design was dialed back from the previous titles.

Why are we stuck on one planet when past games let us explore several? And not even a fully fleshed out planet at that.

Presentation sucks because there are no cutscenes. Instead we get slow, unskippable, "seamless" dialogue dumps that are entirely unengaging.

The story fails to take advantage of its setting. It is totally barebones and feels like something on par with a SNES JRPG in the 90s.

The cast is at least less cringy than SO4s but they lack originality big time. Everyone is just an expy of somebody else and all of their moves are copypasta'd as well. Fidel as ZERO original attacks. Wtf

PAs are implemented so badly that they're a chore to experience.

Mutually exclusive party members, a hallmark feature of the franchise, still hasnt returned since SO3.

It sucks because it tried to copy star ocean 3 so hard. Would've been better if they made it an original game without copying any of the past games.

As I've pointed out before, Dragon Quest 11 copied a lot of stuff from previous DQs: enemies, music, items, etc etc. However, they did it within a game that was relatively fresh and polished so it worked OK. Star Ocean 5 copied even more...and everything they didn't copy was poor or uninspired.

It's not the worst game ever: you can get some enjoyment out of it if you bought it for $10 and wanted cheap entertainment for two weeks. But it was bad enough that it killed the Star Ocean series. (So I will never forgive it...nor will I forgive the people who didn't fund it properly)

Star Ocean is a "once per console gen" series and so it really needs to deliver when it does release. The previous games pretty much lived up to that but this one despite being moderately late into the gen, did nothing worthwhile with the power at its disposal.
It needed to be a huge and feature rich game with multiple well developed planets to explore.Instead, they wasted what effort they could muster on a janky "seamless" system that causes more problems than it ever had a chance to solve.

In particular I really can't understand people lauding the "all playable characters on the field at once" idea. It should absolutely never become the standard for JRPGs (or any genre). It's nothing but a mess that needlessly dilutes the player's influence, especially in light of the knee-capped AI control system they used.

Most of the game is re-hashes and borrowed assets and what little is "new" is mostly mistakes.

I enjoyed it for the most part, but it has it's fair share of issues.