Yo Ho D'oh
Rogue Galaxy offers inter-planetary swashbuckling as only Level-5 can do it -- for better or worse.
Published: February 21, 2007
Regardless of the methods used to arrive there, the end of battle seamlessly transitions you back into freely roaming around the areas. The only time the outcome will ever change is if you happen to win (or lose) one of the random Hunter Challenges that will net you Hunter Coins if you can satisfy the conditions -- stuff like beating all enemies in 30 seconds or without taking damage or without using certain kinds of attacks. It's a fun little wrinkle to add to the sometimes aggravatingly frequent random encounters, too.
So the battle system is cool, the distractions are, well, distracting, but the storyline and characters kinda suck. Isn't that enough to make a game merely mediocre? Ordinarily, yes, but then this is a Level-5 game, and if there's one thing they know how to do better than almost any smaller-time developer is make their games look good. It isn't just that the game is almost universally gorgeous (it is, save for some random odd overly blurred textures here and there), or that it all loads up seamlessly after your first loading screen -- the text of which actually catches you up on things if you haven't played in a while -- no, it's the presentation, which mixes real-time bits of action with pre-rendered vistas that are absolutely breathtaking that gives this world a sense of cohesiveness and ambience that no Level-5 project before it has done.
Maybe it's all the different alien races, or the worlds they inhabit, or just that those cookie cutter characters I bitched and moaned about at the very least don't look like clichés most of the time. In all likelihood it's all of these things coming together to craft a world that I actually wanted to explore that made the game so endearing despite some of the more glaring faults.
Certainly a large part of the personality and pop of the game is due to the translation and voice actors that were thrown into the mix. Steve is prissy little C3-PO wanna-be, Simon eerily reminded me of a little robo-Billy Connolly, Zegram... well, he's just kinda what I picture Steven Jay Blum actually looks like and even more cliché-tastic characters like Amazon Lilika and shy love interest Kisala sound right. Hell, Jupis and Deego, characters you'll meet toward the middle to end of the game, sound right despite being the most, well, alien of the bunch. All of this is carried on the backs of the localization and the voice performances, and all were fantastic.
Likewise, Dark Cloud maestro Tomohito Nishiura's score is an epic (though not entirely stirring) suite of tunes that feels more brash and full than his previous work, and if nothing else shows that he's just at home in a slightly campy space opera as he is in crafting songs about the desolation of a world that must be rebuilt.
There is one final gripe that I have about the game. Fuck cheap bosses. Seriously, fuck 'em. It's sort of an unwritten rule that the final boss in a JRPG has to take like 26 thousand tries to kill because they're never really dead the sixth time you've laid into them, but getting wiped out by a stupid ultra-powerful move is about the lamest thing a developer can include in a final boss battle. They should be hard, sure, but not so pointlessly cheap nor a marathon session of fights that you throw the controller down vowing never to return (I would have, if not for this review).
Slogging through endless tiled dungeons cobbled together from pre-set pieces is bad enough, but I can understand that in the interest of seamless loading some sacrifices have to be made. But please, Level-5, don't force someone to go through all that, then a marathon final battle, then have a game-ending random attack thrown in there just for masochistic kicks.
That said, I still don't mind recommending Rogue Galaxy -- if only because the trip is greater than the eventual destination. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy wrapping things up with a nice, meaty ending, but there's so much good stuff along the way that I didn't mind (despite what expletives may have erupted from my office) some of the more annoying parts of the game. Sure, they drag the overall experience down a little, but that doesn't mean you can't have a fantastic time just playing around in the world that the developers created. It's not quite their greatest game to date, and some problems like the tedium that threatens to settle in is still something I hope they can graduate from, but assuming the mantle of the last mega-hyped JRPG to hit in the waning years of the PS2 is something the game can certainly do -- just barely.