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[WarPig]

I've played a lot of both American versions. They're both pretty good. To me, it's just cool to see two basically gameplay-driven RPGs dominating the genre this fall.

I'd agree with the arguments that Symphonia has the better combat system -- SO3's is pretty seriously exploitable, whereas Symphonia is more structured and better balanced. On the other hand, the character design gets right up my nose. Little fucking badly-animated munchkin-people. Star Ocean I'd say wins the localization race by a head, too.

tri-Ace, I think, hit on the right narrative structure for its strengths with Valkyrie Profile, shove the epic quest into the background and fill the foreground with the shorter stories. Hopefully they'll try that again one of these days.

Oh, and I still can't fully grasp it, but I think the invention system in Star Ocean is pretty cool. If nothing else, the invention descriptions are frequently hilarious.

DFS.

 

[kiryogi]

Some fun for the folks~ (and klonoa fans)

Klonoa skit in the japanese version of ToS:

http://kir.sytes.net/Movies/Klonoa.rar

 

[kiryogi]

and even more fun! This one is secret/spoiler tho. But shows off a semi intensive battle for those folks curious about how the battle system is. (This was when I was going back to it, so yeah I know I suck)

Sorry about the file size. At the time I captured it, I was still messing around with different codecs and whatnot.

http://kir.sytes.net/Movies/test.rar

(28 megs on slow connection, beware!)

 

[Shouta]

Oh yeah, SO3's battle system is way more exploitable (as you can see in Bebpo's post, Kokyuu-sen spammmmm) but I enjoyed SO3's battles way more than ToS when I wasn't exploiting the exploitables. SO3's battle system does need improvements (more Killer Techs/Special Moves, more normal hits, slightly adjusted hit detection, and of course to go with that, adjustable AI) but it isn't anywhere near as bad or busted as some people are making it out to be.

 

[duckroll]

It's not the exploitability that turned me off SO3's battles, but the complete lack of intensity. The entire concept of the 3Dish map in battles is retarded imo, because while cool in concept, the execution is pretty terrible with lots of empty space in every battle even when the characters and enemies are spread out. Also the techs and normal attacks just didn't feel like they were impactful enough and it just lacked, to put it simply, the joy of beating the crap out of enemies. It just didn't do it for me.

 

[Crazymoogle]

I haven't played the previous SO before, I have played through SO3 DC (I bought the first buggy version and sold it when I knew there will be SO3 DC) twice, I think the story is pretty interesting to me. Installing to HDD shortened the load time between scenes.

Is that legit HDD support, or HDDloader?

 

[Bebpo]

Is that legit HDD support, or HDDloader?

The JPN version had legit HDD support which cut down on load times and bugs (for non-DC). I have no clue if they kept that for the US one though.

 

[Crazymoogle]

The JPN version had legit HDD support which cut down on load times and bugs (for non-DC). I have no clue if they kept that for the US one though.

That's strange (that nobody knows yet). I would consider HDD support a huge selling point.

I guess we will have to wait and see.