The Star Ocean universe never looked much better in this PS2 installment in the star ocean series. Our story begins with Fayt, our stubborn headed but determined hero on vacation with his family and compassionate childhood friend Sophia. After a little nudging from Sophia, Fayt and Sophia decide to look around the hotel when a crisis hits this peaceful vacation resort planet. An unknown military space force attacks the resort and this ends up separating Fayt from Sophia and his parents.

Another Epic Space battle!

            As stated in the other review this game has a stellar battle system. Everything is controlled in real-time giving you some significant advantages and battle strategies when facing enemies. The controllers consist of weak attacks that let you do massive damage combo attacks and strong attacks that deliver one deviating blow that can even knock an enemy off balance when they are guarding your attacks. But the real meat and potatoes of this system is your special attacks and symbology. To perform a special attack you need to hold down ether the strong button or weak attack button and let it rip. Symbology is the game's magic that provides the player with healing capabilities or means of inflicting magical damage. Taking proper control of the characters during battle is also a major tactical maneuver in this game. If you have a character that you want healing you can set their status to manual and put them far away from the enemy and use them as support every once in a while or you can select the computer activated A.I. and allow the computer to back you up with ether support or force depending on what you want your other characters to do.

Problem with this is that sometimes the computer will not do what you want it to do or your character will just stand there and not move. Planning out what you want to do ahead of time is vital to winning battles, especially boss battles. Another minor grip about the battle system is the difficulty level. If your character is not leveled up to a suitable level you might as well forget about continuing because every battle will be like fighting an ending guy. Using the bonus gauge is vital, because if you need to boost your characters level in order to continue, getting the trip exp bonuses on weaker foes give you the necessary amount of points to level without jumping to another zone and losing on every single battle trying to level up your character to the proper level needed to continue on. Bottom line...don't cheap your way through by buying a ton of potions and level up your characters a bit before continuing to harder areas. There is a safe guard to that though. Each shop only has a certain amount of potions before they run out, so buying out the whole shops potions without rationing it out can seriously handicap you later on.

The attention to detail is noteworthy.

Graphically Star Ocean: Till the End of Time boasts nice looking atmosphere's that have great detail. The hotel resort outside looks awesome. The characters designs have a nice anime look to them, and when I say anime I mean anime. They don't look realistic but good enough to merit a nice pass. As mention in the previous review Till the End of Time has a nice soundtrack that delivers the right mood for each atmosphere you explore. In terms of the voice acting this is one area Quinton and I have different opinion's on. All the dialogue in this game is delivered with emotion, but I found the acting to be a bit off. It's ether they try too hard or not hard enough, nothing in between. Not the best in terms of delivery and speech. In some instances I found Fayt to almost sound like a nagging whiny boy, but I guess that may be because of his stubborn side. Some of the voice actors just didn't seem convincing enough for me, but I guess that may be a personal bias

Overall this game rocks. All it's minor quirks don't do anything to stop it from delivering an entertaining experience that span two DVD discs.