The newest Japanese style role playing game, Rogue Galaxy is sitting on the backs of the great RPG companies. They took the best idea’s of other games and incorporated them here. The fighting style resembles Dot Hack, with the isolated fighting in bubbles. When wondering around you just wonder into a group of enemy’s and fight. When you beat them all it tells you what you have gained, but you never leave the playing field.
The skills upgrade system is like that of Final Fantasy X. You find special objects that you put together to learn the skills. To learn a skill you have to be able to move around the grid to it, having learned the skills before it. This makes for a nice way to format that a skill requires another while giving options on directions to travel in. You can still choose which skills you want to pursue.
The game starts out with lots of pop up messages telling you how to play. The character will have to complete an action and the game will pop up with how to do it, pressing the start button to clear.
The story starts, you’re a bounty hunter on a desert planet. The planet, unfortunately for the character, is being quarantined from the rest of the universe, and none of the citizens are allowed to leave. When a monster attacks the town, the main character gets mistaken for a famous bounty hunter. The “hero” goes along so that he can get off the planet.
The cinema sequences are well placed in the game to show off the landscape and give a good view of the different areas. Cut scenes are mostly used to show detailed views of the area or of new characters when they enter, otherwise the game uses the characters, taking control of them while a scene is playing out.
You can directly control any of the characters that are in your party. They still show up when you’re walking around, unlike some games that hide the whole party into one character. The other characters that you’re not controlling will follow you around and generally act according to general guidelines you can set about whether they should focus on attacking, use all available special items or conserve them.
The different characters each have unique abilities that will affect what can be done as the character.
Characters grow by levels. This can make the game interesting, having to play each of the characters so that they don’t get behind, and sometimes a different character’s skills may be needed to get past a certain point in the game.
Another unique thing about the game is the battle recorder. You record all your battles so that you can be paid. This gives the game a realistic touch, as in real life you don’t get paid for a bounty unless you can prove your work. The characters in the game are just as skeptical, claiming that it is as good as not doing the job if it’s not recoded.
I give the game a eight out of ten. Rogue Galaxy can be very clich© sometimes, and the game play has elements that look like they are mimicking other games, but the story is well thought out and the game play flows nicely, which is rare in games today.
The game seems like it was actually thought out and not thrown together, like most of the others on the market. The story has some real depth to it with many characters that each have their own quirky personalities. Again gameplay will seem familiar, but it’s well done, giving the user lots of options to play as they see fit.
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