Whew, Star Ocean 3 gave me quite a scare when I picked it up. The blue haired hero was trapped in a futuristic emergency bunker, with graphics looking very similar to Xenosaga. Talk about a horrible case of deja-vu. I wandered around, talked to a few untranslated NPCs, and basically got very annoyed with a game I had been looking forward to for quite a while. Lucky I didn’t run into any KOS-MOS clones. Finally, another console opened up, and this one had battles. Hooray!

The battle system was just what I hoped, open ended, plenty of combos, and really high damage and Hit Points for everyone, including the monsters. However, it should be noted that the game itself seemed pretty hard. Not having access to the menus, since I don’t know a lick of Japanese, left me with no healing potions, and the monsters I was fighting could easily dash off a 1000 of my HP with a single hit. Having 12000 HP isn’t much use when an enemy cornered one of my team mates and hacked away at her.

Notably absent, but only because of the Japanese, was the skill system that I was so excited to mess with. Alas, it seems I will have to wait before I counterfeit my way to higher levels and practice my mad cooking skills. With any luck Thief Gloves and giant rabbits will still have their place in The End of Time, but if not, at least we still get to look forward to a hero wearing a really ugly shirt.