"Lucky!" That's how I felt after getting to play Star Ocean 3: Til the End of Time at the Square Enix Booth in the South Hall of the LA Convention center. I'll confess to being a huge fan of the battle system of Star Ocean: The Second Story, and anyone else who falls in that category will love what has been done with the game.

The playable version at E3 had no English dialogue, unfortunately, so what I was able to gather from the text was limited to my meager knowledge of Katakana script. However, the battle system is gorgeous. The series' trademark battle movement is still in place, and the artwork has been improved considerably for the new console. In addition, battle combos are a lot more impressive to execute - in effect one-upping Tales of Destiny II.

One of my characters (albeit with 10,000+ HP) could execute a 37-hit combo for about 1500 HP damage on each hit.Those looking for the gargantuan amount of levels and skills available with the original title will not be disappointed. PC hitpoints have gone to five-digit levels, and there is a very large skill system to boot (though what some of these skills do is hard to say...). Even so, fans of earlier Star Ocean titles are sure to love this one, if only for the battle system. Let's just hope all of the other gameplay elements are executed decently.