Star Ocean: The Divine Force Review – Reaching For The Stars

Star Ocean: The Divine Force is the latest entry of the iconic Star Ocean series by tri-Ace. The series hasn’t had the easiest time over the past few years with the previous entry, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness receiving a less-than-stellar reception. By comparison, Divine Force propels the series back into orbit however it doesn’t go quite as far as it could.

It makes definite improvements over its predecessor with the fun new DUMA system and cool exploration features but is let down by a lackluster story, performance issues on the PS5, and somewhat awkward combat. It’s not a bad game by any means but with a little polish, it could have soared a lot higher.

Stranded Among The Stars

Going back to the formula of Star Ocean: The Second Story, the game features dual protagonists. You can start the journey by playing as either Raymond Lawrence or Laeticia Aucerius. Raymond is a captain of the merchant vessel Ydas that serves under his family’s company Lawrence Logistics. One day his spaceship is attacked by the Federation and he crash-lands on a faraway planet named Aster IV. The planet is underdeveloped and the inhabitants aren’t aware of the existence of other worlds beyond the stars.

Aster IV happens to be home to the Kingdom of Aucerius where Laeticia serves as the princess. She’s always accompanied by her knight named Albaird Bergholm and they already set off on a secret journey to avoid the potential conflict with a neighboring country. From here, Raymond and Laeticia unite together in order to save the cosmos from a much bigger threat than anticipated. It’s a basic story and one that I feel has already been repeated so many times with different angles, but it’s still enjoyable enough to follow. 

The best and worst part of the story is the characters. Character designer Akiman did a great job with the character design but I found that most of the characters were underdeveloped and hard to relate to. They never stray too far from the usual fantasy RPG stereotypes, which may be fine for some but when I’ve seen these sorts of characters done better in many other games in the genre, so it’s hard for them to stand out. 

Aside from the main cast, the NPCs in the game are basically no different than mannequins. You can’t even interact with most of them. You can only talk to the important NPCs that can provide things like side quests, and access to buy stuff, but no one else. NPC conversations can really help strengthen the world-building of RPGs and make the game feels more lively, so it’s quite a shame how they just ditched one of the most essential parts of the genre.  

Combat And The AP Meter

The combat of Star Ocean is pretty simple Action RPG fair. Each character has their own attack skills that they can use by consuming a fixed amount of AP. AP recovers fast, but you need to stop attacking the enemy for a brief moment for it to actually wait for the AP meter to build back up.

The combat is very centered around using AP management, which is fine but the problem is your characters don’t have normal attacks that don’t consume AP, so there’s gonna be a lot of moments where the pacing of the combat feels limited. When you run out of AP (which happens a lot), you have to sort of huddle in the corner of the battlefield for a few seconds so it can recover. The only alternative is to actively swap between characters to keep the momentum going. 

If you can get used to it, the next step is to set up combos where the game allows you to assign each skill to different buttons including the order of the skill from each character menu. I like how flexible it is and there’s definitely a lot of room to experiment, especially since some character plays very differently even compared to a lot of JRPGs out there. For example, Nina is a pure support character and can’t fight, so when you play as her the main target is shifted to the party instead where she needs to only focus on giving them support while maintaining a safe distance from the enemy.

The DUMA System

The main feature that makes Divine Force so different from past Star Ocean games is the DUMA system. This appears in-game as a flying orb that lets you perform special actions. This system is tied with another bar for the Vanguard Assault gauge (VA), which you can fill up by battling enemies and then consuming it to deploy a barrier, speed to perform a rush attack, quickly dodge, or even fly around freely. I can’t stress enough how fun this system and it is such a big saving grace not only for the combat but also for my overall enjoyment of the game. 

By using D.U.M.A. you can also blindside the enemy by disappearing from their sight when performing a VA rush in front of them (basically a super fast dodge move). Blindsided enemies will be immobilized and suffer extra damage for a time, but there are some enemies that can’t be blindsided because they don’t have eyes, but at least the VA rush can always give you some momentum to dodge their upcoming attacks. The combat will keep evolving through the game, but it’s not gonna be too drastic besides giving you more options to build each character. 

This game can also be pretty hard if you underleveled. For example, when fighting this giant monster boss in the third area, I keep dying despite being only 2 levels behind the boss. Even lowering the difficulty didn’t help that much. Healing or using other consumable items in battle is also very risky, because your character needs to stand still for a good few seconds when using an item, and most of the time I kept dying before even getting to use them. 

Customization 

The character customization is quite basic. Each character has their own Skill Tree that you can explore by using SP to strengthen skills or learn new ones. I kinda like how each skill that you unlock actually feels meaningful and not just some small increase in stat bonus that probably won’t have a significant effect, so every time you level up there’s definitely more impact on how strong your character grows. Maybe that’s also the reason why even being slightly underleveled or simply forgetting to unlock skills can make you feel that much weaker.

Besides that, you can customize character equipment, strengthen their combat and active skills, and also adjust passive skills that can give more special traits or advantages to each character. Meanwhile, for D.U.M.A., you can make this flying orb more handful by further strengthening and learning more skills. But unlike improving characters by SP that you can easily get from each battle, the D.U.M.A. needs special gems that will automatically be converted to PTS. Gems are scattered around the world and so easy to collect, though you need to collect a lot of them to even increase one level of each skill. For example, some skills need a minimum of 50 PTS to upgrade, so you need at least to collect 50 normal gems or 4 special gems that can give 15 PTS just for the cost. 

There’s not a whole lot to dig into, I think the customization is simple enough and easy to learn even if you don’t follow the tutorial. Just make sure to prioritize more on characters that you actually comfortable using and don’t forget to unlock more skills when reaching a higher level instead of just leaving those SPs stacked. 

Exploration & Side Activities

Besides combat, the D.U.M.A. system also shines when it comes to exploration because it relies on mobility. With this mysterious floating robot, your character can fly around the map with ease. Exploring with D.U.M.A. is so much fun and you can reach any destination a whole lot faster, so it really goes to the point where walking is not necessary anymore even when exploring cities.  

As for the stuff that you can find around the map or side activities to do, it’s pretty limited. When you are in the big open area sometimes there’s a treasure chest or random strong bosses, but besides that, there’s nothing that will catch your eye besides a group of normal enemies to rack up EXP. When exploring major cities, while some of them look breathtaking, it still feels soulless because of the lack of NPC conversations. Also, the side quests are pretty boring and generic, even the first one that you can do in the game is literally helping this little girl find her cat. Ah yes, gotta love those. 

The only exciting side stuff to do is Private Actions. This is basically like the usual bonding event between the main character and each party member. These are pretty good and there are a lot more events dedicated to each character than I expected and even accompanied by their own ending. Most importantly you can learn more about their backstories while still enjoying some engaging interactions outside the main story. 

Performance on PS5

I was about to leave this part because it’s a multiplatform JRPG, but Star Ocean: The Divine Force actually offers Resolution and Performance Mode. So how was it? All I can say is that it’s quite miserable.

At first, I’m playing the game in better Resolution mode, but the frame rate is sluggish and not comfortable on my eyes, so I decided to go with Performance Mode. It was not bad at first, but as I progressed further the game started to stutter a lot, especially when exploring big cities or when there are a lot of particle effects on screen. This isn’t a rare occurrence either, the game stutters every few seconds and it’s getting annoying to play. 

The optimization definitely could use a lot of work because the game doesn’t even look that next-gen, it could easily pass for an early PS4 game. How the game looks is not so much of a big problem, but at the same time, the game shouldn’t be this bad to run on next-gen hardware.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force

I have pretty mixed opinions on Star Ocean: The Divine Force. While it’s definitely not as bad as the previous entry, I do think there’s a lot of room for improvement to give the Star Ocean games that much-needed comeback. There are a lot of parts that feel lacking, but I do still enjoy the game, mainly thanks to the D.U.M.A. system that manages to make the combat and exploration fun. Without this system, I probably wouldn’t have the energy to play it. That’s just how impactful it is to my overall enjoyment. 

Besides that, I think Star Ocean: The Divine Force is a pretty serviceable JRPG and one entry that might be worth checking out whether you’re a fan of the series or not. 

Star Ocean: The Divine Force is available for PS4, PS5, and PC.

Review copy provided by Square Enix. The game was reviewed on PS5.

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