RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

A fair review of Rogue Galaxy would involve overuse of the words ‘juxtapose’ and ‘contrast;’ the former meaning to place things side-by-side for comparison, the latter meaning comparisons with stark differences. Vocabulary lessons aside, Rogue Galaxy is plagued with both spectacular highs and criminal lows; a fantastic presentation that is brought low by the foibles of the role-playing genre. What could have been an epic space opera winds up feeling like the same anime nonsense we’ve seen before, and what could have been a truly memorable game is resigned to the ‘flawed, but still good’ category.

Meet Jaster Rogue, a young, orphaned scavenger and bounty hunter eking out a living on the desert planet Rosa. His planet’s under control by the Longardian Federation, who have been at war with the Draxian Empire for who knows how long, and the Longardians are starting to overstay their welcome. Before we can delve too deep into intergalactic politics, monsters assault his hometown and the youth steps in to fight them off. He’s briefly aided by a mysterious masked man, who has the courtesy to leave his sword in Jaster’s care before disappearing. Not coincidentally, crewmen from the pirate ship Dorgenark come looking for the man, seeking to hire him; he was, in fact, a legendary bounty hunter known as the Desert Claw. Sword in hand, Jaster is mistaken for the Desert Claw and invited aboard in his stead. Jaster’s been looking for a way off this rock anyway, so he keeps shut about his true identity and gladly accepts.

Backing the story is a likeably colorful cast of characters. Jaster himself is a fairly cheerful and idealistic youngster, though he doesn’t have the charm or personality to drive the story on his own; fortunately, he doesn’t have to. Fellow pirates Steve and Simon bring the comic relief, with Steve as an even more genteel C-3PO and Simon as a boisterous, vaguely Scottish armadillo-man-thing. Zegram (memorably voiced by Steve Blum) brings the necessary cynical wit and easygoing attitude, and it’s perhaps intentional that a guy named Zegram looks and dresses like Captain Morgan. The crew eventually picks up a hardened amazon warrior, a goofy renegade hacker and an ex-soldier with lots of time and a machine gun on his hands. Most of their subplots are interesting, and some are surprisingly moving. A good chunk of the supporting cast gets enough screen time to stand out, and even the characters that have cookie-cutter backstories inject enough life into their roles to make them enjoyable to watch.

Let’s get to the game itself. The game is played from a floating third person perspective, with Jaster and company moving around towns, dungeons and the like. You’re allowed to jump, swim, climb and mantle onto walls, allowing one to easily bypass obstacles and move around the environment without difficulty; never again will a fence, a chest-high wall or a differently-colored patch of grass get in your way. Getting around is as hassle-free as possible, with only the occasional and very simple jumping puzzle to mix things up. Save points pull triple duty as health regenerators and teleportation devices, so you can pop into one and zoom across the map to another previously activated one, and jump out ready for action. Later on, you’ll gain control of the Dorgenark and fly between planets at your leisure; combined with the teleporters, you can get into and out of any previously explored area in seconds and be across the galaxy just as quickly.

Information about the game world is conveyed quickly and succinctly to the player. Tutorials helpfully explain the various aspects of the game world as they come into play, from general battle controls to minigame controls. A PDA containing background data on your current world and other points of interest is available at all times, and updates regularly as you talk with each world’s denizens. The mechanism by which your team learns skills, the Revelation Flow, is oddly compelling and reminiscent of Final Fantasy XII‘s license board; abilities are unlocked through the use of various items on a grid, and the option flashes on the menu when an item can be used, and with whom. An expandable minimap shows where shops, teleporters and your current quest’s destination can be found, and when loading the game you are given a short text interlude reminding you what you’ve been up to, and where you’re headed next. Throw in cutscenes that can be paused and skipped at will, and the result is that the interface in Rogue Galaxy does things that more, if not all, role-playing games should do.

Battles take place in the same environment and play out in real time. Combat is something of a hybrid between a pure action game, say Devil May Cry, and more action-oriented RPGs; the closest analog I can immediately think of would be the .hack series. You control one character (typically Jaster, although you can switch characters at any time) and use a combination of ranged and melee attacks, along with items and special abilities; some monsters require certain tactics or weapons to break their guard before they can be damaged. You use action points with every command and must pull back to recharge once you’ve exhausted them; a successful block of an enemy’s attack instantly refills your AP gauge. The computer controls your teammates, though you can dictate their overall behavior and what spells they can and can’t use. Your allies will periodically shout out suggestions for skill or item use, and will follow these suggestions with the push of a button, but otherwise you’re largely responsible for the well-being of your party. Fights can be over in seconds, and transition to and from combat is smooth and almost immediate. One can even start walking away as treasure and experience are tallied.

Rounding out the high points are solid audio work and impressive graphics. As briefly mentioned earlier, the cast boasts a solid list of actors that do a good job of getting into their roles. Simon and Steve, for instance, seem like they should be more annoying than they are; they rarely carry their respective schticks too far, and they show more than one side to their characters. Steve’s relationship with his creator, Dr. Poccachio, is particularly touching, and Deego’s ill-fated relationship with his one-time ally Gale is delightfully film noir in its stylings. The dialog isn’t always up to the task, with some scenes bordering on trite and cliche, but the characters do a fine job of carrying the story. The musical score is often quiet and subdued, picking up well for boss fights and particularly dramatic moments but content to stay in the background most of the time.

The visuals carry a style of their own, and beyond the crisp and colorful graphics there is a lot to praise here. The game boasts a charmingly retro-futuristic take on space piracy, with the Dorganark essentially a flying 17th-century galleon crewed by striped-shirt pirates that would be right at home in a certain Disneyland ride. Planets are thematically distinct and well populated, and there’s no shortage of ground to cover. While you are limited often to single cities and zones on the planets you explore, rest assured that those zones are very large and feel as massive capital cities and dense jungles and deep mining pits should. What’s more amazing is that transition between zones is seamless, and the game apparently has little trouble processing these huge locales. Even traveling across planets is expedient and is often limited only by how fast you can skip the repeat animation of the Dorgenark entering and leaving a planet’s orbit.

With all the above in consideration, I have to point out that the game contains several troubling flaws, some of which could easily be deal-breakers. Perhaps most pervasive is the game’s difficulty, which can randomly spike from one encounter to the next. Certain enemies require annoying tactics to beat, such as jumping to strike at their head or literally bouncing on them Mario-style to open up their guard, or even equipping Jaster with a gun whose sole purpose is to break shields and which does no actual damage. Some critters hit hard and wide with every strike, and most of them appear in large groups. This is made worse by a punishingly high encounter rate and too-huge dungeons, not to mention the simplistic companion AI, which won’t lift a finger to use a health potion or life-saving skill without your say-so. Battles too often consist of your party hovering near death, with one character having to spend their AP to bring the rest back. Bosses vary wildly in difficulty, and you’ll be mopping the floor with mechanical death machines one minute and getting pasted by an insane ghost witch the next. And, lest we forget, it throws in a handful of boss fights you simply can’t win, which RPGs everywhere could pretty much do without.

If difficulty were Rogue Galaxy‘s only major flaw, it could be forgiven in light of the many points in the game’s favor. But the interface that goes so far out of it’s way to accommodate the player makes everyday actions harder than they should be. Switching equipment is a chore involving several menus and no way to directly compare something without trying it on first. As convenient as the save points/teleporters are, they are sometimes placed just beyond your reach, forcing you to backtrack way more than is comfortable; this is compounded by an absurdly high encounter rate, and too few safe zones – how often are the same idiot monsters going to attack my heavily-armed party in the middle of an open street with Longardian soldiers all over the place? Minigames, ranging from insect battling to factory line assembly, tend to be more trouble than they’re worth, and you can safely get through the game without ever touching weapon synthesis.

Lastly, the story tends towards a mishmash of anime staples, gleefully blending fantasy and sci-fi at will. Taken with the appropriate amount of salt, the game doesn’t push too hard on suspension of disbelief, but for every scene or plot twist that works – and I mean really works, like the aforementioned Deego/Gale confrontation – there’s one that comes off as awkward and insipid. Witness a poor waif and her starving daughter get brutally shoved aside by mobsters on Vedan, only for the pair of them to inexplicably show up in a haunted castle on a jungle planet for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Jaster uses a *gun* to create platforms to strike a boss monster with his sword (this is, mercifully, rare). A prisoner on Zerard has cut a deal with the guards and literally walks right out of the dungeon, but not until after your party shows up. The list goes on.

For all of Rogue Galaxy‘s many highs, there are several lows to offset them, but the game does too much right for a dedicated role-playing gamer to write the game off completely. It may well appeal to a wider audience than most of its contemporaries, having done so much to escape the usual contrivances of console RPGs. And yet the game is, in the same breath, bound by still other common RPG problems, lacking a steady hand at the storyboard and without a keen eye for gauging difficulty. It’s not a triple-A title by any stretch of imagination, but if you can put up some perplexing events and can tolerate sudden spikes in difficulty, Rogue Galaxy will be a welcome addition to your collection and may ultimately see more playthroughs than its big-name rivals can hope for.