Rogue Galaxy

2024-08-07 (Backloggd review)
I wish we had more Level-5 games like this golden era of theirs on PS2. Sure they're clunky in a lot of ways but they were just churning out original ideas and IP. And some of the stuff they did still hasn't really been bested. Case in point the weapon fusion/synthesis stuff is still really cool. Maxing out weapons and then fusing them to get better ones? Not as good here as Dark Cloud 2 IMO but still a really fun idea.

Rogue Galaxy is replete with a fun settings, cool worlds, great music and a fun cast paired with that classic PS2 era mid-ass voice-acting. What pulls it down is that mechanically it is basically a worse Dark Cloud 2. You'll spend a lot of your time in random battles and dungeons that often drag on far longer than I liked. I basically hit a rhythm where if I ran into a group of enemies that couldn't all be one-shot first turn with one of the game's cheesier abilities I'd run. If you enjoy the idea of weapon fusion like I did that means you'll be doing even more random battles to max out your weapons and then be rewarded with a weapon you'll find at a generic merchant in another 2 hours playtime. Great. You also have boss fights that are surprisingly difficult and require you to chip away at a bosses health for minutes at a time.

So why play it? Despite those mechanics that drag it down, the graphics, the style, the vibe of the game is really its own unique thing. Definitely check it out. But I'd play Dark Cloud 2 first.

2020-06-07 (?)
This is a tough one to review. I really liked some parts and absolutely hated others. Let's start with what's good. I liked the setting, I liked the worlds, the music was great, and I like the characters. They really had some good characters with a variety of depth and motives. I liked the way they tied them all together at the end. Gameplay-wise it's like a copy paste of Dark Cloud which was pretty fun. Of special note was the weapon synthesis mechanic. I got a little obsessed with that. That kind of leads me into what I didn't like.

What I didn't like was the dungeons and combat. The dungeons were far, far too long with nothing much interesting in them. Half the chests that you could find had worthless trash you could just buy. The other half had mimics that were tedious to fight. Speaking of tedious fights, there are literally a million random battles in this game. Legit every couple hundred feet you have to do a random battle. And oh boy I basically cheesed every single combat by using a spell that would kill all the enemies instantly. Every single fight EXCEPT for the ones that required you to use a stupid weapon or a charge up ability to break the "shield" or "barrier" of the enemy. Or the enemies where you had to jump up and down repeatedly to attack their faces. So fucking tedious. I got to the point where I'd run from pretty much any combat I couldn't insta-cheese. So combat was non existent. I was basically playing the game to get through the story, and get more weapons to fuse. And the weapon fusions. Man such a cool thing but 1) takes WAY too long to do because you have to max out their EXP or whatever by-- you guessed it-- fighting in tedious random battles. I think 15 was how many I counted was required to max one weapon. This brings us to 2) There are way too many weapons. There are a shit ton of worthless combos that all take way, way too long to get. And guess what, 3) most of the weapons are pointless to get. I could pretty much always buy the best available weapon at that point instead of doing any merging. So they punished me for my favorite mechanic. Oh and last complaint combat wise is the boss fights that just WOOP your ass. They take SO long. I almost quit at the Vedan fight where you basically need to block and chip away at Gale's health for like 10 minutes. Turns out you have to do that for numerous fights so I'm glad I learned it there.

I actually did enjoy cheesing the game given how hard it was. Oh, that includes the fact that you can have infinite healing potions on you that you can use instantly. Super funny.

And the last thing I wasn't a fan of which is kind of a bummer was the ending. Kisala, who canon, based on the moves you have, is the love interest of the main character, Jaster, decides to abandon the party and become queen. Makes no sense.

So all in all why'd I give it an 8? Because it's cool original IP, I really did enjoy the story and characters, the weapon fusion was sick, the music was dope... I enjoyed it. And honestly all my complaints could be tweaked to turn the game to a 9 or 10 in my book.