Review: Rogue Galaxy
One of the last few Playstation 2 games I have played in recent years, I was actually very excited to get it via Gamefly. The trailer and previews looked interesting, the combat system seemed like it was fun and it had decent voice acting (from what I saw).
Then I received it, and I want at least 10 hours of my life back. Here is why:
Major Flaw: Mio. Do I really need to say more? I think they mistook “idol” for “airhead” when drafting her voice actress, and whoever did the casting should be fired. Or whoever decided to leave off Japanese language options. The latter is a long-standing personal pet-peeve. Native language options are almost always better than localized, if the subtitles aren’t completely different.
I could understand if she was an optional character, but apparently you have to go to her to obtain missions if you want to accomplish a lot of the game’s objectives. I would use video clips of her to torture people for information; she’s that bad.
Major Flaw: Zones and dungeons are too damned long. I was in the third real dungeon, and it took me about 20 minutes to get from one objective to the next, and that was with avoiding a decent amount of the combat. I know they really wanted to show off how huge their game world was, and how there was no loading (not even for battles). Great! Kudos! But I like to call what they attempted admirable, but what they achieved was bloat.
Minor Flaw: The factory system. For those of you who do not know, there was a frog that plopped itself into your inventory that, when fed weapons, can combine them into new, unique, often better weapons. It was that simple. Want to “craft” in the game? You have to put on your hard-hat (and thinking cap) and use the rather complex Factory system where you actually have to lay out and plan the combination of materials and hope you did it right, or there were no results. From placing conveyors certain distances apart so that parts arrived in one place at the same time, to routing the electrical grid, this was a tremendous time sink that could make some really nice things, if you had the patience for it.
But seriously, with Toady around, why bother?
All-in-all, the game was not that terrible, but I did not want to sink more than the 10 or so hours I was in find further disappointment elsewhere. I had other things on my Gamefly Q, and at the pace I play RPGs at, I would likely have rented the game so long it would be as if I had paid for it in full, which is most certainly was not worth.
