Just when you thought the good-old PlayStation 2 had nothing left to offer but a bunch of sequels, along comes Rogue Galaxy, an original role-playing game from the makers of Dragon Quest VIII and Dark Cloud 2. Like those games, Rogue Galaxy features a beautiful cartoonish art style as well as lots of imaginative characters to meet and places to visit. Its frequent battles are much more action oriented than the traditionally slower, turn-based combat that Japanese RPGs are known for. Rogue Galaxy is also quite a big game, featuring plenty of optional areas to explore and minigames to engage in. Yet in spite of all this, the basic flow of the game can get monotonous, making a few too many parts of Rogue Galaxy feel more like a grind that weighs down on the otherwise rousing, upbeat adventure. Fortunately, it's easy enough to look past these parts.

Meet Jaster Rogue, one of the more normal-looking people you'll find in the imaginative world of Rogue Galaxy.

Rogue Galaxy is the story of Jaster Rogue, a good-natured young man who's just trying to make ends meet hunting beasts on his dusty little home planet. He longs for more excitement in his life, and he gets it when one day he has a run-in with an enigmatic man who seems to be a highly experienced bounty hunter. Then, a case of mistaken identity lands Jaster a seat on the Dorgenark, a space pirate ship (complete with sails and everything) that's traveling the galaxy in search of experienced crew. The first space pirates Jaster meets include Steve, who's basically an even kinder, gentler C-3PO, and Simon, a squat little alien-looking guy with a rocket launcher and a thick Scottish brogue. He'll be joined by numerous other characters later on the game, ranging from a downtrodden, dogface warrior to a no-nonsense tribal warrior woman. The characters are likable but somewhat one-dimensional, and the plot makes stabbing attempts at comic relief amid what's a fairly standard anime-style boy-goes-to-space storyline. Rogue Galaxy has an imaginative look and expressively detailed characters, and the quality of the voice work is quite good, all of which makes the story sequences fun to watch even when they're predictable. One nice touch is how most of the story cutscenes are rendered using the game's 3D engine, so your characters will appear differently in them depending on which weapons and outfits you have equipped.

Eventually Rogue Galaxy opens up to let you choose which of your different characters to control directly, but at first, you'll control Jaster as he sets off on his misadventures with the crew of the Dorgenark. His journey will take him to a lush, underdeveloped planet in search of fuel, then a highly industrialized megalopolis planet to get an expired travel visa renewed, and beyond. The quirky premise of some of your early mission objectives helps define the game's personality, but at the same time, it takes a good number of hours before Rogue Galaxy picks up the pace and you start learning about what's really at stake in this story. However, these first hours serve well to let you learn most of the different aspects of play. While Rogue Galaxy isn't a particularly complicated game, there are some important details to the combat that you'll need to get used to.

Combat is central to Rogue Galaxy, in which you'll spend most of your time wandering around in vast, winding environments, running into packs of enemy monsters along the way. These encounters crop up suddenly and with predictable frequency. However, unlike in other RPGs, Rogue Galaxy doesn't switch between an exploration screen and a combat screen; when the enemies appear, they'll be right in the area you're exploring. The action-oriented nature of the battles is immediately apparent, since you're able to shoot as well as slash with your sword almost as quickly as you can tap the buttons on the controller. You can also defend to minimize damage received from enemies, as well as use items and various special abilities called "revelations." Though the combat looks like something out of an action game at a glance, since you do things like attack while jumping or pick up and throw an enemy into his cohorts, the role-playing roots are still visible soon enough. The game pauses whenever you go to use an item or ability, and every now and then you'll need to wait to recover your energy before you can continue your attack. And, of course, you'll see a bunch of damage numbers flying off of the foes you strike.

To its credit, you won't fall asleep at the wheel with this combat system, which is nice and fast but still forces you to think about your foes' strengths and weaknesses as well as your own party members' tactics, much like you would in other RPGs. However, the combat does have a few pacing problems. The numerous boss battles in Rogue Galaxy will force you to spend plenty of time fumbling for items and special abilities rather than fighting. You don't get traditional healing magic in Rogue Galaxy, but instead will rely on large volumes of healing potions and other restoratives, which can instantly restore your characters back to full health or nearly full health.

Combat isn't paced as well as it could have been, but it's still challenging and enjoyable.

That sounds powerful, but the combat still is challenging, so you'll often get into fights when two out of three of your characters suddenly get wiped out, so your third one brings them back, then he dies, and so on. Each character fights slightly differently, but you'll control only one of them directly (probably and usually Jaster) as the other two fumble around the battlefield under the barely passable supervision of the computer artificial intelligence. They'll get themselves killed constantly, but at least they'll sometimes volunteer their aid to you in the form of an item or ability that would be useful in the situation. A tap of a shoulder button confirms their suggestion, letting you keep fighting without pausing for the menus so much. It's game over if everyone in your party goes under, but thankfully, save points are liberally sprinkled around the game--you can even teleport between the ones you've visited. Getting a game-over screen can still be a drag, though you'll notice another cool little detail whenever you load your progress: The game offers a brief textual synopsis of what's happening in the story since the last time you saved.