An unremarkable story with some interesting ideas marred by a painfully stilted execution.
Rogue Galaxy is a PS2 RPG with a few interesting technical innovations which come at a cost, several interesting sub-mechanics which never fully come to fruition and a rather unremarkable story and cast of characters.
The game starts on desert planet Roza, which is under the control of one of two warring intra-galactic forces. You play as Jester, a strong young-man who has always wanted to adventure the galaxy; but the imposing military blockade prevents the people of Roza leaving their planet. One day the town is attacked by a giant beast and Jester is given one of the legendary star-swords by a mysterious stranger who happens to be the galaxy's most famous bounty hunter (who then promptly vanishes). Jester takes up sword and defeats the monster but in the process of doing so is mistaken for being the aforementioned bounty hunter by a group of recruiting space-pirates. Jester recognising an opportunity when he sees one decides to join the pirates in their quest to find 'Eden'; a planet thought to be host to unimaginable wealth. Finding it will be no easy task though as this planet mysteriously disappeared from the galaxy long ago for reasons unknown. So begins a promising quest that soon buckles under the painfully slow story-telling of what turns out to be a largely unremarkable adventure.
First a little on the set-up of the game; there are several planets in the game (which are pretty huge in their own right). Whilst you run around the world there are no load times, either when you get into one of the games many random encounters (at which point a warning sign will pop-up and enemies will materialise) or enter/leave an indoor area. At first this technical feat seems extremely impressive but, it quickly becomes clear that it has come with some significant compromises; the entire game-world is streamed up by hiding what is being streamed-in behind well-placed corners. The end result of this is that the game world tends to break down into a series of extremely samey looking tunnels and straight-lines. These are effectively featureless bar the odd treasure chest. This certainly leads to a lot of repetition and a sense of déjà vu when running around the enormous areas. As a result you will spend most of you time navigating using the mini-map rather than your sense of direction or your eyes.
The battles, they play out in real-time with full three-dimensional control over your character (which you can opt to switch on the fly). You can attack with a close-range weapon or fire away with a distance weapon. In addition you can enter your menu to cast a magic-spell or use an item (both of which happen instantly. You can even cast magic if you are in mid-air and it will reset you to the ground). The battle system itself is fine for the most part but you will find that many battles play out the exactly the same. The camera can also be a tiny bit of nuisance when you get your back up against a wall. Fortunately the game stocks you with an extremely generous supply of healing items so this is rarely likely to get you killed. Actually the game overall is very much on the easy-side and all the boss battles play out mostly identically. The game sets up the promise of defeating bosses in unique and interesting ways, for example, you get a gun near the beginning of the game that creates platforms you can use to scale a boss…which is almost never used again, and the same applies to a freeze gun. The only weapon you get that you switch to frequently is the shield-breaking gun (which takes up your sub-weapon slot); it's quite miffing that the developers expect you to go into the menu to manually switch back and forth between your damage-dealing gun and your shield-breaking-gun. It is even more baffling because this functionality could have easily been mapped to the d-pad, which otherwise does nothing. It's a minor nuisance, but a minor nuisance that is consistently present throughout the second-half of the game where shielded-enemies enter battle alongside their un-shielded counter-parts on a routine basis.
The combination of a generally low difficulty, repetitive battle strategy and arduously long indistinctive locations comes to a head in a massive-dungeon which comes around during the mid-point of the game. It serves as a monolith of dull-game design. It is very hard to feel a sense of exploring a planet, let alone a galaxy, when the areas are so clearly the copy and pasted work of a game designer and not a living, breathing world. The game-world comes off as very contrived, barren and overly-massive all at the same time. Rogue Galaxy is a game that often shows that 'more is not always better'.
The same can be said of all of the games sub-systems; you can level up weapons and then combine then when they are fully levelled to create newer more powerful weapons, you can create items that don't exist in the game world and then populate the galaxy's shops with them through a very well-conceived factory mini-game and you can kill scores of a certain enemy (or one of the games many optional sub-bosses) to rank up your galactic bounty-hunter status. There is nothing really wrong with any of these systems in and of themselves. Taken individually they are all interesting parts of a whole. The 'more is not always better' angle rears its ugly head again though. Weapon level and character levels are too large and bounty quotas are too high to make them compelling. If handled right these elements could have blended to create an addictive mixture where 'the next thing' never feels far from the player's grasp. Instead the fact that everything takes so long means these sub-systems become a kind of secondary consideration rather than an interesting driving motivation behind the players' actions. Bounties in particular could have served to make the dungeon-crawling more interesting but the fact that the quotas are so high turns them into a grind instead. Add to that a lack of an on-screen bounty-quota counter upon killing enemies and you have a sub-system that the player is unlikely to feel particularly compelled by.
The story and characters are largely unremarkable and wholly under-developed. You never really get a sense of camaraderie that you'd expect with a pirate-tale. The story itself although not bad, is very drawn out; it doesn't even really get started until the 30 hour point where the pacing of the game improves drastically. One positive of the story is that it certainly goes in a direction which the player is unlikely to expect at the outset of the game, but the pacing is so slow that it is hard to really be surprised by the events that unfold.
All in all it is quite hard to recommend Rogue Galaxy Director's Cut to anyone but the most starved JRPG fan. This reviewer didn't even attempt the post-game content and has no will to ever play the game again. It's not that it is a bad game; it's just dull and wholly unremarkable. The Playstation 2 is host to a massive library of RPG's, most better, or at least more distinctive than this one.