Amazon is pretty painless to return stuff to and get a refund. In most cases they refund you up front and just require you to return the item by a certain date before getting pissy. They'll even provide a shipping label, all you gotta do is take it to a UPS dropoff.
StarOcean 5 : Integrity and Faithlessness
- Thread starter Xexx
- Start date
Pyksel
Rasterizing . . .
- 840
- 284
You don't even have to take it to a UPS dropoff as they'll come out and pick it up.
Xexx
Vyemm Raider
- 7,428
- 1,623
Thing is we now will only refund 50% if its been opened. Sometimes it slips and they do a full refund but its supposed to be 50% now on open games etc. I remember at one point i sent back an open Wii-U and bunch of games and got full refund on it all after like 20 days...
Synj
Dystopian Dreamer
- 7,886
- 34,488
I know about the UPS pick up, but every time I've tried it there's a $6-7 charge. I'm sure I could look it up but aren't refunds supposed to be free with Prime?You don't even have to take it to a UPS dropoff as they'll come out and pick it up.
If it was worth grabbing right away we'd already know. As such I'll play it in a few months when my gamefly queue fills up a bit more.
Pyksel
Rasterizing . . .
- 840
- 284
They are free so I'm not sure why UPS would charge you. We simply fill out the Amazon RMA, throw a copy of it in the box, and tape it shut. UPS is out the next business day to pick it up. You shouldn't even have to contact UPS as it's all handled right through the Amazon RMA process.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
- 19,829
- 13,341
Doesn't Best Buy give more than that on buy backs if you have GCU? I seem to remember buying Tales of Zestiria for like $48 and then selling it back a week or two later for like $32
Xexx
Vyemm Raider
- 7,428
- 1,623
Unsure, BB is aids so i avoid them as much as possible - Their return policy was 15 days last i remember but they just have too many shady practices, but not as many as gamestop.
Derkon
Trakanon Raider
- 2,452
- 1,192
Reading the Neogaf thread on it and it seems most of the people playing it there have been enjoying it. Looks like most would score it closer to a 7, game seems good if you don't mind what's already been mentioned about it(smaller scope/shorter game length).
Still debating sending this back and going with #FE though, it's getting good reviews and Nintendo games rarely go on sale. SO5 will probably be on sale pretty quickly.
Still debating sending this back and going with #FE though, it's getting good reviews and Nintendo games rarely go on sale. SO5 will probably be on sale pretty quickly.
Little review for those still interested / considering buying it after a price drop
Finished it yesterday at a runtime of 40 hours with 1-2 hours being idle. Can probably do it in 15-17 like reported in earlier reviews if you skip all skits, crafting etc.
It would be a lot shorter if it allowed fast travel before the end. You do get a hint of it being available, but is taken away less than an hour later and not available again until you're on the path for the final showdown.
This causes a lot of backtracking. A lot. Can probably remove 10 hours from my time because I did a bit over half the "side quests" before I got fast travel again. Once you get that, you can finish off side quests very quickly.
Note: Side quests are nothing except "collect or craft item" or "kill enemy in x zone" acquired from bulletin boards in 3 locations + same type of quest from a NPC. You're required to go back to the board to get the reward. Doing these before fast travel causes the massive backtracking mentioned above. EDIT: There are three annoying quest where you need find a guy. One in each town. You have to go to several towns, each with some npcs saying where he has gone to. Then when you find him, you need to go back to the board and finish it. Once you done all three, he becomes a vendor that sells some of the rarer crafting components. Highly suggest leaving these until you get fast travel.
There is no overworld map except the zone you're in, so at first you can end up traveling to different zones just to see if the exit to the place you want to go is there. This again is negated with fast travel since there is only a handful of zones.
Combat: It is ... meh? If you control Fidel, you will for the most part ever use the two skills you set to close range. This because you will nearly always be in close combat range, only activating the skills set to long range when your mob dies and you switch to a different one further away from you. While running to it, you might trigger a long range skill or two.
I did 95% of the play through with Fidel, and switching to Miki (healer) for some "bosses" in the random "dungeons". These are black spheres that are in some zones (sometimes need to enter, exit, zones to make them appear) where you need to get through 3-5 rooms with a boss at the end. Once you start, you need to do all the rooms. In the beginning of the game, you need control of the healer because you need to spam AE heal. Before you get AE heal, you will most likely fail. No skill, just heal. Once you level, they become trivial. Nothing in between.
You can set skills to your party members on how they act in combat, but you rarely ever swap the roles out. Some are obviously better than others. Around mid game, you will most likely have the ones you will use. Since Reilia has no attack, and is basically useless (her buffs are pointless on anything but bosses since fights are over in seconds) you can put +%fol and such roles on her.
You will not really have a full group until late game since people leave constantly.
In late game, you can't even see what is going on since the screen is just a big flash of spell effects.
On normal difficulty, you will rarely/if ever, die. That is one character dying, not a wipe. Game over happened twice for me. Once when I ran into the "dungeon" as a newb with only two people as mentioned above, and when I tried the post-game dungeon where I wiped to the first trash mobs who hit harder than the final boss.
At that point I was level 99, so not sure what to do there other than grind crating items to make gear, however, the best items are created by items from the last dungeon. Post-game dungeon needs to be run 4-5 times I think in order to get enough items to get 100% of the crafting items. It gets progressively harder with the final boss growing in difficulty each time, taking 20-40 minutes to kill (this I read, not done it)
Crafting:
It's basically pointless for the main game. You can buy all the weapons/armor you need to finish the game easily, and it only gives you a slight powerboost from time to time. You do need it for the side quests. I've unlocked most recipes that doesn't require post-game materials.
"Special skills"
Crafting, loot drops and gimmic type things. One side quest gives you the lockpick skill, so do that. One level, and it opens all locked chests.
Story and characters:
Generic at best. The "skits" in the game (like Tales games) activate in main towns. You run into a circle, your party disperses with some of them having conversation options. Some of those have dialog options with answers that apparently gives you + to the relationships with the characters. There is no slider or visual representation of it other than if you save and load you can see some answers are better than others.
Once you finish a skit, you run back to the circle and the party gathers. You can then enter and exit a building, and if the circle is still there, you can do another. You can end up doing 10-20 in a row, sitting there for an hour+ running around the towns talking to the same characters. It is for character building, but most of the characters are extremely one dimensional. They talk about the same things over and over. Looking for cats, being scare of ghosts, hitting on women or ... Within the first two hours you will most likely know what every characters favorite things are, which they will continue to expand on through the entire game.
I got the good ending I think, since I did all the skits I could find. Sometimes you will need to backtrack to towns to get them all. IE: If you enter one town and you see you can do a skit again, most likely, all towns now have some. Before fast travel, this will take.... a while (hence 40 hours). Skipping those, 15-17 hours is entirely reasonable. If fast travel had been there from the start, the game could probably be done in less than 10.
Overall story has been done many, many, times before.
No replay value that I can see since the combat is so simplistic as well.
4.5/10 since it is completely generic, but not completely terrible. You know it's not a good sign though when you play a new game and it keeps making you wish you could play the old ones like new again. A remastered 2-4 would outshine this by a fairly large margin.
PS: End game boss is still bugged, so you need a MP drain item (can be crafted) and used on him to pull him out of just standing there being invincible. I had to pause and go to a youtube video to figure that out since I had just stood there hitting him for 10 minutes without anything happening or any event triggering. No dialog or something that I could see that would make you think you'd have to do that. But once I MP drained him, he activated the next part right away.
Finished it yesterday at a runtime of 40 hours with 1-2 hours being idle. Can probably do it in 15-17 like reported in earlier reviews if you skip all skits, crafting etc.
It would be a lot shorter if it allowed fast travel before the end. You do get a hint of it being available, but is taken away less than an hour later and not available again until you're on the path for the final showdown.
This causes a lot of backtracking. A lot. Can probably remove 10 hours from my time because I did a bit over half the "side quests" before I got fast travel again. Once you get that, you can finish off side quests very quickly.
Note: Side quests are nothing except "collect or craft item" or "kill enemy in x zone" acquired from bulletin boards in 3 locations + same type of quest from a NPC. You're required to go back to the board to get the reward. Doing these before fast travel causes the massive backtracking mentioned above. EDIT: There are three annoying quest where you need find a guy. One in each town. You have to go to several towns, each with some npcs saying where he has gone to. Then when you find him, you need to go back to the board and finish it. Once you done all three, he becomes a vendor that sells some of the rarer crafting components. Highly suggest leaving these until you get fast travel.
There is no overworld map except the zone you're in, so at first you can end up traveling to different zones just to see if the exit to the place you want to go is there. This again is negated with fast travel since there is only a handful of zones.
Combat: It is ... meh? If you control Fidel, you will for the most part ever use the two skills you set to close range. This because you will nearly always be in close combat range, only activating the skills set to long range when your mob dies and you switch to a different one further away from you. While running to it, you might trigger a long range skill or two.
I did 95% of the play through with Fidel, and switching to Miki (healer) for some "bosses" in the random "dungeons". These are black spheres that are in some zones (sometimes need to enter, exit, zones to make them appear) where you need to get through 3-5 rooms with a boss at the end. Once you start, you need to do all the rooms. In the beginning of the game, you need control of the healer because you need to spam AE heal. Before you get AE heal, you will most likely fail. No skill, just heal. Once you level, they become trivial. Nothing in between.
You can set skills to your party members on how they act in combat, but you rarely ever swap the roles out. Some are obviously better than others. Around mid game, you will most likely have the ones you will use. Since Reilia has no attack, and is basically useless (her buffs are pointless on anything but bosses since fights are over in seconds) you can put +%fol and such roles on her.
You will not really have a full group until late game since people leave constantly.
In late game, you can't even see what is going on since the screen is just a big flash of spell effects.
On normal difficulty, you will rarely/if ever, die. That is one character dying, not a wipe. Game over happened twice for me. Once when I ran into the "dungeon" as a newb with only two people as mentioned above, and when I tried the post-game dungeon where I wiped to the first trash mobs who hit harder than the final boss.
At that point I was level 99, so not sure what to do there other than grind crating items to make gear, however, the best items are created by items from the last dungeon. Post-game dungeon needs to be run 4-5 times I think in order to get enough items to get 100% of the crafting items. It gets progressively harder with the final boss growing in difficulty each time, taking 20-40 minutes to kill (this I read, not done it)
Crafting:
It's basically pointless for the main game. You can buy all the weapons/armor you need to finish the game easily, and it only gives you a slight powerboost from time to time. You do need it for the side quests. I've unlocked most recipes that doesn't require post-game materials.
"Special skills"
Crafting, loot drops and gimmic type things. One side quest gives you the lockpick skill, so do that. One level, and it opens all locked chests.
Story and characters:
Generic at best. The "skits" in the game (like Tales games) activate in main towns. You run into a circle, your party disperses with some of them having conversation options. Some of those have dialog options with answers that apparently gives you + to the relationships with the characters. There is no slider or visual representation of it other than if you save and load you can see some answers are better than others.
Once you finish a skit, you run back to the circle and the party gathers. You can then enter and exit a building, and if the circle is still there, you can do another. You can end up doing 10-20 in a row, sitting there for an hour+ running around the towns talking to the same characters. It is for character building, but most of the characters are extremely one dimensional. They talk about the same things over and over. Looking for cats, being scare of ghosts, hitting on women or ... Within the first two hours you will most likely know what every characters favorite things are, which they will continue to expand on through the entire game.
I got the good ending I think, since I did all the skits I could find. Sometimes you will need to backtrack to towns to get them all. IE: If you enter one town and you see you can do a skit again, most likely, all towns now have some. Before fast travel, this will take.... a while (hence 40 hours). Skipping those, 15-17 hours is entirely reasonable. If fast travel had been there from the start, the game could probably be done in less than 10.
Overall story has been done many, many, times before.
No replay value that I can see since the combat is so simplistic as well.
4.5/10 since it is completely generic, but not completely terrible. You know it's not a good sign though when you play a new game and it keeps making you wish you could play the old ones like new again. A remastered 2-4 would outshine this by a fairly large margin.
PS: End game boss is still bugged, so you need a MP drain item (can be crafted) and used on him to pull him out of just standing there being invincible. I had to pause and go to a youtube video to figure that out since I had just stood there hitting him for 10 minutes without anything happening or any event triggering. No dialog or something that I could see that would make you think you'd have to do that. But once I MP drained him, he activated the next part right away.
Vorph
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
- 10,999
- 4,736
This really annoyed the shit out of me when it happened, and I've barely touched the game since.
Haven't finished it yet obviously, but the rest of your review is spot-on for the point I'm at. I could forgive most/all of the other problems the game has if the combat was fun and interesting but it's just boring and can be easily beaten with button-mashing. I mostly just control Emmerson, at least he has four(!) buttons to press.