LttP Rogue Galaxy: A Grand Space Pirate Adventure

[Cadenza]

I was just going to make a post in the "Whatcha Playin'" thread, but since I've already put almost 17 hours into this game I figure that's enough enjoyment on my end to warrant its own thread, even though interest in a fourteen-year-old PS2 game is probably limited. Scattered thoughts ahead!

I've been wanting to play a long RPG that I could really sink my teeth into, and this game has been scratching that itch very nicely; every dungeon I've come across has taken at least two hours to fully explore, and once the game actually lets me manually adjust my party I'll start working on sidequest stuff in earnest. Currently I'm stuck on a boss, and I'm not sure if I want to throw myself against it over and over for a while or do some monster-hunting first to boost my levels/find more items for character progression. Probably the latter if I'm being honest.

I'm probably not the first person to make this comparison, but Rogue Galaxy feels a lot like an anime Star Wars. The plot has been taking me to a new planet every few hours, which is great considering I'm used to the Star Ocean model where you're typically stuck on Medieval Fantasy Planet for two-thirds of the game. And fully half the playable characters are non-human; we've got four regular people, a buff dog-person, two aliens, and a robot, which is a pretty good spread for this type of game.

I haven't messed with the Factory or Insectron stuff too much, they're a little too fiddly for my tastes. I'm guessing I'll have to at some point for sidequest stuff, though.

I highly doubt anyone else here is also playing, but feel free to share your own thoughts if you are, or if you've played Rogue Galaxy before!

 

[Patrick]

I remember thinking it looked cool in previews, then never got around to it. I think I’m more likely to go back to FFXII than start a new RPG right now. I’m interested in hearing more about it though!

 

[Zef]

Really looking forward to this thread! I'm a big fan of Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle, and the combination of that with FFXII made me very interested in Rogue Galaxy until I tried to run it on PCSX and slammed headfirst into an incompatibility wall. I do have a BC Playstation 3, so I still believe that, one day, some day, I'll play it--I have the titanic strategy guide and everything!

Also, my best friend loved this game and everything about it except the Mimics. He'd go on and on about the Mimics until I developed a healthy fear for them even though I only knew their Dark Cloud predecessors, which I hated, so I'm especially looking forward to those

 

[jpfriction]

I wonder where my abandoned save left off? I think I tried the first factory thing and slowly walked away.

Need to make myself finish Dark Cloud 2 first but I’ll probably pick it up again someday, seemed neat.

 

[Cadenza]

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much of a response to this thread, but I'm glad people are interested!

Also, my best friend loved this game and everything about it except the Mimics. He'd go on and on about the Mimics until I developed a healthy fear for them even though I only knew their Dark Cloud predecessors, which I hated, so I'm especially looking forward to those

Mimics in this game are the worst. They automatically drain your party's action gauges, have way more HP than most enemies, and deal much more damage on top of that. They're pretty gross!

Anyway, I've spent the past couple play sessions going around looking for items I missed and powering up my party a little, and thanks to that I was able to beat the boss I was stuck on. The trouble I was having was that you have to fight it with just Deego (the buff dog-person I mentioned in the first post) for story reasons, and it can drain your health really quickly if you don't apply a steady stream of defense buffs to yourself. Only took me two tries though, which I'm pretty happy with.

Now that I'm on Chapter 7 and can manually adjust my party, I'm going to see about doing more sidequest stuff before progressing with the plot. This is probably going to be mostly Quarries (this game's version of FFXII's Marks system, only a bit simpler) and meeting monster quotas to raise my bounty hunter rank. I tried catching some bugs for the Insectron, but I must be missing something because they keep eating my bait and getting away. And I still can't make heads or tails of the Factory; I might just use a guide for it.

Some miscellaneous things I enjoy about this game:

-The spaceship you fly around the galaxy with is modeled after an old galleon ship, which is both absurd and rad as hell.
-When you're in deep enough water, Deego will swim by dog-paddling.
-You can talk to your party members to get their thoughts on the current situation, and their dialogue updates pretty frequently.
-You also get voice clips from everyone while you're running around doing stuff, but if they start to get annoying from repeated plays you can turn them off.
-The soundtrack is pretty decent, but for the most part hasn't really grabbed me. However, I will point out two exceptions: the title screen theme and the "running around your spaceship" theme are both excellent, albeit for different reasons.
-Every single NPC has a unique name.
-Save points also act as fast-travel locations, letting you teleport between every save point on a given planet, and they also fully heal your party when you touch them.

I've learned since making my original post that this game was released on Playstation Network a few years ago (I'm playing on a physical PS2 copy I bought in the Before Times), so if you're interested in playing along you can actually do that on PS4!

 

[spines]

this is a game i've been a little interested in since it came out. i even thought a little about buying a copy when we stopped in at a game store yesterday, since i was already in a very "try some random things i skipped over at the time" mood. mostly i remember seeing some video on g4 or something of fighting a huge boss while the main character was doing like flip jumps with a 20 foot sword or something like that? this is such a weird and faint memory by now i'm not even sure how real it is, but it seemed like a pretty decent and out-of-the-ordinary rpg at the time. i definitely have a lot of ps2 nostalgia and still might check it out at some point

 

[FelixSH]

I bought this years ago and still plan to play it. Back than, I tried it for a first impression and died against the tutorial boss. I guess I was bad at the battle system. Or maybe it is just hard? I will find out in a few years, when I give it another shot.

 

[Cadenza]

Wow it is dishearteningly easy for a thread to get buried. But here I am regardless!

I didn't play much today, but I did make enough progress to reach the next plot arc. I haven't talked about it much, but the story for this game is pretty simple - the main character, Jaster, is just minding his own business living on a backwater desert planet when he inadvertently gets mistaken for a famous bounty hunter and recruited into a band of pirates. These pirates are searching for a map to the legendary lost planet Eden, a planet supposedly just full to the brim with fabulous treasure that mysteriously disappeared thousands of years ago. They're also racing to find this map before Daytron, a galactic mega-corporation, beats them to the punch.

Where I've left off, Daytron has already found three ancient tablets that supposedly reveal the map to Eden, but instead it only showed some hints for the locations of three fragments of a key that's needed to fully unlock the tablets in the first place. Each of these fragments are supposedly located in some ancient ruins on a few planets throughout the galaxy. You can go to these ruins in any order, and I'm assuming these ruins will be pretty long dungeons, so I guess I know what I'll be doing the next few play sessions.

This game continues to be fun, and enemies are finally dropping enough money that I can be freer with my purchasing habits. I'm trying to keep at least one extra weapon on hand so I can keep doing weapon fusion for everybody as I go along without having to stop. As for sidequests, I've finally figured out how the Factory works, to a point, and I've decided to just not bother with the Insectron at all. I've never been super big into monster-raising sidequests in RPG's, and from what I've read online most of the rewards you get from it can be found elsewhere. Maybe I'll change my mind at some point, but eh. Eh!

Stay tuned for further space pirate adventures I guess!

 

[Cadenza]

Still playin'! Just hit the 50-hour mark and there are still probably a few chapters to go.

I'm at the tail end of Chapter 10 just before what I assume is a soft point of no return. After finding the three key pieces scattered throughout the galaxy, the Dorgengoa pirate gang returns to the ruins on Rosa, and after some shenanigans solved a puzzle that opened the way to some ancient ruins, at the end of which was a keyplate which finally unlocked a warp gate in space that leads to Eden.

Thus far this game has doled out plot points in bits and pieces, but the past two chapters there's been a whole bunch of exposition. Things that have been learned in these past two chapters:

-Jaster, our intrepid protagonist is actually a descendant of the legendary Star King, a figure from tens of thousands of years ago who ruled the galaxy, and the inherited power that comes from that lineage can save the universe somehow
-Kisala, the adopted daughter of Dorgengoa, is secretly the princess of Eden, the lost planet everyone's been trying to get to the whole game
-The bounty hunter that the space pirates initially mistook Jaster for is Jaster's dad, and gave him his sword to set him on the path to gaining full control of the Star King's powers

That's kind of a lot of important information to dump on the player in the span of a few hours! And the spoilery bits above were only foreshadowed like, a few times each that I can recall, but that's about it. I'm still enjoying the ride, but I feel like some of the time spent hack-and-slashing through huge dungeons could have been spent developing the plot or characters a little more. After their introductory chapters most of the party has stopped getting any substantial amounts of character development, aside from Jaster, Kisala, and, surprisingly, Steve, who it turns out has been carrying the memories of his creator's deceased son, Mark, inside his memory banks, so that Mark could live on and travel the galaxy, in a sense. That spoiler is a neat idea and it gets explored pretty thoroughly; whenever you activate a new save point - not all of them, but a lot - Steve will send a transmission to his creator, who then turns Steve off temporarily so that he can talk to Mark. I've just reached the end of this particular plot line, and I won't spoil it entirely but let's just say it's bittersweet. I wish there was more stuff like that in this game.

I haven't touched on it in this thread yet, but the gender disparity in this game leaves a lot to be desired. Out of a party of eight characters, a whole two of them are women, and of course they both get some pretty fanservice-y alternate costumes. RPG's as a whole tend to be better about having at least an even split between men and women in their playable cast, and it rubs me the wrong way to see this game push against that for no reason. Actually, while I'm here, isn't it weird that all the alien party members in whatever sci-fi RPG you can name are men or male-coded? Like, I'm seriously hard-pressed to think of a counter-example here; all the female characters in sci-fi RPG's I can think of are human or at least humanoid, unless we're talking about player-created characters in stuff like Star Trek Online I guess. And it's cool that those games let you do that, I just wish it was more common.

Anyway, I don't want to end this post on a sour note, so I'll point out another cool thing I realized while playing this game recently. During the exposition party in Chapter 9, the player learns that the lost planet Eden's true name is actually Mariglenn, which is short for Le Marie Glennecia. This isn't important to the larger plot as far as I can tell, but that happens to also be the title of the title screen theme, which means that the game has been subtly reinforcing the characters' and the player's desire to find Eden every time you turn on the game! (And it plays in the game proper when you solve the puzzle that opens the ruins on Rosa, and probably when you fly through the warp gate and actually reach Eden, as well.) That's super cool!

 

[Cadenza]

After a month-and-a-half and a little under 65 hours of playtime, I've finally finished Rogue Galaxy!

For better or worse, the plot goes deeply, wildly off the rails once you actually reach Eden/Mariglenn. There's this thing in the game I haven't mentioned before called Rune, which is essentially a harmful magical substance that turns living creatures into horrible monsters. I assumed it was your standard "this is the in-universe excuse for why you fight giant bees and volcanoes with legs" things that video games do, because it doesn't come up all that often in the plot... until you reach Eden where it suddenly becomes vitally important. See, the reason that Eden disappeared from known space is because the rulers of the planet sealed Mariglenn in an alternate dimension (which has the side effect of stopping the flow of time on the planet, somehow) to keep a horrible cosmic being called Mother, the source of all Rune in the galaxy, from eating every planet in the galaxy and eventually the universe. The whole quest for Eden was created by the rulers of Mariglenn to ensure that only a group of people strong enough to defeat Mother could find their planet in the first place, because opening the gate/wormhole to Eden has had the unfortunate side effect of giving Mother a way to reenter the galaxy after she destroys/eats Mariglenn. The problem is that Mother's Rune energy is so powerful that conventional weapons don't harm her; the only way to get around this is to forge a sword out of a previously-up-to-this-point completely unmentioned substance called Drigellum, which is essentially the strong emotions of your party given physical form. Yes, this is a very roundabout way of saying that you have to defeat the final boss with the power of friendship.

So you go extract the Drigellums from your party (and get some last bits of character development in the process), forge the sword, and trudge through Mother's lair, which is rather disappointingly just a really big cave with some magma in it, and then you fight Mother herself in a two-part boss battle that ends with Jaster stabbing her in the face, which causes her to partially break into pieces and then fall into the magma and melt.

But we're not done yet!

mostly i remember seeing some video on g4 or something of fighting a huge boss while the main character was doing like flip jumps with a 20 foot sword or something like that? this is such a weird and faint memory by now i'm not even sure how real it is, but it seemed like a pretty decent and out-of-the-ordinary rpg at the time.

So it turns out that this actually happens! After you defeat Mother, the heads of Daytron (remember them?) shows up because I guess they tailed the party to Eden, and they start trying to harvest all the Rune energy in the area. This is a bad idea, because it turns out Rune is partially sentient, and it absorbs Daytron's ship, which transforms it into a huge horrible Demon Battleship (the game calls it that, even). Your party has to split up and destroy different parts of the ship individually, and this culminates in Jaster, who is now in full control of the Star King's powers, transforming the collected prayers of the people of Mariglenn into an impossibly huge energy sword to fight the Battleship head on. It's very dumb and also pretty rad simultaneously. After the battle, the party barely escapes the collapsing lair, Kisala becomes the new queen of Mariglenn, and the party goes its separate ways as the credits roll.

In the end, this game's biggest strength and biggest weakness is that it's a capital-B Big game. There are five planets to explore throughout the game (six if you're playing the U.S. version, which adds an entirely new optional planet not present in the original Japanese release), all of which are lovingly detailed and you get to explore with barely any load times at all. The dungeons are huge, each one taking at minimum two hours to fully explore. There are hundreds of weapons that you can fuse together in thousands of different combinations, and most of your inventory will be taken up by crafting materials that are also used to fill out this game's License Board equivalent. There are several different, entirely optional sidequests to pursue throughout the game: there are quarries to hunt down, monster quotas to meet, crafting recipes, insect-raising, rare items to find which do absolutely nothing besides serve as decorations in the pirate ship captain's room, and so on. There's even a post-game optional dungeon that has an even longer, more difficult version after you complete it once (and I have absolutely no desire to even look at it for the foreseeable future).

At the same time, all of this stuff kind of comes at the expense of the plot and characters. With few exceptions, none of your party members get much development after their introductory chapters, and the story goes from being underdeveloped to over-explained in the space of a few hours, which is impressive in its own way but also not great. Characters are introduced and then disappear from the story entirely after their spotlight in the plot is over with. I'm not entirely sure what a solution to this might look like either, because spending more time developing the overarching story or your party would make this game even longer than it already is. I barely even touched half the optional content in this game and I still spent nearly 65 hours to complete it!

Still, I guess if my biggest complaint about this game is that there's too much of it, it must be doing something right. I do like this game a lot! But I suspect that I would love it if I had first played it in high school, when I would have been more willing to overlook its flaws. And the sheer length will probably keep me from revisiting it anytime soon. But I do think overall that Rogue Galaxy is a good game, and it's a shame that it apparently didn't meet Sony's expectations just because it didn't sell a million units.

If nothing else, it has one of the best title screens on the PS2: