Finally! You Can Actually Use All Your Party Members in Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness

One thing has always bothered me about RPGs: idle party members. You can spend twenty hours gathering all of the party members available in an RPG—be it Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, or The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim—and you're stuck with bringing along just a few of them into battle. What the hell are the rest of them doing? Sleeping? Cribbage? Sipping afternoon tea?

So it was surprising to find that the upcoming Star Ocean title, subtitled Integrity and Faithlessness, will feature a combat system that eventually includes all six standard party members fighting at the same time. As Square Enix producer Syuichi Kobayasha stated in an interview with me at a private appointment, it was tricky for developer tri-Ace to implement a system that could handle having six characters on the battlefield at once, but the result has been a success.

Indeed, having six characters around might sound hectic, and it is at first, but you can change between any of the characters on the fly while the remaining characters are controlled by AI that can be transformed and nudged by assigning four out of about 100 unlockable “roles” to them. It essentially works as a shortform version of the Gambit system from Final Fantasy XII, with roles providing the AI general instructions on how to act as well as giving passive bonuses.

Playing the English version (the Japanese version is already available), I experienced the opening hour of the game in the rocky island Sthal which introduces the blue-haired protagonist Fidel and pink-haired healer Miki, before jumping ahead about ten chapters later with the rest of team on a spaceship carrying mutant monsters in glass tubes. Joining Fidel and Miki are the black mage Fiore, the defender Victor, the brawler Anne, and the ranger Emmerson—a well-rounded group to say the least. Flipping between characters will be important in taking advantage of each character's strengths

By using SP earned from battle and resource gathering, you can unlock new character abilities and new roles that aid in bolstering each of your party's archetypes. And since you can only assign one role to any one character, you will need to define each character further. By the midgame, you can give attackers extra stun chance, tanks extra health and a better ability to generate threat, and mages higher MP and intelligence.

The downside, though, is that as flexible as it is to assign whatever roles you want to a character, it seems that pairing roles with the typical archetypes seem to be favored more than going outside of the box. We'll need to see whether this is the case in our review when we'll have far more time to experience the game's character progression.

Another important reason why all six characters will be available in battle is because of the game's commitment to seamlessness. There are very few cutscenes in the game, in favor of dialogue between characters that take place within the environment. Having a limited number of party members in battle wouldn't make sense if all of them have something to contribute to the story. If Integrity and Faithlessness is a successful revival of the series, let's hope that other RPGs can incorporate this all-inclusive narrative design.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness arrives exclusively on PS4 on June 28, 2016. It comes with both a Standard Edition at $59.99 and a Collector's Edition at $109.99 that's bundled with an 80-page art book and a 16-track music sampler from composer Motoi Sakuraba of Dark Souls fame.