Thoughts on Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness

Character Design

The character design is perhaps the simplest, most obvious inconsistency. The protagonist, Fidel Camuze, was clearly designed with the colour blue in mind: his hair is blue, his eyes are blue, his really cool jacket is blue, the soles of his boots are also inexplicably blue. This blue fascination even extends as far as making the first non-Fidel character seen red, just to emphasise the contrast between the two. Some important, unanswered questions are raised from these design choices: how exactly does this technologically underdeveloped planet manufacture blue dye, and what possible reason could there be for dyeing the bottom of combat boots blue?

On its own, Fidel’s visual design is largely problem free. But when contrasted with that of Fiore Brunelli, the team’s resident ‘sexy witch’, things start to become strange. Fiore’s design is singlehandedly the most problematic; her outfit is perhaps best described as gothic-lolita-jester-themed stripper witch, but even that doesn’t communicate the ridiculousness of her skin-tight bodysuit with cut-outs showing off skin—including most of her breasts and butt. Unnecessary sexualisation aside, Fiore’s clothing is inconsistent for a number of reasons. First and foremost, her research institute appears to already have a uniform, which is sexy enough itself—allusions to the fact that researchers are able to wear whatever they want do not explain why she is the only person to deviate from the norm. No explanation is given for the presence of her functionless ‘skirt’, the devil tail, or the devil wings; ‘because I want to’ starts to fall down when you consider how blatantly Fiore’s design struts into tropes about ineffective female combat armour. Claims about Fiore needing to have pseudo-tattoos visible in order to use her magic more effectively are also unsubstantiated: fellow female mage Miki Sauvester has no visible markings, and even so, markings on the inner thigh do not require visible breasts and buttocks. Seriously. Her outfit shares more in common with the enemy Succubus—literally a sex demon—outside of the research institute than it does with anybody who works there, or indeed any other character in the game.

Fiore is easily the most nude character in the game, but there several additional factors which exacerbate this. Remember Fidel and his cool, eccentrically blue outfit? Let’s talk about what it doesn’t cover: his face, neck, and two-thirds of each finger. What about Victor Oakville? His only visible flesh is face and neck; the rest is covered in heavy combat armour. And Emmerson T. Kenny? Face and some hands. All of the men are dressed like warriors, whereas the other women, though slightly more reasonably than Fiore, each wear tiny skirts that show a significant amount of leg—and underwear, if the camera moves in the right ways.

I’m not a prude—designing sexy characters is fine. But the character design has to be grounded and consistent. Fidel and Victor both dress like swordsmen; why is Fiore dressed like she is attending a sexy Hallowe’en party? Emmerson dresses in maximum coverage to assist in hiding his identity as an off-worlder; why would his partner, Anne Patriceani, not do the same?

Premise and Plot

Kid me was captivated by videogame narratives; I was really excited by what could be done in an interactive, audio-visual format that could not be achieved by traditional literature. But as I learned more about both writing and videogames, the stark differences between the two grew—and it became painfully clear when basic creative writing fundamentals seemed to be overlooked or discarded in favour of simple game design techniques.

One area of interest for me is the overlap between player and protagonist in videogames. Even when we play as distinct characters, there is a tendency to describe the actions of these characters in the first-person—unsurprising, given the fact that it is our hand that guides them across the screen. Navigating this space can be difficult for game designers: accounting for the player and protagonist as distinct entities as well as a symbiotically linked singular entity can be hard.

Star Ocean manages to show off what happens when you lean too far to either end of the spectrum. Fidel and Miki are not from an underdeveloped planet, and so are unaware of space-age technology; when they come across a crashed space shuttle, they are oblivious as to its nature and purpose. Despite the player being fully cognisant about these things—even if they are unfamiliar with Star Ocean games—the characters proceed to inaccurately speculate for hours, until Emmerson and Anne begin to half-reveal the truth. These hours separate and sever the overlap between player and protagonist; as a player, I cannot make Fidel act as if he understands—because the character does not—and so I cease controlling ‘my avatar’ and start controlling an uninformed a character wholly separate from myself. This might seem like a ‘duh, so what?’ moment, but a lot of beneficial, under-the-surface psychology relating to player-character empathy runs straight into a roadblock at moments like this.

A quick aside: that space shuttle is never mentioned again; even once the science fiction aspects become more centralised, no mention of it is made. But that isn’t even the most unbelievable thing relevant to the shuttle; when Fidel and Miki first discover it, they literally kidnap a girl that wanders off the ship—Relia—and kill the men who were guarding her. Fortunately for Fidel and Miki, they are heroes in a trope-filled videogame, so the murder and kidnapping of a child is mitigated by the fact that they are heroes and the dead men were villains who had nefarious intentions that will only be revealed much later—well after the blatant crime has been forgotten or rationalised away.

On the flipside of the player-character connection, Fidel also knows things that the player is not made aware of. What the player sees of Fidel’s father, Daril, is not great: Daril is and has been absent, residing in the capital; he responds with anger when Fidel calls him dad; he rejects Fidel’s call for aid, largely abandoning his kid to death from foreign aggressors; he constantly challenges and undermines Fidel’s capability as a person and swordsman. Daril is a jerk—and yet when he is killed, Fidel flips out and becomes really distant. Why? In the last few minutes of the game, Fidel reveals that before his dad ditched him to go train soldiers in the capital, he was kind and supportive of young Fidel. This information would have been helpful to know at a more relevant time, when perhaps it could actively convince me to care about a character that plays a minute role and is then killed off in a shallow attempt to garner an emotional reaction.

On the subject of consistency: a whole bunch of post-battle barks and random town dialogue revolves around Daril; this all remains present tense, even after Daril dies. Cue the awkward moment when the first battle I fight after that sequence finishes has Fidel say something like, ‘Guess my skills are gaining on my father.’ That kind of thing doesn’t really help with my lack of care or concern regarding Daril’s death.

The Star Ocean series borrows a few things from Star Trek, namely the concept of the Prime Directive (or Underdeveloped Planetary Protection Pact / UP3) which forbids advanced, space-faring civilisations from mucking about with the natural development of other civilisations. This is a Big Deal™ in Star Ocean—including Integrity and Faithlessness, evidenced by Emmerson and Anne repeatedly acknowledging the UP3 before breaching it each time. In their defence, these actions are justifiable in a number of ways—breach the pact to save someone’s life who was endangered by your presence; breach the pact to stop an enemy faction gaining weapons of mass destruction. Establishing the rules and then justifiably breaking them is a great writerly technique. Unjustifiably breaking them is not.

The side quests in Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness start out innocuous: collect five blueberries. Then, because this is a videogame, they escalate. But once the typical fantasy fare gives way to science fiction, things go a little too far. Having occupants of an underdeveloped planet asking for laser oscillators and grenades is one thing; actually delivering those items must be the most severe breach of the UP3 possible and carry with it a severe penalty. But no: because this is a videogame, the consistency of the established universe can be discarded in favour of ‘logical’ progression.

There is a scene where Emmerson explains that the universe is massive, much bigger than underdeveloped planet dwellers like Fidel can quite imagine. What is really poetic about this is how hollow it rings, given the fact that this apparently irrelevant, underdeveloped planet is the centre of the universe—everything of import happens here, except for a handful of things that happen in the immediate vicinity of its space. Which, coincidentally, we never really get to see; this Star Ocean game has a suspicious lack of stars to explore.

Trope Ocean

Star Ocean typically explores fantasy settings from a science fiction foundation: a space-faring hero gets stranded on a planet with medieval-level technology as part of a grand space adventure. This, too, is very Star Trek-esque. What Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness tries to do is invert this, and thereby provide a unique twist. This is unsuccessful, largely because things never really progress past the medieval stage; all space related matters are limited to exploring one allied ship or two suspiciously dungeon-shaped enemy ships. There is no travelling to distant stars, no exploring different planets; even when the party actually travels in space, these scenes consist entirely of tech jargon and a static view of inside the bridge.

So what happens when you take a series that uses a science fiction wrapping to explore fantasy tropes and take away the science fiction? The one unique aspect of Star Ocean ends up discarded, leaving us with the same rehashed, well-worn fantasy tropes explored countless times before. Fidel uses a sword because RPG heroes must use swords; he’s a teenager, because only teenagers can save the world. Early 30s Emmerson constantly talks about how old he is; early 40s Daril is referred to as Old Man by Miki. Fidel and Miki are pseudo-adoptive siblings after Miki’s parents and Fidel’s mother die from an illness; even after the super explicit conversation about killing that familial bond so something more can happen, Fidel remains somehow oblivious to Miki’s romantic affections because he’s way more interested in swords—that’s not a euphemism.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness hits an exorbitant number of the Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés; a more realistic pursuit may be to identify what aspects of the game aren’t blatant tropes played straight.

Saving the Best for Last

Every design decision should support the goals of the game. In Dark Souls, challenge is a key factor—and sparse bonfires help to enhance this aspect. In contemporary RPGs, this is not a factor; so why is it that save points are still a concept? More troubling still—why are autosaves not standard? Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is not a particularly difficult game, but woe betide anybody who suffers a power outage, runs into an unlucky fight, or suffers any other possibility and loses hours of gameplay simply because. Let players save anywhere, anytime, and be kind and considerate enough to save for them just in case of the unfortunate and unforeseen.