by Temujin

Rogue Galaxy is an rpg brought to us by the same clever chaps who produced the excellent Dragon Quest VIII. Naturally, my hopes were quite high. At the time of reviewing I'm about 93.24% through it.

The setting is rather similar to FFXII, in that its futuristic, yet people still seem to prefer spears and swords to machinegun lasers. There's also a big, nasty war raging.

The protagonist is a chap called Jaster Rogue, who falls in, partly by accident and partly by lying, with a gang of space pirates who mistake him for a bounty hunter they want to recruit.

The rest of the game involves them flying about the galaxy, visiting a variety of worlds and kicking the crap out of many people before falling into a less than original save the universe scenario. Unusually for an rpg, almost all places (including towns) are prone to random battles and shops all sell different things.

Items are extremely important in this game, for a number of big sexy reasons. Firstly, although characters get a range of generally unique abilities, they cannot heal in the traditional way (ie casting cure or suchlike). Therefore you need healing items, especially as enemies can do large amounts of damage. Secondly, items are required to fill out the revelation chart (like FFXII's licence board but specific to each character) to gain abilities. Thirdly, items are necessary for one of the mammoth sidequests.

The sidequests are massive. Each of them. There's Toady, the, er, toad, who eats weapons, combining them into better equipment, which is cool and easy. However, insectron and the factory are more complicated. Insectron is a kind of basic chess with five insectors you have to catch from around your travels. There are various levels of league and it's pretty in-depth. Lastly there's the factory. Yes, you get to own a factory about 1/4 or 1/3 into the game. You gain blueprints by talking to people and have to combine items through the proper production process to design new items (such as weapons and shields) which you can then buy from certain shops.

The game itself is a very well-designed, with reasonable voice-acting, though not up to DQVIII's standard (and sadly not all, or any even, British voice actors). However, there are a number of flaws.

The battle system is real time button mashing, basically. I have no problems with this necessarily, I love God of War, but it's tedious when the enemies are tough and a pushover when they're easy. Plus, to heal anyone you have to open the menu and use healing items, you can't ever use magic, which feels really weird.

Most of the characters are superfluous. Not quite as bad as FFXII's "what the fuck are you doing in my game Penelo?" level of superfluous, but still surplus to requirements. FFXII has the excuse that removing all the annoying/unnecessary characters would leave four or less playables in the game, but Rogue Galaxy has 9, of which only 3 are integral to the story.

The story begins in an interesting fashion, but soon becomes a case of stereotype after stereotype. Ooh, a mysterious vanished planet with untold treasures! Argh, we have to defeat the ultimate evil! Oh noes, parents are dying! It's not a bad story, I've just heard most of it before.

Least but not least, the dungeons are huge. Just about all of them are enormous. I don't mind a big dungeon necessarily, but it'd be nice to have one that wasn't colossal.

I'd love to give Rogue Galaxy a great score. At the heart of it is a cunning idea, with plenty of scope for the mammoth sidequests and exploring places, but it's let down by a subpar battle system and reheated storyline.

7/10, I think. If you want an rpg, you should still buy Phantasy Star IV (legendary old school masterclass in storytelling available on SEGA mega drive collection) or Shadow Hearts/Shadow Hearts Covenant.