Japan didn't like it; will streamlined mechanics be enough for success in the west?
To outsiders, the Star Ocean series can be impenetrable, even downright adverse. Without digging into optional content, Star Ocean can easily take 100 hours to complete, while its many cut scenes—sometimes as much as 10 hours in a single game—are as confusing as they are long. Fans love it. But for Shuichi Kobayashi, producer of the upcoming Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (known simply as Star Ocean 5), wildly sprawling narratives and content for content's sake just won't cut it any more.
Star Ocean 5 is on a different path, one where even RPG newcomers can give it a try—and Kobayashi, visiting London on his first trip outside of his native Japan, knows just how to make it happen.

"The audience for games these days is made up with a lot of people that don't have that kind of time to spend with a single game," Kobayashi explains, "and they are put off by a game that asks them to put in 100 hours to get to the end and see everything. Because of that we deliberately made the pacing a lot faster than Star Ocean has seen in the past and that can make the game seem shorter, but maybe that is not what some of the core fans wanted."

I'm told that Star Ocean 5 can be completed in roughly 30 hours, increasing to 50 with the included side missions. This is a bold move for a series that has for the past 20 years done a better job than most RPGs in building an audience around a consistent game design, one of real-time battles (there's no turn-based tomfoolery here), kawaii characters, and outlandish cut scenes. The characters remain, but everything else has been changed. Perhaps that's why, despite some complimentary comments surrounding Star Ocean 5's visuals, Japanese critics haven't been kind.

"From the core Star Ocean fans that have been following the series for a long time, there have been mixed opinions about Star Ocean 5. We've had some very good and some very bad comments," Kobayashi says when I ask him about how the game, released at the end of March in Japan, has been received. "Because of what has been done with previous Star Ocean games maybe what a lot of long-term fans were expecting was a really long game that's going to take you many, many hours to get through. What we did this time was slightly change the focus, though."

"We really wanted to attract new players for the good of the future of the franchise."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqihD0mH1qQ

Come July 1 (or June 28 if you're in North America), Kobayashi's changes will be put the test outside of his home country. And while fans will undoubtedly have their reservations, it's hard to argue that Star Ocean 5 hasn't been changed for the better.

For starters, a reduced running time doesn't mean reduced content. Rather, it's simply much quicker to get through it all. The obtuse conversations with NPCs and the drawn-out cut scenes have been scaled back in favour of properly integrating the story into quests. It's a simple and rather obvious change, but one that ensures players are hit with as few gameplay interruptions as possible.

"We don't take control away from the player," Kobayashi says. "Previously in Star Ocean you'd have a lot of long, static cut scenes that you would have to watch, then you'd play some game, then you'd watch another cut scene. Here, though, we don't want the player to feel as though they're not in charge at any point. It's a very difficult balance to get that interactivity alongside having the kind of story we want to tell, but I think the balance we've got between the dramatic storytelling and the actual gameplay is what we aimed for from the start."

Instead of cut scenes, more emphasis is placed on world building as you explore towns, converse with inhabitants, and interact with your allies. In a typical stroll through a town, townsfolk always seem ready to indulge in what seems like small talk—and in previous games, that's exactly what it was—but now they actually provide useful information about the area, or about a quest.

Again, this might sound obvious, but then Star Ocean has always been that little bit different, making players work extremely hard for the inventible narrative pay off.

Just what does a head scratch mean anyway?

These changes have, however, caused a number of problems when it comes to localisation. The reduced number of cut scenes means that Kobayashi and his team have had to come up with other ways of conveying a character's thoughts and emotions. The answer is subtle body language and facial expressions, but this is a form of communication that, as Kobayashi found out, can change significantly between countries and cultures.

"Not all of these gestures translate very well across the world," says Kobayashi. "One that I remember is that, in Japan, it's common to communicate that is a character is confused by having them scratch the back of their head. I was very much taken by surprise when told by some of the localisation team that it doesn't necessarily have the same meaning across the whole world. So we had to think about what gesture we could use to get that across to everybody."

"That might seem like quite small a thing to pick up on in relation to localisation, but it stands out a lot for me."

Anyone who watches anime, or reads manga, will probably understand the meaning of the head scratch, and Kobayashi readily acknowledges that anime and manga continue to see a steady growth in popularity outside of Japan. But he's more concerned with the fact that "a lot of these things are not going to be 100 percent mainstream even if anime fans understand them." It's not enough for anime fans to understand Star Ocean 5. The audience goals are much larger than that.

It's debatable if Star Ocean 5 can see mainstream success outside of Japan. Despite Kobayashi's efforts, it's still too weird, too demanding to sit alongside the likes of The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4.

"The way I see it is JRPGs and Western RPGs are two separate things," counters Kobayashi. "It's not that one is better than the other, they're just different from one another. JRPGs are very much linked into Japanese manga and anime and a JRPG allows you to experience being a hero in a way that has a manga or anime style story pushing it forwards. You can follow that hero and be them in their adventures."

"By comparison, the Western RPGs often focuses on letting you take a self-defined role within a world in whichever way you want to play. They're very different ways of playing."

If Star Ocean 5 is the game that brings the JRPG back to mainstream success then it will have scaled a peak that the vast majority of its bedfellows have, often spectacularly, failed to reach. Still, the fact that changes to pacing and narrative are being tested at least shows Kobayashi, and by extension, publisher Square Enix, are trying. After all, if the latter is willing to take big risks with its flagship series Final Fantasy—FFVX is chasing a wider audience too—then there's no reason not to do the same for Star Ocean.

"Looking to the future, if we're going to take Star Ocean on another 20 years, then we absolutely have to appeal to more fans and younger fans," states Kobayashi. "That will allow us to achieve a generational changeover and prevent the series being locked into a single generation."

"In some ways we are maybe not 100 percent confident that what we make is going to be popular around the world," he continues. "More than that, though, is that if we don't make something that we think is good and we're happy with then there's no point in doing it at all. We have to believe in it first."

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is being released exclusively on PlayStation 4 on June 28 in the US and July 1 in Europe.