YMMV / Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness

• Broken Base:
  • The way cutscenes are implemented in the game. Instead of having traditional scenes for dialogue, most of the scenes consist of Fidel and the rest of the party having conversations in real time. These scenes include skit-like conversations as well as plot-important ones. Players either like the concept since it flows a little better than fading the screen to black or whatever to load a cutscene, while others thinks its a Scrappy Mechanic because it prevents people from being able to skip most of the game's dialogue.
  • Fiore's checkerboard outfit. Some like it for obvious reasons and accept it as part of her personality, while others dismiss it as it's hard to take her seriously because of it (see Narm below).
• Contested Sequel: Star Ocean fans can't seem to agree if this game is better or worse than the previous entry, but some vets suggest that it doesn't hold a candle to the second or even the third entries.
• Franchise Original Sin: A common criticism of the game is that the story is just standard JRPG fare. Thing is, the storytelling in Star Ocean has never been particularly strong; it's just that the previous installments made up for that with good gameplay. This game, however, has seen its gameplay criticized as not being very good, making the unremarkable story more noticeable this time around.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• I Knew It!: Ilia Silvestri is mentioned in the dictionary under her married name of Ilia Kenny, confirming the long-standing theory that she is Claude Kenny's mother.
• Narm:
  • Fiore's outfit (a checkerboard-like pattern that alternates between cloth and nothing) is not only weird by JRPG standards but also somewhat resembles the checkerboard used to mark missing textures in Source Engine.
  • In both the English and Japanese versions, Der-Suul's voice does not fit the guy at all. He's a bishounen in looks, but with a growler voice. That combined with limited lip movement makes it hard to take him seriously. Not to mention that this is somewhat of a common occurrence with the antagonists. Even most of the mooks have tough voices if they speak in a cutscene, despite most of them looking as young as Fidel.
  • The lack of real cutscenes hurts some of the more dramatic and serious moments of the game, especially if players are trying to swivel the camera around to get a decent angle of everyone important to the scene. Of course, some players see some charm in messing with the camera, especially if they've already seen the scene before.
• Narm Charm: The game allows players to get emotes for Fidel, which he is free to do at almost anytime, including in cutscenes. And since nearly all of the emotes cause Fidel to act hilariously out of character animation-wise (many of them are really exaggerated), some players have had some fun making Fidel act like a goofball during the game's cutscenes.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The "non-cutscenes": the game forgoes traditional cutscenes for the majority of its plot (regular cutscenes still exist, but they don't happen as often as expected), opting instead to have all the relevant characters speak in real-time while the player is (usually) free to move Fidel and the camera around (even while he's speaking) and whatnot. Because of this, there's no way to skip many of the game's cutscenes, which can turn replaying any part of the game for any reason into an exercise of patience/frustration for players.
  • The rock-paper-scissors mechanic (aka the triangle system) involving fast weak attacks, slow strong attacks, and guards for combat is seen as this, or at least poorly executed, for two reasons:
    • For one, it's supposed to allow you to assess your enemies and counter appropriately, allowing skill to overcome most battles. Unfortunately, the enemies' strong attacks don't really follow the same guidelines as the player's strong attacks. For the player, the majority of strong attacks come out slow. The enemies' strong attacks, however, usually come out as fast as their weak attacks, so unless you're already performing a weak attack before they start their strong attack, you'll end up getting hurt (and strong attacks break guards). Not to mention that, once you get a larger party, it'll be hard to assess enemies with all the attacks and particle effects flying around. Because of this, most of the time it's better to just chain multiple attacks together to keep the enemy from acting too often, instead of playing by the triangle system.
    • Two, playing by the triangle system is the best (and only) way to raise your Reverse Rush gauge to higher levels, a gauge that lowers anytime the enemy successfully counters your attacks, and the decreases get worse the higher you've built the gauge. And by "playing by the system", we mean that you have to be successful at every part of the system to raise it beyond 3 and 4 bars. This means using weak to beat strong, using strong to beat guard, and using guard/counter to beat weak. The first and last can be done consistently, but the problem with enemy strong attacks mentioned above makes it harder to maintain the gauge as you fight tougher enemies throughout the game. Which also means that it's tougher to get the bonuses that come from using the gauge as you progress through the game.
• That One Boss:
  • The Cryptic Research Facility boss fight involves keeping Anne safe while fighting off a Robo Gunner and two Sentinels, and if she falls, you lose and have to reload to try again. It comes early enough that it's possible for players to be woefully unprepared and/or underleveled for the battle, either being unable to keep the party alive from the bosses' attacks, or failing to keep Anne (who isn't fighting during this battle) safe, as the bosses will almost always try to take her out first. It's generally considered the fight that teaches negligent players the value of using and synchronizing party roles.
  • If you're unprepared, the second fight with Der-Suul can be this due to his love of spamming a powerful AOE attack called Spicule and tendency to target Miki (your main healer), along with constantly respawning mooks to divide your attention.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: In addition to the game environments looking pretty slick, the fact that the game is able to have fast-paced combat with as many characters fighting at the same time as it does us a sight to behold.

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