The Star Ocean Universe

Taking a Moment

When I look out the windows of my home, one thing I can't help but notice is the scenery. You see, I currently live in the country, across the road from a farm that grows corn. Some distance behind the house is a tree farm. When I look out my window, I can see the sun shining on a warm, summer or cold, snowy day. I can look out and see when it's snowing or raining. The house I live in is old, bought by my stepdad's parents sometime in the sixties, so when the wind really gets to blowing, I can hear it. On those warm spring and summer days or in the colors of fall, I can head outside whenever I want and just soak it up. I can take a blanket out with me along with some notebooks and pens and write.

The Star Ocean games have really opened my eyes on what it is we truly have to lose, either to a rapidly changing climate or to war. I personally can't imagine what it's like to not be able to go outside when I want to, to feel the sunshine warming me up, to go swimming in one of the local lakes, to walk among the colors of fall, or to feel the clean, crisp air of a wintry day. I don't like being outside during the winter because I'm not overly fond of the cold, but it's still something I can do when the mood strikes me. The human cast members of each Star Ocean game - Edge Maverick, Reimi Saionji, and Crowe F. Almedio (The Last Hope - The Eldarians and Morphus also don't experience the same things due to controlled or harsh environments); Ronyx J. Kenny and Ilia Silvestri (Fantastic Space Odyssey/First Departure); Claude C. Kenny (Second Story/Second Evolution); and Fayt Leingod, Sophia Esteed, and Maria Traydor (Till the End of Time) - really do not have that kind of a luxury. For those from The Last Hope, Earth's atmosphere is in critical condition. People live in underground cities in order to survive. For those from the first three games, Earth's atmosphere is stabilized but controlled. Animals are vague memories. Trees grow, snow falls, but it isn't the same as what we in real life (and those fictional characters from the underdeveloped planets of Roak, Expel, Vanguard III, and Elicoor II) experience. Please note, also, that what we currently experience in our real lives isn't at all similar to what the fictional characters from Roak, Expel, Vanguard III, and Elicoor II experience. If there are any similarities, it would be to what our ancestors experienced hundreds of years ago when first coming to the Americas or before the discovery of the Americas.

I think the ones who would be the most amazed by natural weather in a natural environment would be from The Last Hope. Edge, Reimi, Crowe, Faize, and Arumat would, when they allowed themselves those brief moments, would truly stop, look around, and stare in wonderment at what they were seeing. Edge, Reimi, and Faize, for sure, would be, at first, afraid to walk on the grass because, to them, it's delicate and should be cherished. Such a fear would be overcome because they have their missions to complete, but it would also be something that they would take the opportunity to lay in and feel it against their skin.

This isn't to say the casts from the other games wouldn't take those moments to lay in the grass and go swimming because it is something I feel all of them would do. Of the human characters, the two I feel that would do it the most are, naturally, Edge and Fayt.This is mostly because I know the planets they're able to visit, and where some of the best places for them to lounge around and have a picnic, as it were, are.

It isn't lost on me that these characters live in the Eternal Sphere, the brain child of Luther Lansfeld of the four-dimensional realm. His world is just about as bleak as the majority of the playable characters for The Last Hope. For him, there is no concept of time. For Luther, he lives in a pristine, white and technologicall advanced world where nothing ever changes and that has left him bored and seeking something different, something flawed that makes it perfect. He and his team of developers create the Eternal Sphere, I think not only for money but because it gives them something to look forward to, to create, and to enjoy themselves. It makes perfect sense for me that he'd do anything to protect it (even if it means destroying or attempting to destroy it in the end).

For my fellow Star Ocean fans (and anyone who comes across this and reads it), take a moment. Take a moment and step outside. Feel the sun on your face, the cool breeze on your skin, and to soak up the colors of fall and spring. Go for a drive and find a nice spot to have a picnic. Be kind to Mother Nature because, as of right now, this is our only home in the universe, and, though the events be fictional, if we do not want them to come to fruition, we must be mindful of how we take care of ourselves, our fellow humans, and our environment. Let's not leave it for future generations to worry about.

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Some Things the Developers of Star Ocean Got Wrong

This is a nitpick on my part, and it's aimed at some of the scenery we see in the games. It isn't about the characters or the overuse of "gentically altering an individual for this reason or that". Heck, it isn't even how poor of a villain Luther is compared to the Apostle of Creation or even Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Rather, this nitpick is about some of the environments created for the underdeveloped planets.

The grass is often too short.  The grass in various places on Aeos, Roak, Vanguard III, Elicoor II, and any other underdeveloped planet, even in parts of Lemuris, is too short for the given areas where we see it.

Now, you might be thinking that I'm being a bit ridiculous about this, but think about it: In the summer, when there's the right combination of water and sunshine, grass grows. And it grows. It will continue to grow as long as someone isn't mowing the lawn either on a frequent or infrequent basis. If the seaons don't consist of constant weather change or only experience mild winters with little snow, grass can grow to be as tall as wheat without someone tending to it. There are places on Aeos where the grass should be taller than Edge, on Elicoor II that reach Fayt's waist, and so on. Everything is neatly trimmed despite not having enough human or humanoid traffic to warrant it being so, especially on Aeos and in the fields between Arias and Peterny and Peterny and the Sacred City of Aquios. (There are no signs of any kind of livestock in Till the End of Time to warrant the grass being short, either.)

If anyone knows anything about a wild, untamed wilderness is that the grass is at least half the height of an adult human. In ancient forests and in rainforests, this doesn't hold true, not when the trees are tall and their branches thick and filled with fat leaves. This makes some parts of Aeos and Elicoor II very accurate, but there are many patches of land that just look like perfectly manicured lawns. Aeos was likened, by Reimi no less, to Earth's Jurassic era. There should have been many areas with grass reaching the tallest character's chin.

Also, there's the lack of huge piles of snow in places like Airyglyph and Lemuris. Now snow is something that can fall in a somewhat neat way. It can also form a crust, so to speak, so people can walk along the surface without sinking with every step. For these places, the snow should be piled higher than what it truly is. I've only been through mountainous areas a few times in my life, in the spring and in the summer, but, in the distance, when I've looked upon those mountains, I've been able to see the snow. Wind Swallow Valley is the only place that has the right amount of snow for a cold planet. Airyglyph, between the castle city and Kirlsa, not so much.

This leads me up to another thing I feel they did wrong, something I'm sure I've mentioned before - the lack of farms. It's definitely implied that farming takes place. If it didn't, players shouldn't be able to buy things like steamed buns, apple pies, or any other restorative item and, for The Last Hope players, item creation ingredients available. Now, I know that, when one steps into the village of Triom The Last Hope, there are visible gardens. That explains how one can buy (for the short time) certain things at the shops there. It doesn't explain how the shops in Woodley come by their items for sale or in the shops on Roak or En II (or the shops in the other games, for that matter - Whipple on Vanguard III, I believe, has an area for farming, but that's it for Till the End of Time). Where are the farms? Where is the wildlife that often makes up forests and fields and deserts? Yes, we have the monsters to fight? On Aeos, where are the mammals? I've seen snakes and bugs and have heard birds on Aeos and Roak - one can even see water spouting up in the oceans in the distance on Roak - but there are many things these areas simply lack that, while minor in terms of details, could enhance the game so much more.

Please do not get me wrong on this. I realize that a lot of what's been left out has been done intentionally due to different factors - money, storage space, and the like. It's especially true for the older games where everything is saved to a memory card, but the platforms are changing. Information earned throughout the gaming is stored into the consoles themselves, but the graphics are all on a disk. I rather like seeing how realistic a different planet could be. Every time I play, no matter how many times I play, I see those wonderful graphics for these inhabitable planets, and every single time I think . . . I want to go there. I want to see those strange yet similar oceans for myself. I want to go swimming in them. I want to stand in the shade of those tall, ancient trees, to smell the strange scents of flowers not found on Earth, and to simply experience as much of everything about that planet as I can. Imagine how intense it would be if those little things - tall, untamed grass; wild herbivorous animals roaming in the meadows; huge piles of snow that are a work out to walk across; farms growing unique grains, fruits and vegetables with similar yet different kinds of livestock - were there to add to that experience?

It's only my opinion, of course.

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Ask the Star Ocean Character For January - Adray Lasbard

There is a slight change for Ask the Star Ocean Character segments. Instead of weekly, the segments will appear once a month on the final day of the month. This will give people time to submit their questions, either here or at fanfiction.net.

The next character in the que is Adray Lasbard from Till the End of Time.

As per usual, the rules are as follows:

Limit three questions per person
No profanity.
Keep it clean (no sex talk)
Be nice
Have fun

Questions need to be submitted by midnight, January 28, 2013, and they can be submitted via comments, private message, or email (luthersfayt@gmail.com or thestaroceanuniverse@gmail.com).

One final thing - please let me know if you wish to remain anonymous or have a specific user handle you'd like for me to use. I will gladly keep the question asker anonymous or use the handle s/he has specified. Otherwise, I will use the name I know you by. This is something that I will be very flexible with because this is based on fan interaction as much as it is what I come up with for it.

For those of you wondering about the Roger segment, I have a few things I want to tweak on it, add to it, and I will post it as soon as possible.

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Birthday Reminders

Birthday List - covering January to June

January 1 (Late; assigned by me) - Crowe F. Almedio
January 23 (official) - Claude C. Kenny
January 25 (assigned by me) - Ilia Silvestri
January 31 (assigned by me) - Ryoko Leingod
February 3 (official) - Faize Sheifa Beleth
February 15 (assigned by me) - Peppita Rosetti
February 16 (official) - Noel Chandler
February 29 (official - can swing to either February 28 or March 1) - Precis F. Neumann
March 2 (assigned by me) - Roger S. Huxley
March 16 (official) - Meracle Chamlotte
March 28 (official) - Reimi Saionji
April 10 (assigned by me) - Adray Lasbard
April 24 (official) - Arumat P. Thanatos
May 5 (official) - Bacchus D-79
May 7 (assigned by me) - Blair Lansfeld
May 13 (official) - Rena Lanford
June 1 (assigned by me) - Cliff Fittir
June 29 (assigned by me) - Maria Traydor
June 30 (official) - Lymle Lemuri Phi

More birthdays will be added in, and reminders will be posted.

Upcoming Holidays:

Valentine's Day - February 14
St. Patrick's Day - March 17
Easter - March 31
Earth Day - April 22
Mother's Day - May 12
Father's Day - June 16

I've added in Earth Day to the list of holidays because of the message that lies behind The Last Hope. I think it's the kind of holiday that Star Ocean fans could have a field day with so I've included it for that purpose alone.

When it comes to the holidays and the birthdays, I am looking for the following: art, stories (one-shots), and poetry. The highest rating I will accept for stories and artwork is R. No explicit material please, and proofread your work. All submissions can be emailed to me at luthersfayt@gmail.com or thestaroceanuniverse@gmail.com and must be submitted no later than midnight the previous day. All genres except for smut accepted.

For the third planet on the underdeveloped planet list, we come to Roak. This planet has been mentioned in three of the four Star Ocean game - I'm not sure if it's mentioned in Second Story/Second Evolution. It was the first underdeveloped planet to appear, to be explored by players and fans of the game. Some of its history is mentioned in Till the End of Time, and, for four, we get to explore it all over again.

I did some research at gamefaqs.com for Roak for the original Star Ocean game re-released to the PSP as First Departure, which has really sparked that desire to somehow find a way to play the game. (I used my Last Hope strategy guide for Aeos and Lemuris, and I will be using it for Roak as well.) The kinds of foods that are appearing for First Departure are almost what you'd find in any bakery or restaurant on Earth - 10 oz. steak, 16 oz. steak, apple pie (which appears in Till the End of Time along with steamed buns), batter-fried shrimp, and boiled mushrooms, as a few examples - but I know that, as with Lemuris, there aren't any visible farms on Roak, at least in The Last Hope.  

To break it down, this is what you can buy/create for food in First Departure, in addition to the aforementioned foods: agar drink, amazing tenderloin, awful cider, banana frappe, bean rice cake, beautiful ice cream, beef and egg bowl, bitter cake, bitter juice, bloody driver, boiled king crab, cabbage roll, cactus cocktail, cheese salad, chicken shish kabob, chocolate banana, Christmas turkey*, coffee** milk, cola, cold soba, collagn jelly, corn on the cob, crazy cow, cream soda, custard of life, daikon salad, delectable cheese, deluxe fruit platter, deluxe sushi, demonic durian, devil's ramen, eel soup, egg fried rice, egg soup, escargot, fabulous flan, fiery cyclops cider, fine tuna sashimi, fire in the sky, fish ball soup, fresh juice, fresh orange juice, fresh spring roll, fried egg, fruit cake, fruit parfait, fruit punch, fruit sandwich, golden natto, golden stew, golden stir-fry, and granadillia juice, just to name a few. (To see the full list, follow this link: http://www.gamefaqs.com/psp/939439-star-ocean-first-departure/faqs/56728 )

Some of that list is item creation. Some of it is what you can buy in stores or what enemies may drop in battles, according to the list I found.

As for The Last Hope, food stuffs are, of course, found dropped by enemies, in the stores, or for harvesting. In the Tatroi area, one can harvest blackberries, blue seeds, dendrobium, ebony, red seed, seasonings, white rice, and wooden sticks. Rich cheese, natural water, vinegar, uncooked pasta***, raw animal meat, raw fish, common eggs, vegetables, seasonings, Special Warishita sauce, fresh cream, blueberries, bigberries, blackberries, aquaberries, basil, fresh sage, hot chocolate, and pickled plums are found in the stores. Astral City, which is connected to Tatroi via barge, has a harvesting point in the castle itself with aquaberries, bigberries, blackberries, blueberries, and lemons. One of the shops - Whole Heart Foods - offers pumpkin extract, sweet fruit, and natto in addition to natural water, uncooked pasta, raw animal meat, raw fish, common eggs, vegetables, seasonings, Special Warishita sauce, and fresh cream. Next to Whole Heart Foods is the Happy Skip Grocer with the basic restorative items of blueberries, bigberries, blackberries, aquaberries, basil, fresh sage, and hot chocolate.

Heading into the Astral Desert doesn't bring a very high yield for harvesting - bizarre fruit, poison hemlock, seasonings, and thornberries. Around Tropp, harvesting points offer ash, blue seeds, dendrobium, ebony, fresh sage, lemon, oak, and red seeds. The Cave to the Purgatorium hides caterpillar fungus, ebony, fresh sage, magic seeds, poison hemlock, and white rice. Around the Purgatorium itself, lemons, poison hemlock, ripe berries, seasonings, thornberries, and white rice can be found. There are only two shops in Tropp, but neither offer food stuffs for sale. (There is a Roakian, though, he does sell grape juice. To trigger that particular sale, talk to an old man in Tatroi who is crazy for grape juice.)

There is much that we don't see on Roak in The Last Hope. Since it is, at this point, the last game but taking place before the first game, the fact we only wander the Astralian continent is, perhaps, done by design.

Even so, I can't help but wonder why we don't see any kind of farms on Roak. The food does have to have from somewhere and not just the fighting of monsters and harvesting points. The harvesting points don't even exist in the previous games, which I won't say don't exist for the NPCs . . . they just don't exist for the players to find and utilize.

Also, I realize that, when it comes to farming on these underdeveloped planets, I sound like a broken record - we don't see it, we don't see it, we don't see it . . . but I truly am very curious as to the variety that could be found in fruits, vegetables, and animals when it comes to planet-hopping. Bunnies were changed in appearance. Why not mix up the food stuffs a little and see what we can come up with that can be similar to what we know but at the same time exotic and new?

Naturally, as Roak remains an underdeveloped planet for a little over three centuries, the farming of food stuffs and raising of livestock are how the people survive. I don't believe or even think for a moment, though, that Roak is a farming/gathering/hunting type civilization. The civilization on Lemuris, yes, it is. If the right private action is triggered on the alternate Earth, Lymle indicates as much. However, Lemuris doesn't have some of the same advancements as Roak. The climate from one planet to the other also makes a difference in how easy it is to till the soil (cold weather causes the water in the soil to freeze, etc . . .) in certain areas. There's a lot of open space on Roak, and it wouldn't necessarily be hard for farmers and livestock breeders to keep monsters from eating the food/breaking into the barns and livestock pens.

I think in terms of produce, one would definitely find fruits and vegetables similar to that of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, tomatoes, lettuce, corn, and potatoes on Roak. There might even been wild bovines, deer, and other animals for hunting, which I feel would be done until taming the animals could be accomplished. Bunnies are "hunted" and treated like they're horses or donkeys so . . .

Anything is really possible. I'm simply wishing we had more information about the underdeveloped planets themselves so we could get those ideas.

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* - I will only buy into the notion of a Christmas turkey in a video game with non-humans so long as it's coming from item creation and a human has been involved in the process. Christmas is an Earthen holiday. Life on other planets will not have the same holidays as we do.

** - Like with the Christmas turkey, I will only buy into the premise of coffee milk if the coffee beans are somehow imported from Earth. A friend of mine pointed out to me within the last week of this entry that coffee beans can only grow if certain soil conditions are met. She brought up Anne McCaffrey's research on coffee beans. If the right conditions aren't met - soil, weather, etc . . . - coffee can't grow anywhere other than where they're grown.

*** - I'm now having a hard time buying into the notion that players can buy uncooked pasta on underdeveloped planet. The issue is that of storage and the right combination of ingredients/chemicals to keep the pasta from spoiling . . . unless the uncooked pasta is made fresh daily and sold right away. Then I can believe that premise of buying uncooked pasta on an underdeveloped planet. Yes, uncooked pasta appears in one of the shops on Aeos, but we're talking about stores built by Eldarians so . . . . to buy uncooked pasta from people who know how to preserve it so it doesn't spoil is completely understandable to me.

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Note: I have an inquiry out to Laura Bailey, the voice actress for Reimi Saoinji, to interview her for this blog. Even if the interview is a no-go (or I don't hear back in time), I will be writing about Laura and the projects where we can see and hear her voice on June 22. I will post on whether or not the interview will happen.