What is Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness?

The return after seven years: smaller, faster, and built so the battles never stop the story.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is the fifth main game, announced in Famitsu in April 2015 and released for PlayStation 4 in Japan on March 31, 2016 (the PlayStation 3 version, Japan only, followed a month later). The West received it on PS4 alone in June 2016. It was the series’ first numbered game in seven years, and its first under producer Shuichi Kobayashi, who took Star Ocean over from the retired Yamagishi era with the stated aim of reviving the dormant series.

The game is set in S.D. 537, deliberately slotted between The Second Story and Till the End of Time, on the underdeveloped planet Faykreed. Swordsman Fidel Camuze, his childhood friend the healer Miki Sauvester and a mysterious amnesiac girl named Relia are pulled into a first-contact conflict. Character designs are by Akiman, Akira Yasuda of Street Fighter fame, his first work for the series.

THE SEAMLESS EXPERIMENT

No transitions, anywhere

Battles where you stand

The game’s defining technical idea is the removal of the battle transition: enemies exist in the field, fights begin and end in place, and story scenes flow into combat and back without a cut. Exploration, cutscene and battle are one continuous stream.

Seven in the fight

Where earlier games fielded four, Integrity and Faithlessness puts up to seven party members in battle at once, managed through a Roles system that assigns each fighter behaviour and stat tendencies. The screen-filling melee is the game’s most remembered sight.

Private Actions, kept

The series’ signature town scenes return, tracking which party members spend time together and bending scenes and endings accordingly, the connective tissue between this lean production and the 1998 game it sits behind in the timeline.

THE RECEPTION

A lean game in a lean time

What was praised

Reviewers consistently liked the combat’s speed and the seamless structure, and the return of a full console Star Ocean at all after seven silent years.

What was not

Just as consistently, it was criticized for its short length, small world and visible budget, and it did not meet Square Enix’s sales expectations. Its producer said plainly that the plan was never to stop there: assets and engine work from this game were reused to build the mobile Anamnesis cheaply, keeping the series alive until a full sequel could follow.

The Divine Force The Last Hope

What is Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness?

THE SEAMLESS EXPERIMENT

THE RECEPTION

THE FIRST WORD