Recent reviews by Brant-Flir

This game is a return to form for Star Ocean. As a long time fan who spent most of his childhood playing SO2, this game really hits the nostalgia factor: the sound effects are perfect, the music is great, and the easter eggs are immersive.

Monsters from older games are given wonderful world building, such as the scum slayers. Even the Field Guardians from SO2 are recognizable in one of the enemies. The minigame gives you brand new next-gen renderings for all of the old characters from old games (I would not be opposed to remakes of the old games with this art style).

At first, the combat hit me as too fast and too much button mashing, until I realized it plays exactly like the old SO2 battles where you would just hack away and stunlock the enemy. I was really expecting a terrible game after the last two Star Ocean titles, but I was pleasantly surprised that they really made a well put together game so far.

The new vertical exploration mechanics really surprised me with how seamlessly they fit in and how fun they are.

My only complaints thus far are the lack of conversations with inhabitants of the worlds--the only non-cutscene people you can interact with are just asking to play the mini-game. As all the talking is voiced, I would really have liked text-only interactions at the least with the townsfolk to give the world some life. This worked fine in the SO1/SO2 remakes where some conversations were voiced but the random conversations were text-based. Other than that, I love the worldbuilding, but would have liked slightly longer dictionary entries like SO3.

Thank you Tri-Ace and (Square)Enix from giving us this blast from the past. With any luck, maybe they can release the PSP remakes of SO1 and SO2 and bring SO3 to Steam as well.

TLDR; Highly recommended for the nostalgic SO2/SO3 players (8.5/10 nostalgia value). Otherwise the game is a good non-AAA title (7/10).

Stellaris went from a fantastic game with its minor faults that I could look past, until they made the 2.4 update and quite literally made the game unplayable. Thanks for bring Imperator dev cycle to Stellaris.

I would not reccomend this product. While the visuals are amazing and the era is ripe for storytelling, the only story being told here is how to not make a game. To date, the soundtrack does not play more than three songs AND if you purchased the DLC songs, they will not even play. Worse still, the developer refuses to make any comment whatsoever regarding this and will not even confirm they are working on a fix, much less aware. Worst game I have played by PDX, and it had so much potential. I wanted to like this game and played almost 200 hours in an attempt that perhaps I was missing something. In fact I was--I was missing a fun game. The game is empty, boring, and the mechanics are a step backwards.

Furthermore, the arrogance of the lead developer is the final nail in the coffin for me on this game. I purchased the game soon after release, and held off making a review while I observed what PDX was going to do. Based on the responses I have seen on their official forums and the quality of patches since (they had to release a hotfix immediately after the first patch release because the game was unplayable--its almost like they do not test this game pre-release or since).

That being said, this is not to say PDX cannot make great games. Skip Imperator: Rome, but definitely check out Stellaris and CK2. Those are great games by this developer. They can do better than Imperator: Rome.