The first part of this review of the plot of Star Ocean 4 covered general issues with the story and the characters and their story compatibility with the plot itself.
This post will cover the plot in more detail up to the end of the Alternate Earth arc. All notices applied to the prior post still apply, including this including spoilers. This will not be a line-by-line breakdown of the plot, but more an overview and pointing out the flaws where applicable.
1. The Backstory
As a prequel to the rest of the series, Star Ocean 4 is set in SD 10, quite early on. It's set a few decades after a nearly apocalyptic World War 3, after which humanity not only realized they needed to lay down their arms lest they destroy themselves, they looked to expansion to the stars as a means of saving themselves.
That said, it's worth mentioning Star Ocean 4 is a bit inconsistent. Early games mentioned Earth was somewhat dirty but livable, and Star Ocean 3, set at the end of the known timeline, is a few hundred years after reconstructing Earth and what we did see didn't look too bad off, and given the amount of time that had elapsed, it can be reasonably inferred most of Earth had recovered to a decent looking state prior to the events of SO3 that devastated its surface and population.
Star Ocean 4 wobbles between Earth being nigh uninhabitable, to the point everyone has to live underground, while still showing scenes where humanity is above ground in some areas. Radiation is noted as a common threat, similar to the Fallout series. All further information we get on the state of Earth throughout the rest of SO4 continues to either have Earth be a total wreck or gravely scarred yet still able to support life to some degree.
Another thing that is worth noting is that this game makes heavy retcons to the early history of warp drive and space exploration as mentioned in prior titles, with events of the game providing a justification for why many of these official retcons are not on the "official" record.
Finally, there is a reason the game is subtitled "The Last Hope". A very minor hint is dropped early on with a reference to 'Seeds of Hope" at the beginning of the game, then the plot ignores this until it gets brought up A LOT later, and even then they just give a partial explanation at best and expect the player the be both a Star Ocean lore nerd and willing to accept getting a partial story while the rest is drip fed through painstaking combing of the ingame encyclopedia
More of that when we get there though.
2. Aeos Arc
This arc starts with a recap of the above delivered by Edge on the SRF-003 Calnus, who decided to nope out of the boring induction of the USTA (Universal Science and Technology Administration) given by Deputy Director Shimada, prudent given the man is an unlikable slug of a human being.
We get introduced to Edge's childhood friend Reimi, get a battle sim tutorial, meet Stephen "Lightspeed" Kenny and find out Shimada is a condescending douche to a man with a legit hero's reputation and does more than his smug, bloated superior. After some introductions to Welch Vineyard (recurring character since SO3) and Captain Grafton, not to mention a brief meet with Crowe F. Almedio, Edge's rival/surrogate older brother alongside Reimi for the latter, the Calnus and the other SRF ships launch on their maiden voyage.
It is here the first stupid story decision takes place.
We are shown what "subspace warp" looks like, and a meteor of some sort passes through the subspace field and makes it all go horribly wrong. The reason this scene is stupid is that we find out later human warp tech was reverse-engineered from alien tech yet somehow when we get said alien tech ourselves, this issue never happens, despite the fact the plot says our own warp engines are pretty much a straight up clone of said alien tech in general application.
Basically, the fact the warp drive goes horribly wrong is just a setup for cheap drama.
Despite this, we managed to make it to the planet Aeos, albeit the Calnus crash-landed. It's confirmed other SRF ships, the Balena (SRF-002), Dantedelion (SRF-004), and Eremia (SRF-005) all landed too, in varying states of being smashed up, the Calnus thus far suffered damage that should be repairable after awhile. The SRF-001 Aquila (Crowe's ship) is MIA.
After a brief recon to scout the area after recovering from the landing, Edge and the other SRF troops are attacked by a bunch of insect-like beings, and here is the next bit of stupid.
The bugs are apparently immune to what look like miniature railguns (also called coilguns), and the latter explanation given is the insects generate a field that neutralizes the electromagnetic charge that provides propulsion to the ammo of the gun. This said, Star Ocean needs this scene to establish why futuristic weapons have to be downgraded to fantasy-style weapons, so I can generally roll with this. However, IRL, railguns still fire solid ammo, the railgun is merely using electromagnetism to provide the propulsive effect for the kinetic energy.
So even if we buy that the kinetic force is being greatly reduced by the anti-electromagnetic field, I find it a bit hard to believe the ammo never hits at all, just that it was greatly decelerated, meaning it should hit, but at such low velocity as to do negligible damage, though ingame the ammo never seems to get anywhere near them at all.
But, whatever, they needed an excuse for Edge to grab a nearby metal cutting blade and go old-school sword swinger.
After this, Captain Grafton can't contact the Eremia and it's apparent that they need help, so he rings up Shimada to ask for some reasonable assistance. Shimada is a prick, as expected, but promises to contact "them", and Captain Grafton in the meantime tells Edge to do a recon to learn more from where the projected Eremia crash site is. Reimi winds up coming along, and since she's got a bow (thanks to her backstory helpfully having her learn to use one growing up), she can fight old school too.
After some exploration, they find the Eremia wreckage along with a dying crewmember. Guy admits he had to destroy the ship to kill some monster assaulting the surviving crew and croaks. An alien craft called a Sol shows up, piloted by a guy named Faize, an Eldarian, the Star Ocean version of the Vulcans.
No, seriously, they are literally lawyer-friendly Vulcans in nigh every way, this will become important later.
Faize introduces himself, and confirms he's part of the help Captain Grafton was promised, and that's when a monster shows up out of the wreckage, forcing you three into your first boss battle.
After the Armaros is dead, it leaves behind a strange rock from its yeeted corpse, which Edge reasonably picks up with field tweezers and sticks in a sealed container for later study. After this, you three have to hike back to the Calnus.
Once you get there, you find an entire base facility set up, with the Calnus in its dock. Turns out the Eldarians showed up, helped with repairs, and now this deployed forward base is the Aeos operations center for the Earth and Eldar personnel on-site.
You meet Captain Grafton and Elder Supreme Commander Gahgan, and after handing over that weird rock for study (this never happens, so this plot line goes nowhere), Edge gets handed a surprise promotion to Calnus captain since Grafton needs to help supervise at the new base. You also find out the Calnus got overhauled by the Eldarians, and you, Reimi, and Faize are the new crew of what is now Captain Edge's vessel.
Before we go on to the Lemuris arc, let's cover a few things that get introduced that are poorly explained later.
First, the Eldarian upgrades effectively amount to warp engines that are basically identical to what you had, but no freak meteor can show up and ruin your day. They still a find to screw you over during attempted warp travel once more during the story, but for different reasons later. Second, Gahgan drops a vague hint Faize has many talents and he hopes they will prove useful to you.
The writers got lazy here. The only way you'd know squat about his comments is by poring through the in-game encyclopedia, which is easy to forget even exists. This reveals Faize was heavily genetically modified and a host of other information that the main game never sees fit to cover, so many later scenes have little context. And trust me, this really makes some later scenes make little sense later.
3. Lemuris Arc
The Lemuris arc is when the game attempts to get the main plot off the ground. It is also supposed to show what happened prior to the Pangalactic Federation having their version of the Prime Directive and why they, in part, came up with it.
We start with the team landing not too far from a town called Triom, and when they get out to say hi to the locals, they are very disturbed to have the locals treat them like gods, which they issued appropriately unnerved denials.
Soon after, we meet the village elder Ghimdo and his adopted daughter Lymle. After finding out he has a disease called Bacculus (which is slowly turning him to stone, hence his being in a chair when we meet him), we also find out Lymle wants to visit a nearby place called Alanire Citadel to find a symbological cure. Faize is surprised to see symbology off his world, even the fact it's called such here as well, but Edge agrees to escort her because that's standard hero thing to do, given she looks like six year old despite being far older for reasons the game lazily crammed into the in-game encyclopedia.
Before we continue, let's break down some more stupid.
First off, Lymle had a lot of her backstory crammed into the game encyclopedia, but her summonable hellhound Cerberus (they don't mention the species explicitly, but it's obvious what he references) is implied to come from the Demon Realm of Star Ocean 1, and Lymle's growth was stunted by the same experience, a fact that is generally not relevant to the plot. What is relevant is that since day one, her and Faize are like oil and water for some inexplicable reason.
Also, you might notice the people of Lemuris and Eldar look fairly similar. There is a reason for this.
Also, Bacculus is NOT the Stone Sickness of Star Ocean 1. It's roughly similar, but where Stone Sickness at least tried to obey basic biology to some degree and the first game invested it with enough of a plausible science that curing it would be more a matter of technology than magic, Bacculus is nothing like it, especially since Bacculus turns people to literal stone on the outside, while Stone Sickness essentially calcified the body from the inside until the victim is forced in a comatic state after they freeze up like a statue. If anything Bacculus will turn out to be an incurable plot device pulled out of the butt of the writers to give you a reason to run around Lemuris.
In fact, the actual Stone Sickness will crop up later, but we'll get to that eventually.
Anyway, you have to go to a cliche tower-like dungeon, solve some basic puzzles, and kill off a Dragon Newt, which winds up killing the person there who could help you figure out the symbological cure. Thankfully, you are informed of a Plan B at another town, but not before the game starts a mildly cringey gag where Edge gets assumed a pervert for no good reason.
Once you arrive in the town of Woodsley, a symbologist named Lutea points you in the right direction and wants you to get a copy of the disease on what amounts to a magical photocopier (symbol stone) so a cure can be made. You also get told the route back will be obscured for some reason and you need to find some planet named a Faerie Orchid to get back to Triom. They don't really explain why, this is just to make you take a long way back apparently.
Once you get back to Triom, Ghimdo is still in pain, but he tells you that you aren't the only aliens who had a ship land. Apparently, those lizard people you assumed to be random monsters are connected. After getting what is called a Fire Ring to get past an ice floe blocking the path to it, you find a ship that is not Earth in origin.
Inside, they have you make more use of that Fire Ring and some Plastic Explosives to open blocked doors, with a hard-to-notice warning on them to back off after using the Fire Ring on their detonators before the blast takes off a chunk of party HP. You wind up fighting through a ton of lizard monsters and have to take the long way around more than once due to ice, and after exploring a huge ship (which, if you have the Treasure Sense ability, you can skip 40% of for being empty space), you find out the crew was a lizard-like species called the Cardinaon who apparently crashed and got mutated into those lizard monsters. Worse, the Cardinaon are apparently hostile aliens who intended to invade the planet they landed on.
Soon after, you reach the ship core, where a crystalline entity that is the apparent source of the lizard monsters and Bacculus is hanging. The symbol stone breaks when you try to use it, and instead, the crystal transforms into a huge monster with an angel-like name called Barachiel.
This first boss fight is a difficulty spike out of nowhere where only Edge can do anything resembling damage and fire is the only effective means of doing damage. After its defeat, the lizards across the planet turn to stone and Faize is all "well, we seem to have no more options".
Upon returning to Triom, Ghimdo and a bunch of other people are now stone statues, as the death of the crystal not only killed the lizards, it caused the Bacculus to go into overdrive before the crystal shattered. Basically, you did all that for nothing, save the consolation prize the Bacculus and lizard monsters are gone for good.
Back aboard the Calnus, Faize goes over the data for the Cardinaon and manages to locate their home world, and you prepare to find out more about them.
4. Cardinaon Mothership Arc
This arc is mostly a very long, tedious dungeon crawl, and I'll not bore the reader with too many details except to say the place has tons of cramped hallways, lots of blank, unused rooms, and suffers from being so long the player risks falling asleep.
It starts with a weird discovery. Instead of what should be the home planet of the lizard people, you instead find a giant mothership in its place, and before you can figure out why your vessel is dragged into the lizard people's mothership via tractor beam.
You all get out of the ship on an eerily quiet dock and try to find some of the crew to talk to, but they try to kill you, so you have to beat them up. As you do this, some mysterious woman in a skimpy outfit is watching from somewhere nearby. Some time later, Faize does his terminal hacking magic and discovers this giant mothership has another freaky crystal-like on Lemuris, apparently called an "Epiphanies of Guidance". With this knowledge in hand, your crew attempts to go find it.
Or that was the plan. You instead get caught, put in a holding cell, and a Cardinaon commander quizzes you for some info, confuses Edge by noting he's a descendent of the Muah (in Star Ocean, the common ancestor of modern man and many other races), and then tries to get Edge to tell some 'steel giant" who has been raising Cain to quit running around and causing trouble.
Given the lizard commander is a total lunatic who worships those crystals that jacked up Lemuris and think the knowledge it got from it makes his people gods (despite the fact it also made them feral and insane), Edge instead tells the the "steel giant" to keep breaking stuff and offing these cold-blooded madmen. The lizard commander is dumbfounded at this, plans to keep you in the holding cell until they hunt down the other intruder, at which point he'll decide your fate.
You don't have much time to mope, though, as the 'steel giant' busts in and through the walls of your cell like the Kool-Aid Man. He introduces himself as a cyborg named Bacchus D-79.
Bacchus then infodumps what will be the main plot. He's from the Morphus, a people who are watching out for threats to the universe, and the one both you and he are worried about is what his people call the Grigori. After describing them as a force of malevolent evolution, he also explains that Crowe and the SRF-001 Aquila and Bacchus ran into each other sometime before your crew showed up, and he helped Crowe escape while offering to remain behind to buy the guy some time. You also find out the Cardinaon were a bunch of barely sentient lizards just 200 years ago before the Grigori got to them, and they got turned into a feral invading army in exchange for having their natural evolution fast-forwarded by a few millennia.
In short, the Grigori are the real threat here, and while the game initially bills them as a deranged force of evolution that gives great knowledge but also great insanity along with their gifts Faustian pact style, they get another contradictory motive stapled across the first later that makes a hash of this, but more when we get to that point.
Anyway, Bacchus and your team share enemies, so you decide to team up. You eventually come across another weird crystal thing and Bacchus decides to blow it up as violently as possible. This works, but makes the Cardinaon commander show up in an incoherent rage that you caused what his people consider what made them "gods" go nova, and that's when the pieces reform around the lizard man and turn him ton another Grigori monster, this one called Sahariel.
Edge gets all emo at this point for some weird reason, despite the fact this had to be done because the Cardinaon has become feral madmen, but he doesn't have too much time to mope as the ship is going to self destruct and the lizard commander seriously wound Bacchus with a kamikaze strike. With that, your team bodily lugs the cyborg out through the hallway and attempts to escape.
This starts the typical "escape before the ship explodes" cutscene, only more like "warps to some bizarre corner of space forever", and at one point it looks like you fail. The skimpy-looking chick shows up again to bail you out, but apparently doesn't stick around long enough for you to thank her, and besides, you guys are more concerned with beating the clock. That said, the woman with little clothing notes you "aren't the red-haired man" before hauling tail.
Thankfully, you manage to get off the mothership in the Calnus just as it warps off into parts unknown.
It's then the game recommends you head for Bacchus' home, a place called EN II, where you can find out more about your next move.
This goes horribly wrong somehow, as you somehow, despite having sensors that are sharp enough to detect gravitational disturbances, run into a BLACK HOLE, of all things. As this stupid writing tries valiantly to make you believe it, Edge and company try to warp away from its event horizon before it pulls you in.
A fade-out occurs as the game enters the next plot arc, which is chock full of stupid.
5. Alternate Earth Arc
Be advised, the writing of this arc is head-to-desk agonizingly bad. So if bad writing makes you rage out, be warned, this will give you PLENTY to get mad about.
It starts with the crew waking up to find themselves on a very familiar planet. And not just that, two of them call it home.
That's right, it's EARTH.
However, despite the mass confusion why this Earth is not a radioactive nightmare of poisoned land and toxic skies, Edge and everyone save Lymle and Reimi stick with the ship and the rest do a recon.
First off, while they don't name where you are, it's not hard to guess the location, so I'll just come out and say it. It's Roswell, New Mexico.
After all, what's a game like this without leaning hard on sci-fi cliches, amirite?
Upon entering an old gas station, you find a copy of CHIME (trademark-friendly version of TIME) that is three years old. Given the magazine states the date of production was 1954, you are on a 1957 version of Earth, meaning this Earth is likely either from the actual past or a different timeline altogether. Bacchus also catches a radio broadcast with a clear reference to Sputnik, just make sure we got the year right.
First off, while this scene isn't entirely stupid, the CHIME copy has what looks like Truman on the cover, not Eisenhower. Truman left office in 1952, and this version of Earth is apparently nigh identical to the IRL version and the past of Edge's Earth. However, theories about the weirdness have to wait, as you exit the gas station to find the Calnus surrounded by what are obviously US soldiers. Just as the team is all "now what do we do", the plot drops a helpful person in your lap named Klaus Bachtein in your lap who obviously realizes you are not from this Earth and offers to explain things at his place nearby.
Edge decides to trust Klaus because Klaus basically turns his back to strangers without worrying he'll get shot for the trouble, and once you make it to Kalus' house (where you find Lymle), Klaus gives an infodump.
First off, the Calnus and Reimi are now in the custody of the US military. Also, they should now be in a base located near this world's equivalent to the Barringer Crater (which IRL is in Arizona, not New Mexico). Klaus further explains the base is a black ops place for experimenting on aliens and researching alien tech, and he's not a fan of it.
He was a former member of said base, but quit because of reasons of conscience and not liking the idea of leapfrogging his knowledge instead of figuring stuff out on his own. After a bit more rambling, he makes clear he still sticks around because he hasn't gotten his conscience clean enough yet and wants to liberate the lines that are held captive there as well because they do Mengele-level things to them that don't let him sleep at night. He also utters the classic canards about he doesn't think the people of Earth are mature enough to handle technology beyond their own natural limits, hence why after he helps you get the base captives free, he wants you to take all your alien stuff with you and haul it out ASAP.
Honestly, this is pretty cliche so far but not too bad, but the writing will get retarded fast.
He then leads you out to what looks like a telephone booth and Bacchus turns out his optic camo to hold onto your gear because you don't want to wind up defenseless later, Bacchus will be going in incognito via optic camo with your equipment so the base troops suspect nothing. Sure enough, Klaus gets their attention, a secret entrance rises out of the ground, and some obvious American GIs roughly manhandle your crew into the base while congratulating Klaus on his haul. Meanwhile, as we cut to the next scene, we still have no idea who Klaus refers to as Milla on the phone or his connection to her.
Nothing too overly bad about this scene, the uniform fatigues are reasonably accurate, but the weapons they hold are nothing like you'd expect for the 1950s, looking like a weird chimera of an SMG, light machine gun, and assault rifle.
We cut to a prison cell, and Bacchus hands us our gear after a decloak and Klaus trips all the locks off so we can escape. This rather brief dungeon has some enemy fights against the escape test subjects, all of which are cliches. Stuff like Bigfoot stand-ins, little gray aliens, and even Night of the Living Dead-esque zombies.
Note we also get a scene shortly after the locks deactivate of Klaus getting the crap beaten out of him as a traitor. He pulls out an ocarina which will be important later.
Halfway through we find Meracle, a Lesser Fellpool catgirl about to be killed by a literal chimera. After you save her and make it to the other side of the dungeon, Quelle surprise, you are surrounded by a wall of soldiers.
The soldiers are led by Milla Bachtein, who turns out to be the ex-wife of Klaus, and bizarrely, wears the uniform of a 4-star general in the 1950s. Despite being a woman, mind you.
Milla tries to win you over, even though she does admit to all the Mengele-level horrors you had to fight being her fault. She then spins a very insipid sob story about Earth having an energy crisis and how nuclear is dirty as sin and how all she wants to do is find a clean energy source to fix things.
Before we continue, let's break down how idiotic this is:
1. Earlier, we got confirmation this 1950s is more or less identical to the IRL one, complete with a SPACE RACE. If their energy crisis was that bad, they would not be spending energy on space programs.
2. All you have to go on is her word. The same word you'd be taking from someone who is obviously capable of unethical actions and cruelty so bad her husband and she divorced because her actions sickened him.
3. The IRL world did not have any serious energy concerns in the US until the Oil Crisis of the 1970s.
4. Edge should have enough working knowledge of history, as the SO verse is largely identical to ours for all the above essentials until their WW3 begins, to realize all this.
What Edge does instead of declining to provide anything and insisting on taking his ball and going home is just beyond stupid.
He falls for her story hook, line and sinker, and has an ANTIMATTER Core removed from his ship to give to her in the hopes he can change his own future, despite the fact the last arc smashed us across the face with why handing primitive civilizations tech too advanced for them was dangerous, despite the fact Milla is very unethical as a person at best, the fact she's commanding a black site devoted to alien exploitation, despite Klaus' admonitions getting involved would be suicide, and despite the fact no matter how Edge might think he's acting in good faith, even the rest of the part, albeit halfheartedly, tells him this would be a really bad idea.
Sure enough, it all goes horribly wrong. Edge's unbelievable stupidity is rewarded with being recaptured, Milla reveals she's basically mentally ill, and to the horror of your team is planning to reenact the Half-Life 1 resonance cascade incident by plugging that antimatter core into a spit and pencil generator.
Worse, it's obvious to the team all she's going to do is cause the Earth to go nova because she has no idea what she's doing, and she makes a point to tell you she doesn't care what you think. You do get Reimi back around this point, but considering you've all been locked back up and Milla plans to get everyone killed cause she's crazy means that's not much consolation. Worse, and part of this you need to find out via the in-game encyclopedia, the reason she's insane is that her two-year-old son Kevin died due to radiation poisoning while she and her husband were poking around an alien crash site, she lost her mind, they divorced, and now she's calling her jury-rigged reactor "Kevin" after said deceased son.
It's also worth noting none of the soldiers are remotely nearby because they all basically disappear so the game can let this crazy woman kill the world without restraint.
However, since this would end the game, Klaus manages to have survived being beaten up to bail you out again and while you all run for the Calnus, Klaus accepts the world is going to end and just embraces his absolutely crazy wife to be with her in death because at this point, not much else to do.
Meanwhile, aboard the Calnus, you find Edge idiotically gave Milla your ONLY exalithium crystal with the Antimatter Core, meaning the engine is dead. Thankfully, the plot drops a shameless Deus Ex Machina in your lap as Meracle was apparently carrying one on her this whole time and miraculously, it's a perfect fit for your engine. Cue the Calnus barely getting off Earth before it blows up.
We end with a brief fade-out that apparently sends us through a dimensional warp back to the regular SO universe.
And that's all for this part, I'll cover more later.
Part 3 will cover some more detail about the stupid writing in Part 2 and why it's abysmal before Part 4 will cover more of the game plot.
