Why Star Ocean 4 Is A Terrible Game Part 4

 We will resume this part with the Roak arc, which is one massive parade of terrible writing, canon defilement, and otherwise stupid writing trying to coast off nostalgia for a much better game, albeit it did introduce a clever predestination paradox and a character who deserved a much better game to be in)

First, let's start off with the good stuff.

1. Elayne Farrence and the GOOD predestination paradox

Elayne Farrence is the distant ancestor of the SO1 hero Roddick, which I could buy. She even has sequences foreshadowing the events of SO1, which I can also buy. Even the SO4-specific stuff she foreshadows would work in a game with much better writing, and I regret she was wasted on this one.

She's a fun character who takes crap off no one, tells Edge to get over himself, had good voice acting, and overall just deserved a better game.

Of course, they had to ruin this in one of the secret unlockable endings by pairing her off with someone who by all rights should be dead just so they can come with a lame reason for why the SO1 character wields a sword that is basically a lightsaber.

No, really, that's why.

That idiocy aside, the other half of the good writing was that Meracle knows a crap ton about her via a book about her, but when she meets the IRL version of Elayne, is initially disappointed the book did not appear to match reality. As what turns out to be clever writing shows when you piece together the evidence, the book and Meracle were from a future timeline (one of the good uses of time travel in a game that otherwise made a hash of it) after Elayne provided the material for it, and Meracle winds up with her as an adoptee in one of the endings, where the events of the book become reality as a result.

This showed actually clever writing, and considering the terrible writing this game had otherwise, I regret they did not get a better game for it.

Now, let's cover the cringe.

1. The entire Roak arc is unnecessary and just done to flog SO1 nostalgia.

Before I go on, let me just get out of the way this follows up on the alternate Earth arc, and the entire reason you are exploring Roak is completely unneeded from a narrative perspective. It winds up being used to advance the plot anyway, but only because the writers were miserable hacks who hastily inserted plot-forwarding scenes into Roak at certain points in a terrible attempt to disguise how much this arc was just to flog SO1 nostalgia.

The reason this was pointless is due to what triggers the events.

After getting back to your universe, that hasty repair of your engines with the magical antimatter phlebotinium from nowhere screwed up the ship engines (the warp drive portion to be exact), and thus you need to kill the engine for awhile so it can unscramble the circuits and adjust to the new engine gear. Bacchus is the one who recommends landing on Roak to do the repairs.

First off, why do I have to land on a planet when I could just idle in space? All that needs to be worked on is the warp drive, after all. Just idle somewhere, have the impulse to do minute course corrections to keep my position steady until the warp drive unscrambles itself, then I can move onward. There is no explanation for why this is not a viable option.

Alternatively, let's say the repairs DO require idling the ship on solid ground on a planet with the engines completely off. Bacchus helpfully reveals he equipped our ship with CLOAKING TECH. Since the characters (Edge especially) are understandably fearful of another "introduce advanced tech to primitive imbeciles who will cause a disaster" incident, the ship could be parked in a remote area (which is done), cloaked until we finish repairs (which is also done), and we could just cool our heels there until we need to leave again (which we could do but the game never explains why this is not a valid option).

Instead, your team decides to go out and explore for no clearly defined reason that makes narrative sense (Bacchus too, albeit under a cloak), with the weak compromise of keeping their mouths shut about their origins. You otherwise have no reason to explore Roak than the writers demanded it be done.

And the events of the arc, minus the plot essential ones they shoved in to retroactively try to cover this up, wind up having ZERO impact on the overall story. Roak (mostly the Astral continent in truncated form really) just winds up being an excuse to do some sidequests, deal with a boss who is vaguely implied to be a Grigori but has no real connection to them otherwise, throw a ton of SO1 references at the wall one after another to prove the writers are aware of something that was written better than their hackjob efforts, and has all the extra content like the obligatory colosseum and minigames, essentially making it a scaled-down version of what we got in Fun City in SO2 and Gemity in SO3.

2. The plot essential stuff that they did include could have been done elsewhere.

The writers were clearly not total fools. They did realize Roak had a weak place in their story and so strove to shove in some plot-centric stuff to make it "relevant". The fact Roak's connection to the plot was initially none kneecaps the effort, but to be fair, since it was clearly done for SO1 nostalgia flogging in the first place, I must concede it's fair enough they didn't want to look totally lame by having to straight up admit that.

However, here is the plot-relevant stuff they added, and why it was done poorly and could and should have been done elsewhere.

A. The Muah connection first comes up in this arc. Reimi has to take over as leader since Edge is still in mope mode over the alt Earth arc and thus useless in command, at least until she winds up falling over from a disease that turns out to be 'stone sickness". Yes, the same thing from SO1.

During this arc, we find out about how Reimi and Edge got marked with Muah symbology at birth and Reimi got the mixed blessing of total disease immunity, which also made her nigh immune to radiation degeneration (which is admittedly plausible, as radiation's effects on cells would have degenerative effects much like a disease), but also got her cursed by parents whose kids died in the radiation horror world of post-WW3 while she didn't.

The problem is that this part exists to explain this badly shoehorned retro canon that defiles prior canon, but we already covered that before. Worse, this also triggers a brief part where Edge finally starts to get over himself and hunts down the cure for her condition, which the King of Astral has. This just raises more questions about how this jibes with SO1 at all since there was no mention there was a cure for this disease in SO1 until after we took the blood of the guy whose DNA was used to make the original contagion. Also, if she has was amounts to medical immortality (though not total immortality, she still does age), why wasn't her body laughing off stone sickness before it could do any damage?

If she was practically immune to nigh every conventional disease and was exposed to high radiation without mutation damage, she should be laughing off a blood-based pathogen with neurological degenerative effects too.

The answer for this is simple: SO1 plot nostalgia flogging, whether it made a mess of canon was not important.

B.  Faize becomes the villain. 

I'll be blunt, this was really shoddy writing. They obviously wanted the final boss to be Faize after turning "evil", the foreshadowing is really unsubtle, and the writing is cringe. I already explained why most of it was poorly done, so I'll just cover the Roak-specific parts and explain the idiocy.

Faize meets a cute bunny-riding nomad girl and gets a sweet cloak from her. Knows her all five minutes really. She later turns up dead thanks to some nutty cult. Faize appears to have gone totally insane from this and was trying to suppress it.

Granted, if you hunt through the in-game encyclopedia and pay attention to various scenes throughout the game prior, it's a bit more complicated than that, but the writers due to their inability to tell a story well, they basically just made it look like Faize immediately jumped off the sanity cliff due to this scene alone. 

Basically, Love makes you Evil/Crazy, as written by horrible writers.

C. Tamiel and the whole Asmodeus cult.

This whole thing was obviously crammed into the Roak arc so the writers could claim it wasn't just an SO1 nostalgia fest, but it has glaring problems that still make it pointless.

Tamiel has a very Grigori-ish name and even has one of their signature crystals embedded in his head. That said, he does nothing else to hint he is anything other than a nutbar death cult leader. His entire cult isn't a totally bad idea in theory, makes sense on a primitive planet that had been dealing with demonic invasions some crazed retards might start worshiping the invaders, but the execution is rather silly, has no greater bearing on anything, and makes it hard to tell just when Asmodeus showed up. In SO1, he explicitly stuck around his little pocket dimension and only sent his goons out to start trouble every so often, you had to go to him via a very specific portal. Somehow, this death cult wants to end run around this and yeet him right onto our reality on Roak, via means that make no logical sense aside from wearing out tired "virgin sacrifice" cliches.

How this would have worked is anyone's guess, and the writers just didn't bother trying to insert logic into it. Given the SO games usually try to give a sci-fi technobabble explanation a la Star Trek at absolute worst, this was just garbage writing all around.

What makes things even worse is that they are defeated in the Purgatorium, a place that in no way resembles its SO1 incarnation and Tamiel's defeat melts a MASSIVE HOLE into the bottom floor, which you think would still be there 300 years later. Worse, where are the beings you met in the said temple that did not want to be disturbed from SO1? How is there not a front and rear entrance to the Purgatorium? Why is the cult never heard from again after you off Tamiel?

The writers do not bother to address this because they just shoved this half-baked arc out the door to give you a reason to be on Roak other than "just because" and they did it poorly.

D. Myuria joins you on Roak.

Myuria is that woman with the abbreviated outfit who showed up on the Cardinaon vessel and somehow got off despite them never shoving her means of transport (and how she got to Roak is never clearly explained either). They have her finally join you on Roak and stick with you till the end of the game, and frankly, given the overall pointlessness of the Roak arc, they obviously included her here when she could have joined you in a far more plot-relevant location WITH Bacchus just to pad out the poor Roak arc.

E. The SO1 flogging and why it's so badly done

The SO1 nostalgia flogging shows off the following thing.

1a. Most of the locations from the Astral Continent from SO1.

1b. A younger Lias Warren and Ashlay Bernbelt (the latter is a fight in the Collesseum as a bonus boss of sorts.

1c. The King of Astral (who is depicted light-skinned here, his older self in SO1 is nigh entirely black)

1d. More Muah foreshadowing in the Purgatorium, despite the fact what they show does not match what is found in the same location in SO1.

1e. Stone Sickness (the Bacculus from Lemuris is a red herring, but even the real version breaks canon for several reasons explained above) and the cure (which should not exist in any form YET)

1f. Lots of other minor winks and nods to SO1.

I could go on, but generally, Roak is just here for reminding you that you could be playing a game that is much better while SO4 defecated all over its much better legacy.