How far did you get?: One completion, did not play the ghost ship
How many hours did you put into it?: About 60
With the recent release of PS2 classics on PS4 with updated resolution and trophies, I thought now would be a good time to start my PS2 RPG project back up. Lucky for us, one of the first games released was Rogue Galaxy, one of the PS2s best RPGs.
You start Rogue Galaxy as a young male character named Jaster Rogue. Not long into the intro, you defeat a rather large monster using a sword given to you by a mysterious man. A couple of robots mistake you for being the infamous hunter Desert Wind, and invite you to join them on their pirate spaceship to plunder the galaxy for lost and hidden treasures.
As you play the game, you unlock a pretty hefty cast of playable characters, each with their own deep stories. As you get each character, you spend some time learning about them, and later in the game you even get conclusions to each of them. Though some characters are more interesting than others, I found the cast to be colorful and memorable.
The game plays in a 3D action RPG style, similar to one of the 3D Tales games, random encounters and all. The battle system seems to work best in the beginning of the game, when you are limited in abilities. As you learn to use your abilities, you start to find that a battle system that initially seemed very challenging is actually a little easy. Once Jaster learned Desert Wind Lv 2, which happened for me pretty early in the game, I was able to one shot most of the enemies until almost halfway through the game. It requires stamina to use them, but money is fairly plentiful so I had no issues affording stamina potions to keep enough of it to breeze through the enemies. This gets more complicated to do as you go through the game, though. Some enemies require you to jump to attack them, and your abilities won't work on them. Others have shields you must break first. I appreciated this as it required me to change up my strategy quite a bit.
The game has no healing spells, so items and money are a must. It also has equipment you can buy and find as you go through the game, but your two weapons are the main focus. Clothing is rare and actually changes the appearance of your characters.
The leveling system is one of my favorite parts of the game. You level as you would in most rpgs, gaining experience points and going up in level, but gaining abilities is a completely different ball game. You have to use items you find in treasure chests, enemy drops, and in stores and put them on a grid system to unlock them. Each character has this, so at times you may find yourself trying to decide which ability on which character is most important, because you may not see that rare item you just received again for a while.
There are a few mini quests to take on as you play the game, too. You can use bug catchers to catch bugs and use them in a fighting arena. There's a factory where you can build machines to make you items and weapons. There is also a hunting system where you buy bills to go after really tough enemies to get points in the galaxy hunter rankings, as well as some unique rewards.
It's not a bad looking game for it's time, either. It uses a cell shaded look, popular from games like Dark Cloud 2 and Dragon Quest 8, and I feel it suits it's purpose well. The resolution upgrade on the PS4 version isn't that noticeable, though. It's not a full remake like the Final Fantasy X version was, so it doesn't look that good, but it's still a colorful game full of lovely things to look at.
At only 15 dollars on the PSN store, Rogue Galaxy is a no brainer in my opinion. You'll get 60 hours or more out it, depending on how far you want to go post game, and with a huge world, great story, and fun battle system, you could do worse than Rogue Galaxy to scratch your RPG itch.
Score: 91/100
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