The main character, Fayt, is on vacation with his family and his young lady friend, Sophia. The first 30 minutes of Star Ocean are spent mired in inane dialogue between the two teenage protagonists. The worst part is forcing the player to press "X" after every, single, pointless, sentence between the two. During this time there are, maybe, two dialogue choices for you to make; Where I come from, we call that a cut scene. Instead, you get to click your way through the whole thing while waiting as patiently as possible to be included in the game in some small way.

Then, suddenly, the bad guys attack and you leap into action alongside your not-quite-girlfriend. The action of Star Ocean is in real time, and you control one character while the others, theoretically, do their best to help. You'll start off with simple weak and strong attacks – one each for short and long range - and the ability to block. Sophia, the lady friend, uses mostly ranged attacks and stays out of harm's way at first.

In addition to hit points, your characters have a “fury” meter. It’s similar to energy, and when it’s full you can block some attacks. The more you move, the more fury you use. When it’s gone you’re more likely to get tagged. The meter fills up quickly, so it’s relatively easy to time your attacks and movements to avoid leaving it empty.

When a fight starts, the camera zooms out and you're left with a jumbled view of characters, enemies and an almost constant barrage of attack effects that do more to clutter the screen than create any sense of awe. Once you get used to it, though, you'll be blocking and landing moves pretty easily. If your party members get into trouble (more are added as the game progresses), they'll usually get schooled pretty quickly. There's not much hope that you'll keep everyone on their feet during the longer battles if you choose to stick with one character. You’ll need to switch characters often and pay attention to everyone. Once they go down – and they will – they’ll just slump over. The bad guys simply flicker and vanish when they're put out of their misery, so there's not much satisfaction for either side.

And even with terrible A.I. by your team, the battles aren't very difficult. Once you get used to avoiding attacks and timing your own, you'll cruise through most fights. As you progress, you'll get weapons and items, but the fighting never reaches a level that's particularly satisfying. The effects of having better skills, stats, magic (“symbology”) and equipment should be more obvious, but because the fights weren't that hard to begin with it doesn't feel any better to lay into the enemy with a new toy than it did with the old one. So there are plenty of options during a battle, they just don’t feel necessary. This feeling changes a bit when you get fairly deep into the game, but by that time it's far too late for the payoff to make much difference.

For some inexplicable reason, your enemies show up on your map before you’ve reached them. Of course, you don’t want to avoid all of them all the time, or you’d never gain any experience. But there are plenty of times when you’ll find yourself using the map to avoid any more encounters because they’re not necessary or you’re just not in any shape to fight.

The enemies you’ll avoid at your will are varied in shape, size, difficulty and tactics, which is nice. The characters, however, are all doe-eyed, spiky-haired people with necks the size of toothpicks. The backgrounds are much better than the characters, though, particularly when you're outside. The vistas and landscapes look great, with lighting and open spaces that do their best to put you in the shoes of the character. The inside spaces are less interesting, with a lot of background repetition.

Enjoyment in Star Ocean comes from the story, the ability to explore dungeons, managing fights with lots of high maintenance characters and making some of your own items with craft skills. There’s nothing broken in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, it's just unremarkable. There is plenty of story to get into and a whole party of characters to manage with plenty to do. If you're into the storytelling style – which you'll get a taste of in the first few minutes – you'll probably enjoy it. There's just nothing exceptional about any particular element of the game.