What Star Ocean could have been.

And why I’m glad it isn’t. 

So it turns out Albert Odyssey isn’t fully translated. Big bummer; I was enjoying that one. But I’m crafty and able to switch things on the fly. There are two other series I wasn’t planning on touching during this deep dive into Enix’s forgotten back catalogue, though. What’s this Cyber Knight game? 

Cyber Knight is a space exploration game. It’s somewhat open world, but there’s a clear order of operations that you’ll need to perform to reach the end of the game. A part of me wants to think of it as Metal Max in space, but the games are radically different in so many ways. It’s just the lack of hand holding, need to explore, and excessive menus that connect the two. Cyber Knight also isn’t particularly good. 

The story starts off with the crew of the SS Swordfish, a spaceship in the year ~2400, blowing up a plot of land in space. Why did we blow it up? The universe will never know! After turning Rennes le Chateau into interstellar shrapnel, the crew prepares for o warp home. Before they can, they’re suddenly attacked by a squad of pirates. The captain tells his crew to ignore them, but that’s quickly proven to be the stupidest decision ever made in space. The Swordfish is forced to make an emergency jump, which could take the ship to a random location in the galaxy. Fortunately, it’s to a peaceful planet. Unfortunately, the captain died, the ship is broken, and only twenty four crew members remain alive. But we only get to meet five of them! Good news, Commander! You’re the captain now! Get us home. 

The crew learns that the humans on this planet are actually from Earth as well. Their ancestors also had to make an emergency jump, wound up here, and have lived here ever since. In fact, the ship they used is still around. We explore it and find a replacement part for the Swordfish. This part allows us to warp between planets and even solar systems. Slowly. But more on that in a moment. The goal now is to return to Earth. We’ll have to traverse the galaxy, upgrade our ship along the way, and settle a group (or two) of rowdy robots that are an existential threat to the entire universe. And that’s god who told us that, not some random dude with a Russian accent. 

And that traversal is where I began to hate this game. Doing anything in Cyber Knight is slower than it needs to be. In order to get anywhere, you need to long jump between systems. The planet you arrive at first is random, and there are a lot of planets out there. Only twenty one of them are actually relevant, but every system has between four to six planets. None of them are named, even if you’ve found life on it, so you’ll constantly be flipping between planets trying to find the important one. And there’s an annoyingly long visual sequence that hurts your eyes for every jump. And, for most of the game, you can only jump one system at a time. It’s not until much later that you can leap across the entire galaxy. It’s just so tedious. 

And even when you land on the correct planet, there are too many menus to leave the ship and explore. Back out of the leave planet option, back out of the bridge, go to the hangar, select depart. It sounds quick enough when you read it, but in practice (and due to frequency), it’s just more drag. 

Exploring is inoffensive at least. You pick two of the five other crew members to accompany you out, and all three of you pilot three of the five modules, which are giant robots. These robots are surprisingly customizable. Each module gets a varying degree of weapons, secret special optional weapons that I kept forgetting to use, and four different defensive aura fields. Weapons each have one of five damage types, and each module specializes in something different (but usually multiple). You can also equip four to five different weapons, so there’s always a way to have all of your tools. My team was Kiri and Vynd. Kiri has high attack stats, and Vynd has the best robot repair skill, which is needed on a long dungeon. Your medic skill is sufficient enough to keep the actual healer at home. They used the Rex, Winner, and Saurus, respectively. Not that it matters much, as all the characters are pretty interchangeable and don’t matter to the story. The three non soldiers each get a scene of relevancy, at least. 

…But even then, there’s something annoying about combat. Firstly, it’s also slow. It’s a small tactical grid like Live a Live, but the basic attack animations are ugly and slow. Maybe if there were fewer enemies or they weren’t as tanky, it would be fine? Hell, I’d settle for a reliable way to know if they were immune to my damage types. Which brings me to my second point of contention. Harming mobs felt random. Sometimes a beam would do wonders, other times it would hit for pittance, even if they weren’t blocking. Meanwhile, bosses always hit like a dump truck going 100, but they’re also stupidly easy to trick. Just stand close and punch them. They’ll always defend and never unleash their super attack. In fact, punching things is the easiest way to kill most mobs. They don’t like being punched and will usually defend, so you’ll never take damage while whittling away their HP, if not outright destroying them. It’s just the same tactic for sixteen (in game) hours. That was point three, and here’s a fourth point. With the abundance of enemies, you’ll be spending a lot of time in combat, which isn’t super fun, and it adds to the slowness of the game. And I hear the random encounter rate is through the roof. I played an easy type mod that drastically lowered it (and boosted exp, I believe), and I’d suggest you do too. This game isn’t good enough for that nonsense. There are even fixed battles at choke points! 

But it does do one thing that’s hella rad. Whenever you defeat a mechanical enemy, which is most of them, they have a chance of dropping their parts. Taking these to the lab on the Swordfish allows the crew to study them and learn new things. These are always in the form of new weapons or boosts to accuracy. I’ve read this is how you gain more HP for the modules, but I got unlucky and only found one of those. +5 HP from the start of the game is weird. They’re not particularly rare; I just didn’t want to fight. I never figured out what the human stats meant, so whatever. 

Visually, the game is hideous. Every dungeon uses pallet swapped tiles or the same mechanical black. 

Music is kinda catchy, but only kinda. But there isn’t much of it. A YouTube video has it just over thirty minutes. But it fits the setting well enough. 

On the positive side, the galaxy is connected well, and the writing has its moments. I liked that the best weapon is optional. 

There’s not a whole lot to discuss past the combat, exploration, and module customization, though. Bland characters, villains, NPCs, graphics, sound, gameplay… It’s just so… 20/50. 

And yet, I kinda liked the game. Maybe I’m just embracing the fact that the reason America didn’t get all of these games is because most of them suck, and I’m allowing myself to wallow in that suck. I’m embracing the suck. I am the suck! Maybe it’s just because it’s such a unique game that’s trying something different. Did it work? No. But with some tweaking, maybe it could. It’s similar to Metal Max and Shadowrun in that vein. Not very good, but an interesting play if you’re looking for something radically different from the norm. Cyber Knight got a sequel, and a part of me wants to try it out. Maybe once my main list is finished, I’ll do it. But I need a break from all this. I need something newer, something from 2005.