The Star Ocean series has been running for a long time. Role-playing game enthusiasts should be able to get started in Star Ocean 5 without much difficulty. However, there are some aspects of Star Ocean 5 that could use some insight for experience players, or just general knowledge for the inexperienced players. We’ve taken some time to provide a few additional details that may not be apparent to new adventurers.
Attributes
Like any traditional role-playing game, the basis of Star Ocean are the attributes for each character and enemy. Knowing what the attributes mean and how best to make them work in your favor is important to performing well in combat.
HP – Your health points are fairly easy to understand. If all of your character’s health points are depleted, your character is incapacitated. Likewise, if you deplete all of an enemy’s health points, they go down as well.
MP – Mana points govern how frequently you can use battle skills and signeturgical abilities. Each of these skills and abilities drain a portion of your MP. You will need to use items and other means to replenish your MP if you wish to continue using skills and abilities.
ATK – Attack Power determines how much damage physical attacks inflict. The higher your attack power, the more dangerous a physical attack becomes. However, the higher your target’s defense, the less damage they will take from physical attacks.
INT – Intelligence governs signeturgical and magical power. Many physical attacks and skills have an intelligence modifier that increases their damage slightly based on your intelligence stat. It’s important to determine what kind of attacks your character is using and correlate that your intelligence stat.
DEF – A character’s physical defense determines how well they defend against physical attacks (governed by the ATK attribute). The higher your physical defense, the less damage you take from physical attacks.
MEN – Mental defense determines how much damage you take from signeturgical and magical attacks. The higher your mental defense, the less damage you’ll take. In addition, attacks that have damage modifiers based on intelligence will inflict lower damage if you have a higher mental defense attribute.
Difficulty
In many cases the difficulty level you set in a game determines how difficult the enemies are to defeat. In Star Ocean the difficulty level impact the basic attributes for the enemies in the game, including health, mana points, attack power and intelligence.
Earth – HP, intelligence and attack power are slightly lower than normal, while MP remains the same as the Galaxy (normal) difficulty. If you’re not looking to be overly challenged as you play through the game, you might want to think about playing on the Earth difficulty setting.
Galaxy – This is the normal difficulty with everything set to default. Star Ocean is a moderately challenging game, so if you want an easier time playing through you should opt for the Earth difficulty setting instead of Galaxy.
Universe – Once you beat the game and unlock the hard difficulty setting, the HP of enemies is increased by 50 percent, while MP, attack power and intelligence all increase by 20 percent. This is a decent step up from the Galaxy difficulty setting, but it’s not overly difficult if you handled Galaxy without any problems.
Chaos – If you have a firm grasp on how to play Star Ocean, you can attempt the Chaos difficulty. This is a significant step up from Universe and quite a bit more difficult than Galaxy. All enemies have double their normal HP, with MP, attack power and intelligence all increased by 50 percent. If you’re looking for a challenge, this is the difficulty setting for you.
Status Ailments
While attributes are important for both attack and defense, status ailments are equally important so you know what just happened to your character (or enemy) and how long it will last. Most status ailments in Star Ocean last approximately 50 seconds, however they can various based upon spell or skill power and other variables.
Curse – Instead of damage over time, curse causes MP to drain slowly over time. If you are using a character who specializes in signeturgical or magical attacks, it’s best to remove this as quickly as possible.
Fog – This ailment makes it impossible to select targets or attack from a distance. You must get closer to the target in order to attack.
Freeze – Your character moves slower and takes additional damage from attacks. This effect is automatically removed at the end of a battle.
Paralysis – When paralyzed a character cannot perform any actions. This effect should be removed by another character, or it will wear off once the battle has concluded.
Poison – This is a damage over time effect that slowly drains HP until the duration is over or the effect is cured.
Silence – When silenced all signeturgical and magical attacks are restricted. Only physical attacks can be used while under the influence of silence.
Stun – When a target is stunned they are unable to attack or perform any actions for three seconds. After this short period of time they return to a normal state.
Stay tuned to Prima Games as we offer more tips and tricks for Star Ocean 5: Integrity and Faithlessness!
