Rogue Galaxy puts you in charge of initially one, but eventually eight, oddballs, grifters, and scoundrels in a futuristic space setting, one envisioned with an eye for drama and splashy effects, not a cold eye on the "science" of "science fiction." It is, as developer Level-5's president put it, a "blockbuster sci-fi game." Like a Hollywood blockbuster, Rogue Galaxy looks great and is technically stunning. It's packed utterly full of the standbys of the genre - combat, exploration, personalization, and sub-games that are too huge to be called "mini-games" - which are all executed well, but like a Hollywood blockbuster, the characters themselves seem entirely secondary to matter at hand. Mostly, you'll be concerned about that ship of scoundrels only because they represent dozens of hours of hard work leveling them.


Jaster Rogue is your main character, starting on the desert world of Rosa. As we mentioned, Rosa is a remote world which has been annexed by the Longardian Empire for its resources. The game begins as a young Jaster returns from a dangerous trip outside the safety of the city walls, trading for food rations with the suspiciously Stormtrooper-like Longardian soldiers. Before long, beasts have launched themselves into combat with him, and a truly massive one has begun assaulting the town itself. Jaster moves to valiantly, if foolishly, try to save the town. From there, the game begins. Before you've taken down that massive monster, with no help from those useless soldiers, most of what makes Rogue Galaxy so wonderfully addictive will have become shiningly clear. Unfortunately, by the time you've left Rosa mere minutes later, most of its issues will have a certain clarity as well.


Combat is handled in real-time, with everything important placed in the hands of the player. It generates a very fast, frantic combat system that is the exact opposite of Final Fantasy XII's auto-pilot system. You can swing your primary weapon - in Jaster's case, a sword - until you run out of breath, at which point a few seconds of rest or a successful block will get you back in the action. You can't do anything if you're out of breath (technically, if the blue bar above your character's name goes to zero stripes) except move and block, but your secondary weapon is also limited to a number of uses before it has to be reloaded. In Jaster's case, this is his pistol, requiring time in-between firings to reload.


Hold your primary attack for a few seconds, and it becomes charged, capable of breaking through the shields of certain tougher enemies. If an enemy is a giant, you'll have to jump to hit them in their vulnerable upper body; if an enemy is flying you can jump to engage them or just shoot them down. The system is complicated by the special abilities you unlock by putting items into each character's "Revelation Flow," but they essentially only compliment the abilities you have. Some rain damage in an area, some increase weapon damage, some increase abilities, and some do a few other things, but they never change the way you fundamentally fight. None of the character's unique ability sets ever give them the ability to heal, which is solely the purview of item use - which all characters can do, but in combat each item costs a few bars of "breath." Weak enemies will strike for a tenth of your hit points in a strike; stronger enemies a quarter or a third.