As the game goes on, the incredible depth of systems just grows and grows. Honestly, I was astonished at how much content there is on this one PS2 disk. Not just following the main story or exploring the entire new world that was added for the US release (for comparison, the main story revolves around about a half-dozen world or so world-sized objects), but in tracking down monsters in order to meet a bounty-hunting quota, in exploring to find every single recipe for the entire manufacturing facility you eventually receive (which, itself, is a small but fun puzzle game with the goal of assembling amazing new gear), and in catching and raising teams of the insect-like "Insectrons" for the Insectron tournaments, essentially a Pokemon style game hidden throughout the rest of the game. There are honestly enough things to discover and fight through here that it boggles me that they added so much material for the US release.


But as the depth of systems grows, the shallowness of the characters and backstory becomes clearer. Just on Rosa, you're introduced to "beasts" as the monsters you'll fight, and to a war that deadlocks the entire galaxy into two sides, but you'll never receive an interesting explanation about the war or about beasts themselves. Why are there beasts everywhere? What sort of empire is Longardia? These would be easy questions to brush aside if the characters were particularly endearing, but like someone sleepwalking through an action movie role, they aren't. There aren't any logical gaps, but each of the eight characters are so colorful and weird that they don't work as a group or as a cohesive story, and almost none of their individual stories reach beyond the standards of the genres that inspired them. Story is delivered through forced exposition, beautiful exposition visually, but a stilted way to engage the player regardless. One or two of the character's stories will certainly reach out to any given player's heartstrings; I'm a sucker for noir, so Deego's story of love and friendship gone awry in the cold light of the world really entertained me. But it wasn't done any better than the rest; I just like noir. Each of the character's stories are just thrown at you in the hope that one or two will stick, and that's not enough to feel engaged in a game that's asking for 60 or 80 hours to really get into it.


I salute you, Level-5: your new game has ruined my life as well as any MMO ever has, but like an MMO, I wish that Rogue Galaxy's story and characters were more engrossing. Rogue Galaxy's greatest triumph, the brightest gleam in its eye, is that at sixty hours of play I've got another sixty I could easily pour in. After sixty hours of grueling, fast-paced Japanese RPG action, I have beaten the game's main story, but that's become as irrelevant to me as reaching the level cap in a massively-multiplayer online game. Now that I have that whole "beating the game" part out of the way, I want to get back to becoming the top ranked bounty hunter. Of course, if I'm going to go back a few worlds I could stop and see if I can catch some better Insectrons; and if I'm going to lay out traps I might as well go to the factory and see if I can figure out how to build a better bug trap. And I should probably go to the capital, since travel is pretty much instant, and see if that corporate icon MIO thinks I've gotten enough done to earn a prize.