This is likely the most mixed I've ever been on an RPG in my life. This review will largely be disorganized garble since I have a lot to say, but here goes.
Starting with the positives, I thought the story was pretty good? Funnily enough, I think people overreact heavily to the twist of the game, and I still don't really understand how it could possibly contradict the events of the other Star Oceans (Unless proper Gods come into play in future games.). I don't think the twist diminishes the previous games in any sense of the word either, because the story makes it INCREDIBLY evident that the characters in Star Ocean's world are completely sentient without any compromise to that idea. Hell, I think Flad being the one to explain the Eternal Sphere made me enjoy the twist more just because of how much a fucking weirdo he was. With that all said, much of the ending is very incomprehensible, when it basically just boils down to "The Eternal Sphere is now legitimately its own universe now."
I found myself enjoying the characters quite a bit as well, with 2 core exceptions, and not being big on those characters does hurt the game a lot due to their importance. Star Ocean's track record with male protagonists have been very half and half for me so far. You're either Roddick and you're the most generic character I've ever seen, or you're Claude C. Kenny who I've grown to respect as a character a fair bit over time. Fayt lies somewhere in the middle. I don't think he's generic like Roddick, but he never quite gained his footing in the way I felt that Claude did. I don't dislike Fayt, but he really didn't do it for me as a protag. Meanwhile, Sophia as a female lead just kind of annoys me? She felt very absent of character, and it felt like the very much substituted character importance for character growth.
Everyone else I really did like though. Cliff basically carried the story for me all the way until Albel joins. Maria is cool. I get the appeal of Nel even though I'm not as big on her as other people are. Mirage is cool, but should've joined the party earlier. Peppita is wonderful. I expected myself to DESPISE Roger, but he ended up one of my favorites. Adray is a psy-op of a party member and you can't tell me other wise, but I love him for that.
This is probably the best Star Ocean OST I've heard so far. Star Ocean 2 still has my favorite tracks in the series, but as far as consistently good songs go, this one has a definitive edge.
And now we get to the negatives, and hoooooo boy. I'm gonna be frank, the battle system was too much for me. Lategame enemies scale too quickly. Party member levels don't scale at ALL. Party AI is just blatantly bad unless your name is Roger for some reason?????? Boss fights were painfully easy until the difficulty spike right at the end of disc 1. Normal encounters were often harder than the actual bosses in a very not fun way. It got to the point where I legitimately had to use an EXP boost cheat to make the lategame more fun.
In regards to cheating, I don't know what madman thought the creation system in the game was even adjacent to a good idea, but I hope that they learned their lesson, because it's baaaaaaaad. It should not cost more to forge an item than to buy it in any rpg with a crafting system. Cooking becomes worthless as a result, because the whole point of cooking in previous games was to be able to stock up on a ton of healing items in a cost efficient manner. It was to make dungeon exploration more fun and allow for the harder encounters to exist, as there becomes little punishment for struggling in a random encounter. I cheated max creation stats onto Fayt and disabled item costs for this reason, because this mechanic is so unfun, that I just said screw it, and chose to bypass what I felt was the least fun part of the entire game.
That long rant over, aside from my issues with getting turned around and feeling like the game is pretty terrible with directions (something I think a lot of PS2 and PS1 era RPGs have issue with), that's really the gist of my problems with the game. It unfortunately means I have it rated lowest out of the Star Ocean games, but I do still like the game. Its characters, story and music do a lot of heavy lifting for it, and sometimes the gameplay can be fun when you do actually figure it out. I can definitely understand people who love this game to death and people who despise it as well. Ultimately, I'm somewhere in the middle, leaning towards liking, obviously. It did burn me out though, so I doubt I'll be touching the post-game of this one.