Sholva Star Ocean: The Divine Force Review

This review is for the GOG version. The Divine Force is the second Star Ocean game I’ve completed, after The Last Hope because, as a PC user, that was the one available with a port, at the time, so I played that one first. Now, you can really see the evolution in most aspects, coming from The Last Hope into Divine Force, and this is a good thing, because the latter has vast improvements in Gameplay, Graphics and, I would say, Controls. When it comes to the port itself, on my Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB GPU, with 32 GB of DDR4, the game is able to keep consistent 60 FPS (the maximum it allows) at 1440p, with all settings maxed. I can still play at 4K and stay at locked 60 most of the time, except in a few locations that are more GPU intensive (more vegetation perhaps, more special effects, etc.). The main issue with the game is that it presents obvious Camera Judder, if the framerate is not a perfect lock either at 30 or 60, anything in between, even if you have Variable Refresh Rate, will make the camera judder, and this is with a Controller, even. To make up for the 60 FPS lock, you can apply Smooth Motion if you are on a compatible RTX GPU, to make it output 120 FPS, and it will feel smoother, which is the point, but this won’t eliminate the judder if the base framerate drops below that 60 mark. That said, I found that Smooth Motion is not compatible with the Galaxy Overlay, and you have to disable it in order to use this feature, I couldn’t find a workaround and, since I do enjoy seeing an achievement popping up here and there, I didn’t use Smooth Motion in the end, but it does work if you keep that in mind, with decent results, for a locked 120 FPS experience. The included Shader Compilation process is quite lengthy but very worth it, I didn’t notice any major stutters in combat or in cutscenes, so it works quite well, in general, but you can always rerun it if you like. Going back to the game itself, it has surprised me: the Graphics are beautiful for the type of game it is, the Character Models are well made too, and lit, and their animations in Cutscenes are also quite decent, overall. The slightly uncanny valley “doll-like” appearance of some of the models in The Last Hope is gone here and the characters are pretty good looking, in my opinion, some very cool design overall. Gameplay is pretty fun, it never gets old flying around with the D.U.M.A., once you unlock the ability to boost twice in midair, and all. The Blindside mechanic makes a return and it’s way better than in The Last Hope, much more control over it and useful when fighting big crowds of enemies, for sure, very fun stuff. And also lots of fun with the varied gameplay from the various cast of playable characters, which makes switching around characters quite interesting. The game has content for some good 50 hours, maybe more if you explore a lot so, yeah, it surprised me, and I’m officially quite interested in the franchise.