This is a bold move for a series that has for the past 20 years done a better job than most RPGs in building an audience around a consistent game design, one of real-time battles (there's no turn-based tomfoolery here), kawaii characters, and outlandish cut scenes. I'm told that Star Ocean 5 can be completed in roughly 30 hours, increasing to 50 with the included side missions. Because of that we deliberately made the pacing a lot faster than Star Ocean has seen in the past and that can make the game seem shorter, but maybe that is not what some of the core fans wanted.'

'The audience for games these days is made up with a lot of people that don't have that kind of time to spend with a single game,' Kobayashi explains, 'and they are put off by a game that asks them to put in 100 hours to get to the end and see everything. Star Ocean 5 is on a different path, one where even RPG newcomers can give it a try-and Kobayashi, visiting London on his first trip outside of his native Japan, knows just how to make it happen. But for Shuichi Kobayashi, producer of the upcoming Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (known simply as Star Ocean 5), wildly sprawling narratives and content for content's sake just won't cut it any more. Without digging into optional content, Star Ocean can easily take 100 hours to complete, while its many cut scenes-sometimes as much as 10 hours in a single game-are as confusing as they are long.

To outsiders, the Star Ocean series can be impenetrable, even downright adverse.

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