Rogue Galaxy is the kind of game that could last you a year if you play without a guide and want to go for 100%. There’s a ton of content, most of which is rewarding and feels worth doing, so if you go through it slowly, explore every area multiple times, and grind through the optional content, you’ll have a blast. For players on a budget, it’s hard to beat Rogue Galaxy, and if I were a kid and this were the only game I had to play for months, I’d be thrilled. But how does it hold up for a busy JRPG fan with stacks of other games calling from their backlog? Let’s take a look.
This time I’ll start with the music, because it’s phenomenal. Now most JRPGs tend to have great music, but Rogue Galaxy’s stands out among the best. There’s a theme running through the whole soundtrack that fits the sense of adventure as well as the spacey feel of the game — whoever came up with this game’s English title was spot-on, by the way.
While there’s plenty of variety, several sounds and instruments, like flutes and horns, are used across multiple tracks for a more leitmotif-ish approach rather than disparate, unique themes for each area and planet. There’s always some aspect of each song that reminds you of Rosa, the desert planet that is the home of Jaster, the protagonist. While at first this makes the galaxy feel smaller than it should, it works because the compositions are so damn good. Music cues in at the perfect times during story scenes and exploration — this is something the best developers had perfected by the PS2 era, and the sound design overall is top notch.
There’s one track I gotta highlight in particular — the title theme, Le Marie Glennecia, which stunned me from the first moment I heard it. When I turned on the game, I sat there and listened to the whole thing before pressing Start, and then I listened to it again. I’ve never heard anything quite like it, and after doing some research, it’s a rather creative track. It resembles a Gregorian chant, but with instruments, which as far as I can tell, hasn’t been done anywhere else — not quite like this, anyway. The track plays an additional 4 times throughout the game, always at key story beats, and takes on a special meaning that can only be understood if you play the game.
And oh man, I recommend playing this game. It exemplifies everything I love about the PS2 era. Budgets didn’t need to be astronomically large to create games that reflect an epic scale. Since visuals weren’t high res and super detailed, relatively small teams could pull off amazing settings that feel more alive and real than what you find in most games today. Even though most areas are relatively linear and not as open as they appear, the out of bounds parts of the worlds are so expansive and beautiful that I didn’t mind my movement being restricted. And there’s still plenty of exploration to do, which I’ll get into later.
Rogue Galaxy feels like an attempt by Level 5, best known at the time for their work on Dark Cloud and Dragon Quest VIII, to push the JRPG genre forward by combining it with some light platforming and exploration elements common in action adventure games of the time. I love this era of games, where each part of the experience is complete and fleshed-out, and games felt radically different from each other. Maybe that’s because studios commonly used their own custom engines back then, but I’m no expert on that.
At any rate, Rogue Galaxy doesn’t resemble other JRPGs much in any way besides its combat, which I’ll get to in a bit. Sure, there’s shops and stores and people to talk to, but those elements were common in many other genres by that time. A casual observer might think this is an action adventure game, like a sci-fi Legend of Zelda, if they only watched for a few minutes. There’s not a ton of side quests — more like optional grinding and exploring that can lead you to items that improve your characters’ stats and abilities. This is done via a bizarre license board system, where you unlock upgrades with all kinds of random items you collect during your adventures. Some abilities only require a common potion or fruit, but you might be grinding for hours for rare drops to get some of the later skills. Each character has their own unique board, and unlocking everything for everyone will add dozens of hours to your play time. The game is easy enough that most of these skills are optional, but you are rewarded for your time with tangible and useful improvements, which I appreciate, and I had fun filling all the boards out.
There’s always something to do while you’re exploring. Aside from collecting items for license boards, there’s a fairly involved weapon leveling system. Each weapon improves with use until you’ve mastered it, and early on you get the ability to combine two mastered items into a new, more powerful weapon. There’s no reason not to do this, so it’s a constant goal throughout the game and gives you a reason to explore outside of the story path. It helps that there’s plenty of hidden treasures and areas to find, as well.
On top of all that, there’s a complicated system for training what the game calls “insectors” — monster-like bugs you catch, breed, and level up to fight in tournaments at the galaxy’s capital city. I’ll admit.. I didn’t do much of this, since I got a good 80 hours out of the game doing everything BUT insector tournaments, and that was plenty for me. Again, if I were a kid though, I’d happily spend another 20 hours raising bugs and getting those final trophies. As mentioned, there is a TON of content in this game.
Which brings me to the combat. It’s in real-time but feels more and more turn-based as you go, due to how menu heavy it is. You fight in a three-person party and control Jaster by default, but you can swap which character you control at any time. You can even swap out members of your party during battle, Final Fantasy X -style. Your teammates are controlled by the AI, but you can command them to use abilities at any time via menus, Secret of Mana -style. And just like in Secret of Mana, that’s what you’ll be doing for the majority of battle time once you’re a decent ways into the game, since basic attacks kinda suck, while abilities are.. fantastic. Most characters have powerful attacks that damage all enemies for a relatively small resource cost, and spamming these is by far the best way to get through almost every battle. In a way, this feels unbalanced, since at the very start of the game you don’t have any abilities and combat IS effectively real time, but since this is an RPG, I like that it becomes more menu focused.
While it’s easy enough to get through most battles once you understand the mechanics, enemy difficulties curves up sharply throughout the game, so if you’re not spending time unlocking skills and leveling up your weapons, you’re going to have a tough time. There’s random battles, and they happen a little too often, but this isn’t bad once you get used to it, though environments tend to be sprawling and, well, huge. You’ll be spending a LOT of time in combat, and once you master it, exploring and grinding becomes super chill and fun. Until then though, battles can be quite difficult, and healing resources are scarce for a decent chunk of the game.
Boss battles, on the other hand, provide unique experiences that force you into unique strategies — at least for the first few. Early in the game, there’s creative bosses that might require a special gun that creates platforms, or careful movement to avoid being in the water when a devastating electric shock is coming. Eventually though, boss battles lose their creativity and become almost as easy and simple as regular battles, which is disappointing. The combat overall becomes a complete joke once you’re in the late game, and while I view this as a reward for all that time spent grinding, your mileage may vary. I also took my sweet time with this game, and I can see someone who just wants to get through the story having a tougher time. I wouldn’t call Rogue Galaxy an easy game.. it’s more like, hard to learn, but easy to master once you do.
The story is satisfying for being mostly a lighthearted, serialized adventure. It follows Jaster, a random guy from a repressed desert planet who gets swept into an interplanetary adventure — it’s very Star Wars inspired and doesn’t try to hide it. Jaster eventually joins a pirate crew on a ship called the Dorgenark, and they hop from planet to planet helping local peoples with problems they’re having, whether with the environment, monsters, politics, or greedy corporations. While there’s not nearly as many planets as I’d hoped, there’s plenty of variety here to fill the experience. If anything, there’s too much padding in a game that’s already long enough — some dungeons go on and on for longer than I’d have liked. You’ll have plenty of time to grind weapon levels, that’s for sure.
There’s an overarching story as well, and eventually the story turns into a chosen one tale. That’s standard for the genre, but its various twists were done well enough to keep me interested, and it succeeds in the way it’s told. Cutscenes are long, with great production values, and the voice acting is rock solid. It’s especially good for the PS2 era but even holds up today — and there’s a lot of it! There’s a lot of content and polish to Rogue Galaxy in general, and it makes many JRPGs of today feel.. unfinished in comparison.
To talk any more about the story, I’ve gotta go into spoilers, so if you want to avoid those, here’s a timestamp to skip to. Otherwise, I’ll start by highlighting some problems I had with the story that made it hard to take seriously at parts.
For example, once Jaster joins the Dorgenark crew, why do we not meet the captain until an entire mission is complete? You explore a planet for what must be.. weeks, all while the captain is apparently.. sleeping? I guess this is supposed to be whimsical and cute, but it was just weird to me, considering the tone and plot points so far had been on the serious side. The writers could have come up with something better there.
Much later in the story, the Desert King, the mysterious dude who gives Jaster a legendary sword at the start of the game, reveals he’s — surprise — Jaster’s father. That’s a pretty well-worn trope, but I’m fine with it. What I don’t get is why he didn’t join the party after this. He’s a great fighter, he could have been a big help, and it would have been cool to have him around to see how he interacts with Jaster. Instead, he just.. goes off on his own with no real explanation given.
At any rate, while issues like these detract from the experience, there is plenty to appreciate in the writing. The quest to hunt keys for and unlock Eden kept me engaged, and the whole backstory of Eden actually being the sealed-off Mariglenn, which has been under attack by a mysterious force, is satisfying. I wanted there to be some big mind-blowing revelations once my crew reached Eden, and I wasn’t disappointed. The writers kept me guessing but rarely groaning, which is a win for any JRPG.
In a lesser story, the Mariglenn people would have turned out to be evil in a late-game twist, and I was expecting that. Instead, the story is played straight, with the Mariglenn people being in genuine danger and your party having to save them. It’s refreshingly straightforward and done well. I hate when games have a ton of twists that only exist to shock you. There’s none of that in Rogue Galaxy. And man, that cutscene revealing the final boss is fire.
There’s plenty of other cool moments, like Kisala’s backstory about how she’s actually the princess from another freaking planet, which is intimately related to Jaster’s main quest. I did not see that one coming. It’s explained in a way that fits, too, in that the Mariglenn people wanted their bloodline to continue outside of Mariglenn in case their planet gets destroyed. Then, later, Kisala finds and kills her own father after he turns into a beast! It’s insane, in the best way.
So while the story is usually OK to good, the characters are more hit or miss. Most of your main party gets at least one side story to give you an idea of who they are, but there’s not enough for any character except perhaps Kisala. You meet each member one by one, help their planet solve a problem, and then they join you. But once they’re in your squad, their characterizations are rarely brought up again — for many party members, not at all.
Still, the writers plant seeds for a few characters early on that are later expanded, which is more than I can say for most games. Burton, for example, is a fun character. He’s a random archeologist NPC who appears in most chapters to have some funny banter with the party and generally become the butt of some joke. But then he shows up in the final chapters to help out in a critical way, and I was glad to see him. I didn’t realize I cared so much.
Then there’s the frog you meet early on who sits in your inventory and.. eats your weapons to combine them? Yeah, it’s pretty bizarre, but he’s a funny little guy who adds personality to the weapon upgrade system. Stuff like this is so charming, but it’s weird how this frog gets more development than a few of the party members.
Rogue Galaxy also suffers from poor pacing in parts. As mentioned, some dungeons drag on and on, often for hours due to all the random battles, while other sections of the game go by too fast, especially in later chapters. Near the end of the game there’s a heap of cutscenes and characterization for each party member, but it’s all dumped on you at once while you work through a massive dungeon. This feels out of place, and I wish it were spread out among earlier sections of the game instead.
I can’t complain too much though, since I loved Rogue Galaxy regardless. Its combat, exploration, progression mechanics, and old school presentation kept me hooked the whole time.
