New Details on Star Ocean 5’s Characters, Battle System

New details on Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, the fifth main game in the Star Ocean series, its two new characters, and its battle system have been revealed in the latest issue of Famitsu magazine in Japan.

The descriptions for Emerson and Anne, new characters in the Star Ocean series, have been translated and come courtesy of SiliconEra:

Emerson (CV: Junichi Suwabe): he might look like tough guy, but he has a frank personality, and is a lover of alcohol and women. While in battle, he uses his powerful bow gun to attack enemies from a distance.

Anne (CV: Ayumi Fujimura): a calm and intelligent woman who travels alongside Emerson. Thanks to her variety of martial arts skills, she can practically toy around with her enemies. She also loves cats.

A new mechanic for the battle system was also detailed. Known as the “Role” battle system, players will be able to assign different characters in their party with individual roles. Assigning a role to a character will affect the way the character behaves when it is being controlled by the game’s AI. Each character can have four roles assigned to them at any given time.

The roles typically fall into a defensive or offensive category. Here are four types of offensive roles:

Attacker: prioritizes number of hits and focuses on attacking. ATK +4.

Caster: prioritizes number of hits and focuses on using skill attacks. INT +4.

Berzer: prioritizes attacking targets that hit with weak but fast attacks.

Fighter: drops defenses to focus all on attacking.

There are also Roles for healing, support, and buffs. When a character continually uses any given role, they will become more proficient in said role, giving the player the opportunity to customize the character’s fighting style to their liking.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness was announced in April and will be available in Japan on Feb. 25, 2016 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3. It will then be released in the West at an undetermined date in 2016.

Source: Famitsu (via SiliconEra)