I made a silly mistake in Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness on PlayStation 4, and I have no idea how long it was affecting me.

First, let me go on a tangent. The English localization of this game reads like an English major trying to show off their vocabulary, or at least someone who really loves their thesaurus. I think I have a pretty decent vocabulary myself. I work in publishing, after all. But even I find myself often looking up definitions of some of the extremely obscure words this game spits out, and I highly doubt the Japanese script uses equally obscure langauge. Star Ocean games aren't exactly known for having deep, highbrow stories. They're effectively Star Trek episodes in which crew members get tangled up in a conflict on an underdeveloped planet, with a heaping helping of anime tropes on top. So what's funny is that, tonally, the vocab choices arguably work to the detriment of the game. When some random NPC who isn't presented as well-educated is expressing that he has the hots for Fiore, it doesn't seem particularly appropriate to me for him to use the word "pulchritude" instead of, you know, "beauty" or something. Funnier yet, I haven't noticed any typos or other mistakes in run-of-the-mill text, but when the game tries to get flowery, that's when the screw-ups slip in. I've noticed "atramentous" on a couple occasions, which, again, probably would've been better replaced with something more basic, and one time it was misspelled. Even an inn, which is labeled on the map and has its name show up in large text every time you enter has "sultanic" misspelled as "sultantic". Anyway, with an RPG and the quantity of text that goes along with said genre, I certainly wouldn't argue for the entire script to be pedestrian language, but this is the opposite extreme and feels way overboard, or as the kids say these days, "extra". Considering it's a Teen-rated game, I feel bad for any 13-year-old playing the game and probably just guessing at what words mean from the context. Although, I guess if somebody learns some new words from the game, it's not all bad.

Partially, I just wanted to talk about how ridiculous the localization is, haha, but I also bring this up because my mistake is related to the game's text. Most of the game has been brain-dead easy, so when I got a role that exchanges some amount of EXP gain for SP gain, I figured, "Sure, why not" and used that. Then I got an accessory that seemingly did the same thing and equipped that. You see, despite the over-the-top prose, the game does a piss-poor job of explaining the factors of roles, equipment, etc. It's a lot of abbreviations and stuff written out like formulas and just isn't very clear. Maybe it's just modern gaming terminology that I'm not familiar with, who knows. I am a dinosaur, after all, haha. It turns out the accessory causes me to gain ZERO experience, in exchange for a miniscule boost to SP gain. Really, it seems more like a trolling accessory than something that could be genuinely useful. But getting back to the whole "seamless" thing, the game pops battle results on the side of the screen, and then they quickly disappear, while I'm probably already running off somewhere. I usually glance to see if I got any good drops, but I don't care about the exact amounts of EXP, SP, and Fol I'm getting. But while doing the second proper dungeon of the game (yet another laboratory), I noticed I was getting 0 EXP every battle. At first, I assumed there must be some story reason for that and continued on, but I lost a couple times on the boss battle following the third "protect Anne" battle and started thinking about what I could do to improve my odds. I think I was probably using that accessory for quite a while, haha. I did struggle a good bit on the second "protect Anne" battle right before entering this dungeon too, so I guess the lack of EXP gain finally caught up with me. I suppose I inadvertently found a way to increase the challenge, haha. But even so, outside of the optional Cathedral of Oblivion battles, the only battles I've lost are the first two "protect Anne" missions and this boss battle I'm currently up to, which is why I never even noticed the handicap I gave myself.