Hopeless or hopeful?Star Ocean: The Last Hope starts with a bang. Several thousand of them in fact, as World War III and the struggle of Mankind to rebuild, is played out in the excellent CGI intro. It details events leading up to the launch of a small fleet of star ships, of which you are one, tasked with finding new and more hospitable planets for the human race to colonise.
When the game started proper, I was quite startled by how much detail the graphics held. Enhanced by some excellent depth of field effects the visuals are very sharply rendered - in fact maybe a little too cleanly. But then this coupled with the character design and animation gives it a tendency to make it feel like a puppet show, not unlike the 80s Saturday morning slice of awesome that was
Star Fleet.
One of the first things you'll be introduced to on the ship is the battle simulator, and I'd highly recommend running through all the tutorials, because it's in the highly intricate and fun battle system that this game really shines.
It's an immediate and real time fight, with you running around, strategically positioning yourself and letting rip with sword swipes and special attacks. You can activate a rush mode - filled by aggression or from being hit by enemy attacks - this makes it much more likely that you'll land a critical blow, and you won't be knocked away by an enemy strike in the middle of a combo.
You can also switch characters in real time with a simple push of the shoulder button, and they each play in a surprisingly different manner requiring different tactics to get the most from each. Pressing Y will call in a Secret of Mana style selection ring; here you can select special battle skills, use items or swap out your party characters on the fly.
In all honesty it's the most fun and easiest to pick up battle system I've ever had the pleasure to use in an RPG. It's so easy to pick up, but also holds real depth. You can taunt the beasties with one of your stronger characters, drawing them towards you, then quickly and easily switch to another, using their specials to devastating effect. Or, you can just wade in and treat it as a looser arcade experience, jumping about battering the beasties with your sword as the impressive A.I. takes control of the other party members.
All of which then makes it even more of a shame then for me to report that the main meat of the game - the story and characters - are actually pretty bloody horrible.
For a start the voice acting is awful. Conveyed with all the emotion of a cheese sandwich. And the developers seem to have picked the most grating and twee voice actors possible, with no option to switch to the original Japanese track. You could get around this with subtitles and by disabling the voices completely in the audio options I suppose, but it's not an ideal solution.
Your main protagonist, Edge Maverick (!) is even more of an emo cock-end than your average JRPG hero too, and I found myself shouting at the screen for him to man the fuck up on more than one occasion.
In gameplay terms, Star Ocean is also left wanting in structure. You have to talk to everyone in the current area to activate the next part of the story, and sometimes you even have to talk to everyone and then go back to some you have already talked to, with no indication on the map who that could be.
It's even worse when you are on the ship travelling to new places, as you have to repeat this pattern several times on one journey, and this can take up to an hour depending on the long drawn out cut scenes, in which nothing much ever seems to happen.
The dungeons can be quite well designed, but there is a lot of backtracking in them, and save points can be hours apart. It's they 20th century guys, can we not be allowed to save anywhere we want to yet?
One saving grace is that there are no random battles. Every enemy can be seen on the screen at any one time, and you can avoid them with convenient spamming of the dash move. These enemies do start getting repeated later on though, even on different planets. They do get re-coloured, but it makes the game feel slightly lazy.
In conclusion The Last Hope is not a bad game at the end of the day. In fact I had plenty of fun during the many battles, but it is a disappointing game. Particularly when it's easy to see just how much more fun it could have been with all of these niggles ironed out.
If you like your JRPGs, you'll love this, and if you want to complete all of the side quests and open all the chests I can imagine it taking hundreds of hours of play time. But if you are unsure about JRPGs from day one then this will never convert you, which is a shame, because with the great real time battles I feel this could have won over a whole new legion of fans.
Bungie vows never to follow the Activision route and charge extra for online multiplayer
(1) (30/07) 
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#1 - NewYork - on 14/06/2009 at 22:47 wrote:
I was disappointed when PS3 lost this game, but, now, meh. Pretty looking game, though.
#2 - evilashchris - on 15/06/2009 at 09:19 wrote:
To be honest the cutscenes are mostly people standing around trying to look moody for ten minutes :D
#3 - yupyup - on 15/06/2009 at 16:16 wrote:
Not really though. Not played a JRPG in yonks, must give something a go. The battle system in this sounds cool.
#4 - grayson - on 15/06/2009 at 16:34 wrote:
#5 - evilashchris - on 15/06/2009 at 16:44 wrote: