Star Ocean: The Last Hope

"The Last Hope, But Not The Best One"

Introduction
Space: the final frontier. Let's face it: outer space is awesome. The reality, the possibility, everything about the universe beyond our small blue planet is infinitely compelling and interesting. And the vehicle we use to traverse this great expanse of pulsars, nebulae and impenetrably dark black holes—science fiction—has infinite reach. Enter the universe of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, and prepare to take those bold first steps beyond the Oort Cloud.*

To the uninitiated, the Star Ocean series occurs in a universe very-similar to that of Star Trek. You have analogous versions of the United Federation of Planets, the Prime Directive, and Vulcans. But The Last Hope is a prequel to the other three Star Ocean titles, and it takes place long before any of those exist. The story opens at the dawn of human space exploration—the protagonist, Edge Maverick, is one of the first humans to travel aboard a faster-than-light Starship. You leave Earth wholly ignorant of the great universe beyond, on a mission of discovery. Of course, this premise is entirely reminiscent of the oft-maligned Star Trek prequel, Enterprise. You're on your own out there, with no one to rely on but yourself.

My merging a Roddenberry-esque Star Trek setting with typical Japanese panache and role-playing staples, Star Ocean creates a setting that is familiar to the average gamer, but still retains a unique character—and even charm—all its own. To those who have played through previous iteration in the series, The Last Hope is precisely what you'd expect to see in a Star Ocean game: it deftly manages to be both insanely enjoyable and utterly infuriating, in equal measure. Is The Last Hope a fun game? Yes, by the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly, it most certainly is. But is it a good game? That, dear friends, may well be an entirely different matter.

Gameplay
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a role-playing game with real-time combo-based combat. Ten years ago, that would have been a huge badge of honor. These days, real-time combat in an RPG is pretty old-hat. And to be fair, the way in which The Last Hope implements the combat system is fairly archaic in its own right. When you run across the field, you encounter monsters. Once you encounter monsters, you leave the field and transition to a special combat-arena: a small enclosed space (generally only one per area). After you load the fight, the game's camera will zoom in on each enemy individually. Ostensibly this would happen to alert the player to the type of enemies he or she will be fighting, so the player can plan accordingly… only there's really not a lot of room to plan in an action-RPG. Frequently, you will be spending more time waiting for combat-areas to load and the camera to display each enemy than you will actually fighting those enemies. And once you win, you must endure the typical post-victory fanfare—all of which consumes just a little bit more time than it ought to, and quickly becomes no more than an annoyance.

The combat itself is fast-paced and fun, though there are a few things I didn't care for with the basic mechanics and controls. Fortunately, all of the buttons can be assigned to different commands, so most issues are easy to resolve. You can directly control any of the party-members, almost all of which are fun (and effective) to use, and can switch between them mid-battle with ease. Combos can be built up with normal attacks, special attacks and various symbolic (read: magic) techniques, and can be quite rewarding depending on how much time you invest. The addition of several other elements—rush mode and and blindsiding—make combat a whole lot of fun. Though, admittedly, at the easier difficulties most battles entail little more than tapping the attack button and waiting for everything to die.

Similar to the other big science-fiction epic role-playing game on the Xbox 360, Mass Effect, The Last Hope gives the player a galaxy map and several different planets to explore. The number of locations you can visit is rather limited, though each planet has a unique “identity” to it, but each area is very large with tons of areas to explore–and rest assured, you will be revisiting planets plenty of times, finding new treasures and toppling new foes.

Rating: 18/20

Story
But not every star shines brightly in this Star Ocean. While a vast majority of the game can be insanely fun and enjoyable, just enough flies off in the opposite direction—aspects that are irritating, infuriating, and downright bad.

One of the first things you'll notice about The Last Hope when you look at a screenshot is that Edge, and his steady compatriots, tend to fight with rather outdated-looking weaponry. Archery and swordplay in the future? Normally this would be an easy thing to dismiss as a kind of JRPG-idiosyncrasy. But it's rather hard to ignore the anachronisms in The Last Hope when the game goes out of its way to point them out—and then, promptly and miserably, fails to adequately explain the anachronism. Why do Edge and his fellow deep-space warriors, fight with Medieval weapons? Because, on the very first planet you visit, a single species of alien insects are inexplicably immune to firearms. I would suggest you not think about that too much because it's bloody stupid—but the game wants you to think about it, so it's pretty hard not to.

Star Ocean's explanation of why swords are better than guns is a bit indicative of The Last Hope's overall problem: the writing staff is constantly shooting the story and the universe in the foot. While, thankfully, there's nothing so bad as the nut-punching plot twist from Star Ocean 3, The Last Hope does stumble through what would have otherwise been a very engaging tale.

The Last Hope may be a very detailed, involved game with a ton of things to occupy the typical gamer, and it does, in fact, offer a compelling narrative with interesting characters, gracefully mixing drama, romance and humor in a blend few other games can manage. Unfortunately, The Last Hope seems to constantly trip over itself, stumbling incessantly as it tries to tell its story. A large bit of blame rests with the English-language localization team, who must have set out with the intention of sabotaging the game—there can be no other explanation for such poor, shoddy delivery. The Japanese developers who crafted the story are not without blame, either: it seems they went out of their way to rob several key scenes of tension (and sometimes context) stumbling their way through the delivery of an otherwise wholly engaging tale.

When all is said and done, the execution of the main plot also leaves a lot to be desired. Obviously, Edge is going to encounter some aliens on his journey. Naturally, you'd think the first time you meet a genuine extra-terrestrial would be a seriously major experience, right? Not so for Edge. He takes such knowledge in stride, saying little more than, “Oh.” The whole scene is anticlimactic and underwhelming and does a lot to taint the whole feeling of exploring the unknown. The thing is, we Gamers take it for granted that there will be aliens out there. The developers of The Last Hope, coming from the previous three Star Oceans, also take it for granted that there will be aliens out there. The problem is, the actual characters in the game should NOT take extra-terrestrial life for granted. The story makes a huge stumble with the horridly-executed first-contact scene, and makes several similar stumbles that mar the otherwise well-handled narrative.

The Last Hope is also sorely deficient in the areas of level-design and character design. The worlds you discover, you will find, are all strikingly similar to Earth. And the aliens you meet? They're all strikingly similar to humans. Hell, sometimes the two are indistinguishable. Oh—and all life in the galaxy exists in your standard carbon/nitrogen-based atmosphere. Gee golly, can't you feel the homogeneity? The levels you explore oscillate wildly between labyrinthine sprawls and overly simple, linear traverses. Navigating can be difficult, but you get the feeling that, even if they weren't quite up to the task, the level designers actually tried. When it comes to character design, I don't think any effort was put into it at all. Actually, I seriously doubt tri-Ace bothered to hire any artists at all. One race of aliens has pointed ears. Another angelic wings. Oh—and catgirls, of course. Sometimes aliens settle for mutton-chops, or tattoos. It's ridiculous, and, frankly, so low a level of creativity is inexcusable in a video game. If this were a low-budget television series from 1966, I might be able to overlook insipid alien designs. A pair of prosthetic ears, or a man with half his face painted solid black, the other half white, would be more than forgivable. But even Star Trek managed a few crazy-weird alien designs (Andorians, Tholians and Gorn, anyone?). The only obstacle The Last Hope faced was time and effort—and laziness is no excuse for lack of imagination.

Granted, The Last Hope gives you a pretty fair idea of what to expect, and what not to expect, as soon as you start. First, read the back of the box. My eyes were drawn immediately to the part that read: “Explore the galaxy on your quest, make allies and enemies among the alien races you encounter, and uncover a threat so great it threatens all creation.”

The cliche is nearly permeable. But, rest assured, the story is delivered in several related mini-arcs that are very compelling, despite the archetypal nature of the overall narrative. The characters, though a bit derivative, can be both amusing and compelling, ensuring that your journey through the Star Ocean is, if nothing else, an enjoyable one. Unfortunately, the voice acting for the characters is terrible. I don't mean the voices per-se are bad (no one's acting, like The Last Remnant, is a Saturday morning cartoon, thank God), it's just that the delivery sucks. It really, really sucks.

Rating: 15/20

Audio
Nearly every line in the game feels like it was phoned it—one word at a time. What's more, many of the characters sound bored with their dialog. Why should we gamers care what a character is saying when that character doesn't seem to? And it's filled with unnatural pauses, almost as though each lone word were a sentence unto itself. Basically. It. Makes. The. Dialog. Feel. Extremely. Disjointed. Unnatural. And. Jarring. And, just like that, the immersion is gone.

Outside of the strong, central storyline that will take anywhere from 40-50 hours to complete, The Last Hope holds a breadth of additional content for players to wade through. There are tons of side-quests to complete, tasks to take, character-based ending to unlock (there are a total of nine), items to craft (and invent) and various interactive scenes with your party members to participate in. There's a lot to do, and all of it's fun. One of the first things that stood out to me was that the jokes in The Last Hope can actually be funny, and it's been a long time since I've played an RPG that made me laugh. The entire game is infused with Aoi Sakuraba's soundtrack, which makes even the most mundane of scenes seem, somehow, epic. The Last Hope is the kind of game where you can have a great deal of fun, no matter what you're doing.

Rating: 7/20

Graphics & Presentation
The areas you'll be running around are enormous and look fantastic. Though many of the basic terrain textures and models are overly simple (the world can look very outdated at times) the water and lighting effects can be astonishing—and the level of detail in the design, textures and animation of the various monsters you'll encounter can be downright jaw-dropping. The various magic-attacks are equally impressive, and make exploring and fighting a visual feast. Just exploring the world at a leisurely pace, and watching the various creatures dart about their world, can be entertaining. The one concern I have is that, perhaps, the areas are too big. You can spend a great deal of time running around, exploring every little nook and cranny of the map, without really getting much of a reward. There are a few items you can find in the dimmest periphery, but they're typically the same generic items you can buy in a store for a lot less trouble.

As amazing as the exterior environments are, I feel The Last Hope's interior levels could use a bit of work. My problem is twofold: first, though we can rotate the camera, we cannot set the camera's distance from the player character, which can make narrow interior areas feel incredibly claustrophobic. Navigating these narrow paths is also a bit iffy as Edge never seems to move at the right pace. You can toggle between walking and running, but walking always feels a bit too slow to me, and running a bit too fast. Because the interior environments are just as detailed as the outside environments—lots of tiny details, blinking lights, consoles, etc.—running can be dizzying, but if you walk it'll take forever to get anywhere.

The real gold of the game, so to speak, lies in the amount of detail that went into all of the monster you'll be fighting. From textures to animation (and even sound effects) the enemies you'll be fighting all have a very unique, nearly alien feel that helps to repair a lot of the immersion lost by poor localization. The fights are fast paced, filled with crazy, over-the-top moves and brilliant animations--all of it completely unhampered by any slowdown or graphical glitches of any kind. A first for an Xbox 360 RPG, I do believe.

Rating: 18/20

Final Comments

In the end, despite (or perhaps in spite of) the various stumbling, bumbling and shoddy execution, The Last Hope still manages to be an immensely satisfying experience. RPG-fans have been burned several times this generation, with lackluster titles like The Last Remnant and Infinite Undiscovery, so it's nice to see an RPG that finally delivers. It is, perhaps, a testament to The Last Hope's quality that it's able to overcome so many great flaws that could so easily break lesser games. Star Ocean: The Last Hope is an enjoyable game. It is an infuriating game. It can be funny, it can be annoying. It can be addictive, it can be tedious. But when all is said and done, what matters is not how you feel as you play the game—it's how you feel after you play the game. And, mark my words, after you close the disc tray and shut-off your console, you'll be left with a feeling of satisfaction. This Star Ocean isn't merely a fun game, it's a complete game. Despite its flaws, it's very much a “whole” experience. You can play it in chunks of any length, and when you leave you'll always have had fun. You'll always be placing your game disc near to your console, because even when you play something else, you know it's only a matter of time before you venture, once more, into the Star Ocean.

Rating: 18/20

Final Rating: 76/100

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/04/09

Game Release: Star Ocean: The Last Hope (US, 02/23/09)