Star Ocean: The Last Hope

"A difficult trudge for the casual playthrough, but plenty of obssession fodder"

Star Ocean 4 goes with the same concept as star trek, a premise always full of potential for imagination: space exploration. Get any more specific about it's concept, and it stops making sense. The cast is pulled straight from an Anime harem, and deliberately stuffed with as many otaku fetishes as possible. Everyone feverishly exaggerates physical expression, past the point at which even campy musicals would say "when." But worse than all of that, the main character is like sailor moon, the heart kid from captain planet, or some other idol designed to make 5 year old girls swoon, constantly obsessing over saving everyone and believing in people. It is true that such a lead isn't too rare in Japanese RPGs, but he must have broken some records in the number of times he has mentioned saving people, or believing in people. If not the former, then definitely, the latter. If this game only had a more self deprecating sense of humor, it would have been the perfect campy parody of a bad jrpg, backed up of course, with its terrific battle system. If nothing else, at least the battles are fun...

Story:

Stripping away all the odd Anime cliche's, the story of Star Ocean isn't too bad. Like most sci-fi epics, when humans explore the final frontier, they encounter aliens who are quite similar to humans, filled with greed, ambition, kindness, and other traits that all people posses, maybe just in a slightly different balance. The ultimate antagonist though, like the borg or Q in star trek, the reapers in Mass Effect, ends up being something beyond the full comprehension of humans. Like a hurricane, or a tidal wave, it's almost as if it was nature itself, or perhaps something divine. The setting and universe is still not nearly as detailed and well thought out as Mass Effect, but at least the setting and plot are compelling. You have strip away quite a bit to get to something respectable though. There's too much blatant fanservice, exaggerated body language, which is perfectly accompanied by excessively melodramatic dialogue, and cheesy idealistic lectures doled out by our main character, Edge Maverick (a rather ironic name, for as a character, he's far from cutting edge or Maverick-like) to take the plot seriously. When you're forced to sigh and roll your eyes at the umpteenth "I want to believe in (character's name)!" the next plot development just loses its impact.

I won't deny that some characters have touching moments. I shed an unexpected tear when one character revealed her tragic past. I suppose if a supporting character could do that, she should receive a passing grade at the least. Edge gets a fat Needs Improvement. How can a character be so simple, yet so melodramatic, preachy, and stubbornly idealistic at the same time? It boggles the mind how bad a lead Edge is. The lead should have the most nuances, troubles, and complexities, but like the other supporting characters, his personality is straight forward and 1 dimensional; easily described in one, if not two sentences. At least some of the side kicks have a little second layer, be it a back story, or a change of heart. Edge has none of that, spews all kinds of infantile lectures about what's right and wrong, and as a 20 year old, should be deeply ashamed of how wrongly he misinterpreted "evolution."

4/10

Gameplay:

The first noticeable awkward bit in this game will be the controls for Edge on the regular map. It feels unresponsive because edge can only move at 1 speed. There's no such thing as acceleration. He either runs, or walks, and can't do anything in between. This becomes especially apparent when trying to reach treasure chests. You may be right next to it, but end up passing it back and forth just trying to get in front of it. That said, the gameplay in Star Ocean 4 is nothing spectacular for a JRPG. There's maybe 1 puzzle in the entire game, and it's of the basic type where you don't actually get to make any choices. Instead, you're just searching for the next step, and there is only 1 correct step at a time, which also happens to be the only possible step. I don't care how generic block pushing puzzles are, at least they make you think a few steps ahead.

That said, the gameplay has plenty of merits. The battle system is exciting and tweaked in a way that all the characters have unique assets as a player controlled character, encouraging you to switch often even mid-battle. Most of you probably know this, but Star Ocean uses a real time battle system. Unlike the Tales games, you have much less freedom of creativity for combos, but the bosses are designed in a way that forces you to learn the blindside system where you charge up, immobilizing yourself in anticipation of an enemy attack, then timing the direction during the charge will get you behind the enemy and leave him confused, drastically upping your critical rate, which seems to do actual severe damage against bosses, where normal attacks only hit for 1/5 or so of what they normally do. Just trudging your way about will take forever, but a few well timed blindsides and appropriate followups will leave the beast hurting. There's no manual target switching, and the AI commands are a little too basic, but those are minor complaints when it's easy enough to just command the other characters yourself.

The beauty of Star Ocean probably can only be appreciated by the obsessive gamers. The item creation system is gigantic, and a synthesis system that lets you combine weapons or armor to anything will probably trigger a lot of "post your favorite (ultimate weapon) here" and there will also probably be a fair amount of discussion about exactly what is best. The characters are all pretty well balanced, save 1, who is slightly overpowered, so leveling up all your characters will be a must for perfectionists, and since they don't get experience when outside the main party, it'll involve extra grinding. Not a bad thing in Star Ocean, because the combat system is fun, and manipulating the bonus board, which gives different bonuses at the end of battles depending on what specific accomplishments you achieved during previous battles, is obsession fodder in and of itself.

7/10

Visual/Audio:

The enemy design is the biggest plus to this game's visuals. Everything looks pretty good at first glance, but there are some odd bits of shading pretty often, and many of the surface textures of the ships look bad. The character animations aren't too ugly, though we've seen the same level of quality years ago with FFX, but they're used poorly.

A lot of people might say the voice work is terrible, but I don't think so. The translation for the most part is a success. There is a feline character later in the game, yet another common Japanese fetish, who's archetype in Japanese will always add "nya" to the end of sentences, or change words so that there's a "nya" somewhere in the middle of them. "Nya" is the equivalent of "meow" and I've never seen a dub of such a character that worked in English, but she was well done, perhaps even more feline-esque in the English track than the Japanese. The fault lies with the design and the original writing, not the translation or voice actors. Edge going melodramatic, spazing out even in the midst of normal calm conversation is just how the game was meant to be. One awkward bit though is Lymle's idiosyncratic speech. In Japanese she adds "no yo" at the end of many of her sentences, which is basically just an affirmation, but the translation is "'kay?" In English. This changes things a bit, because it sounds like she's patronizing everyone she's talking to in the English version, even though she's a lolita type character.

The music is by Motoi Sakuraba, and you can safely say at the very least, that it's not bad. While I think some of Valkyrie Profile's tracks are spectacular, he's also done many Tales games, including Abyss and Vesperia. Not trying to disrespect those sound tracks, because they're solid, but like Star Ocean 4's, they're a bit uninspired and generic.

8/10

Star Ocean 4 is fun in its own way, and as much as I hated the story, I can't say everyone will. We do still see harem Anime, people cosplaying as harem anime characters, and young, idealistic protagonists, so some one's gotta be enjoying this stuff. Even to those who aren't into that sort of thing, which I imagine would include most Westerners, Star Ocean 4 can be fun in its own way. I would definitely suggest not jumping the gun and buying this right away though. It's an acquired taste.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/04/09

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