Star Ocean: The Last Hope

"A Dimmed Star in an Ocean of Cliches"

The Star Ocean series and I has kind of a rocky relationship. We had a great time when the Second Story graced my life. But then, we took a break from each other for awhile. That time apart lasted until "Until the End of Time", which, it turns out, is just a placeholder Until the End of our Relationship.

It turns out the title for the new Star Ocean game is appropriately named "The Last Hope", because this is their last hope for me to try to love them again. And well, sad to say, it would be more accurate if it was named "No Hope".

You start off with Edge Maverick (sigh) and crash lands your spaceship onto an island inhabited by giant insects. Since it was supposed to be a peaceful world full of non-giant-insect things, you decide to find out what caused this disaster. You are tagged along by your obvious future girlfriend, I mean, present female friend, and then you go on your travels!

As I started playing this game, the first red light came on really early in the game. When the giant insects attack the crashed ship, as in space ship, for some unexplained reason/plot contrivance, they are shielded against rail guns. Umm...okay. Then suddenly, out of thin air, a sword lands on the ground. He grabs the sword and slices the alien insect! And the girl uses a bow! ...

Wait, let me get this straight. A bow and a sword can kill them but rail guns can't? On top of that, it was proven that these guns (for whatever reason) didn't work against this one type of insect, why not bring your guns with you to see if it'll work on other monsters? It lacks any sort of logic. Also, a valuable RPG lesson: If you are ever part of a crew, don't wear generic uniforms. Always wear something colorful and different from anyone else. And if you're female, wear something colorful AND revealing. Why? Because you're guaranteed to survive any attacks.

So, as I trekked on with the "story", I started to realize something. When I was 10 hours in, there still wasn't, to my knowledge, one main thread to drive this narrative. It was made up of little events to do this and that with no bigger picture. It felt as if the writers made stuff on the spot along the way. But from the most I could tell, it was about some sort of purple-y thing? Hell, if the game itself isn't clear, why the hell should I?

Another aspect that hurts the game and makes the plot even harder to swallow is the absolutely horrid characters. Think of the thing that annoys you most. Okay, got it? Imagine that one hundred times worst. Not one of these characters have anything redeeming about them. They are not relatable in any way, shape, or form.

The main character is a whiny, self-loathing, annoying 20 year-old that constantly needs reassurance. He also takes that self-loathing to a whole new level I've never seen before. In any given situation, any where, he will somehow find a way to blame himself. If the sun was covered by the clouds on a cloudy day, he'll blame himself for not being to control the weather. And when the sun becomes shiny again, he'll probably think of all the farmers who are not getting rain. Trust me, this guy will blame himself for just about anything. Nothing will ever please him. I also find it ironic that his name is Edge, as he has none.

Oh, another valuable lesson from Star Ocean: TLH: you can be as annoying, whiny, and self-loathing as you want, require constant, and when I say constant I mean every conversation, reassurance, and be an overall dumb-donkey, your friends will not just love you for it, but you are also prone to hero worship by them.

And one of those poor characters stuck with that job is the childhood female friend, whose, you know, compassionate, and that's basically her only trait. You also have a little girl who the manual claims it's 15 years of age, but acts and looks like 8. With the way she's written and the way her lines are delivered, it comes awfully close to an either autistic child or mentally disabled. The writers are skating awfully close to offending some people. On top of that, she literally ends every spoken dialogue with " 'kay?" Hour upon hours of hearing her repeat that, it may drive the most mentally stable person insane, and probably drive already insane people into a coma. Then, of course, the rest of the female cast are defined by their boob size and who can dress in as little clothes as possible to reveal as much cleavage as possible. To borrow a line from the great Roger Ebert: "To call these characters cardboard would be an insult to useful packing material".

On top of the offensive blatant sexism going on, the voice acting definitely does not do anyone any favors. With the exception of the main female lead and that little girl, all the other (4) female characters have unnatural high pitches for their voices. Not just that, every line is delivered with so much over acting (although everyone is guilty of that) and over-zealousness, near half way through the game, you might decide to destroy this game in a giant flame so it can't inflict any more pain on others. But then again, you would be putting the flame in agony. Better it than me, I guess.

Besides the sorriest excuse of characters to grace any medium, the game in itself is not any better. "Why, look at that! It's a sci-fi RPG! Cool!" Don't fool yourselves. This is NOT a sci-fi RPG. This is just a standard RPG that happens to "take place" in the future.

Here's a bunch of locations the game that pops into my head at the moment: a forest, a beach, cave, giant desert, ruins, a crashed spaceship. Which of those doesn't belong? I'll let you think about it for a second...so, what'd you pick? The Crashed Spaceship? Sorry, wrong, it's everything else. That location is the ONLY location on that list that remotely fits with the sci-fi theme. Everything might as well be from any standard RPG during the "medieval" times. To add a whole package of salt onto an open wound, just look at the weapons your characters use. Two characters use staves, one uses a wand, one uses a scythe, your main char uses a sword, and his female friend uses a bow. With the exception of the giant robot guy that uses a hand cannon, can you seriously say that those are sci-fi weapons? On top of that, spells, or symbology as they like to call it, are so standard old school types of RPG spells, it just adds fuel to my fire. So this game has a spaceship and calls it Sci-fi. That's like adding a clown into a horror movie and calling it a comedy.

And oh yeah, the spaceship I mentioned, that's basically your HQ to travel around the "galaxy". It might as well be a regular wooden ship. And since the earth is destroyed due to WW3 and has you up in space, it gives the game makers a license to go crazy to design these other planets with personalities. With that conceit, they had so much potential. But nope, they opted for bland earth-y locales. At no point in the game did I feel I was traveling between worlds. Felt more like I was traveling between coasts.

To continue on, this game lacks any sort of imagination and inspiration (look at the so-called "planets"). No only that, it felt as if they didn't even care at all. They scraped the bottom of the cliche barrel, went through the bottom, through the layers of dirt, through the floor, and into a pool of indescribable...thing. This game has officially made me speechless.

Since I can probably continue to rant for another couple of pages, I better continue with the review and yak about the battle system. Basically, you can combine regular hits with skills that you can chain together by setting a skill to either the Right or Left Trigger buttons. During battle, if you perform certain feats or meet some arbitrary condition, you get one of 4 color gems for your bonus board. The more gems you collect during battle, the more bonuses you get. The bonuses consists of extra exp, fol (money), restore some hp/mp, and extra SP gain.

SP are your skill points which allow you to "level up" your skills to make them stronger, which I guess adds the littlest bit of strategy, if you can call it that as it doesn't really require many points to begin with.

The battle starts off quite fun and frantic, but then once you start getting stronger and better spells, you realize that you can just control one of your mages and spam your spells by bashing your trigger button which excludes the need for you to do anything but that. Fun! For the first half of the game or so, if you like using your fighters instead of mages, you will find yourself lacking any sort of variety when it comes to your skills.

After 20-25 hours in, you will still have only 4-5 skills to play with, so you can forget about playing with different skills to seeing what connects with what to the maximum effect because after matching all the 4-5 skills in all sorts of different ways, I find that ultimately, it's just best to connect your initial two skills.

During battle, you can also use something call Blindside. If you charge yourself by holding the B button, and wait for the right timing to tap in a certain direction, you are able to blindside the enemy to go behind them . You are then able to have a chance to do more damage. But since the game is so ridiculously easy during your first play through, with the exception of some bosses, there really isn't a real need for it. You'll probably save time just by spamming your spells.

Visually speaking, the game is very frozen and hellfire. In some parts, like the jungle, are appealing to the eyes while other areas (read, most), everything is visually too busy. In the crashed spaceship, for an example, the red wall cannot simply be just a red wall. They have to add lines. Many many lines. And lights. And...I'll spare you. Around whole place, there are just too many objects and things about. Even in your own ship, everything has a sense of being overdecorated, it becomes distracting. While technically, everything is rendered well, with no visible slowdown, and the character models are sharp, the overallness of it, due to the overdecorating and busyness going on, it ultimately comes off messy.

Another aspect that really boggles the mind is that the game can have this huge giant desert without any loading/cuts between the certain areas of the desert. But if you're in a town, and go inside a very small house, the game has to load when you go between the very small floors. I just don't understand. I just don't.

Just in case I wasn't clear, avoid this game if you want your ears and sanity intact.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/13/09

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