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Star Ocean: The Last Hope
PlayStation 3
The Star Trek Anime You Never Knew You Wanted
3.5/5 stars
“Star Ocean: The Last Hope International” (“SO4”) is an enhanced port of a formerly Xbox 360 exclusive entry in the venerable ‘Star Ocean’ RPG series by Tri-Ace, a series that began waaaay back on the Super Famicom (SNES, but never released outside Japan). Most North Americans’ first experience with the ‘Star Ocean’ franchise was likely the not-so-hot “Star Ocean: The Second Story” (“SO2”) on the original PlayStation, a game dragged-down by annoying characters and horrendous, horrendous voiceacting. Regardless of my disdain for “SO2,” as one of the earliest examples that really nailed all of the key gameplay features I expect, the ‘Star Ocean’ series will always be the first thing that pops into my head when someone says ‘action-RPG.’ Despite continuing the button-mashing tradition of its predecessor, “Star Ocean: Til the End of Time” (“SO3”) managed to wow me with its largely non-annoying cast, minor battle system improvements, and an epic story with an incredible plot twist that apparently only I liked. Early impressions by Xbox 360 owners seemed to indicate that “SO4” was a disaster and not worth playing. A year later, with no better RPGs on the horizon, I decided to buy the PS3 port of “SO4,” yet was never able to bring myself to play it. If it was as bad as Xbox 360 owners were saying, it would be like “SO2,” a game I have no desire to ever look at again. But maybe, I thought, the RPG-hating, FPS-loving Xbox 360 fanbase was wrong… maybe “SO4” was a good game like “SO3,” but the illiterate heathens who owned Microsoft’s box weren’t able to see it? I was left with a copy of Schrodinger’s Game: If I didn’t play it, “SO4” might still be good or bad, but if I did play it, it would definitely be one or the other. With my PS3 backlog dwindling, I decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and open the box.
Presentation
“SO4” is a very impressive-looking game. While the game engine only renders at 720p instead of ‘full HD’ 1080p, the polygons are all smooth and completely jaggy-free and the textures look incredible. The game’s environments are all huge and almost entirely open, with quite a bit of diversity ranging from forests to caverns to snowfields (which suffer a little too much bloom in a successful effort ad simulating snowblindness) to towns. Yes, “SO4” is an HD game with towns, despite what Square Enix (the publisher for “SO4”) infamously said about towns and HD games during their hastily scrambled defense of “Final Fantasy 13.” Character and enemy models look quite good as well. However, there are a few less-than-stellar aspects of the character graphics: There are not very many enemy types throughout the game, instead filling up the game’s bestiary with a large number of pallet swapped creatures; character animation was obviously motion-captured from Japanese actors, thus certain character movements have an over-acted Japanese style (think back to the original “Power Rangers” TV show *shudder*), with extra awkwardness attached to head movements; character faces are just large anime masks slapped-on over the motion capture; and the lip synch for most dialog is really off. Individually, none of these flaws is all that terrible, but they all add up into something noticeably wrong, especially given the huge number of game-engine-rendered cutscenes that occur throughout the game. Most of these cutscenes take no less than 15 minutes, with some taking up to an hour.
Soundwise, “SO4” doesn’t really have anything going for it. The soundtrack is okay, with no particularly terrible tracks, but also little in the way of memorable music. The voiceacting is a very mixed bag, with the majority of major character actors performing admirably with two notably awful supporting characters. One of these supporting characters has such awful voiceacting that I thought the character’s introductory scene would play out in a completely different way than it actually did – I thought the character’s ‘bad acting’ was an attempt at luring the rest of the characters into a trap… but the ‘bad acting’ turned out to be the character’s regular voice!
I have heard reports from other “SO4” players that the game begins to suffer from technical issues involving random freezes after the in-game clock ticks past the 100 hour mark. I didn’t play for nearly that long, nor do I believe the game has enough engaging content to warrant playing that long. Instead, the random freezing glitch seems to be reserved especially for obsessive completionists who love the grindy bonus content Tri-Ace tacks onto the end of every one of their games.
Story
“SO4” is, for all intents and purposes, very similar to what would happen if a Japanese manga author had his eyes taped open and was forced to watch every episode of “Star Trek” ever made in canon chronological order (thus starting with “Enterprise,” then “Star Trek,” then “The Next Generation,” then “Deep Space 9,” skipping “Voyager” and filling in the space between episodes with commercials for “Battlestar Galactica,” “Sliders,” “Andromeda,” and maybe a trailer for the original “Star Wars”), then told to write a video game script. Because it draws so heavily from some of the most popular Western science fiction, the story doesn’t really feel particularly original. However, as a non-hardcore Trekkie myself, I found it quite enjoyable to pick out the obvious references and noteworthy changes that migrated into the game universe’s lore from Eastern sources. It is also interesting to note that “SO4’s” main narrative is divided into self-contained story arcs that ultimately tie together in the end, giving the entire game a very similar feeling to watching a competently-written science fiction TV series.
“SO4” takes place at the very beginning of humanity’s exploration of outer space and provides a backstory that draws heavily from “Enterprise,” with humanity having nearly destroyed Earth using nuclear (not anti-matter!) weapons. Humanity’s first steps into outer space are aided by a friendly alien race known as the Eldarians, who just so happen to have pointy ears and stiffly-formal personalities (they’re totally not Vulcans, though, as they have emotions!).
As the Earthlings and Eldarians work together to colonize an uninhabited planet called Aeos, they soon encounter a mysterious meteorite that is able to fuse with dead organic matter to transform into a terrible monster. With most of their ships destroyed by the mystery meteorite on Aeos, the Earth fleet entrusts their last remaining ship, the Calnus, into the hands of two young crewmen: Edge Maverick (a blond, Luke Skywalker wannabe) and Reimi Saionj (a not-so-subtle copy of Hoshi Sato from “Enterprise”). These two Earthlings team up with a young, inexperienced Eldarian named Faize to continue their ship’s original exploration mission while the remaining higher-ups work to colonize Aeos.
As these three intrepid explorers travel the galaxy, they end up having quite a few self-contained adventures: There’s the ‘Underdeveloped Planet’ episode, the ‘Aggressive Reptilian Aliens’ (called ‘Cardianon,’ which seems awfully similar to the reptilian Cardassians from “Deep Space 9”) episode, the ‘Time Traveling’ episode, the ‘Captain is Emotionally Distressed’ episode, and then the ‘Finale that Ties Everything Together’ episode.
Of course, the tiny crew of the Calnus can’t stay tiny for the entire game, thus each episode of the story sees the crew growing by one or more aliens. Unfortunately, these added crewmembers are where most of the bizarre influence of modern Japanese pop-culture creeps into the game. While Baccus, the giant cyborg who takes up two seats on the Calnus, and Myuria, the large-breasted, even-larger-eared symbologist are welcome additions to the crew, the rest of the cast doesn’t fare so well: Indeed, the first person to join the crew after Edge, Reimi, and Faize is an autistic loli symbologist named Lymle. Not long after the addition of the loli, the crew gets the dubious honor of hosting a blue-haired catgirl named Meracle. The final insult is the addition of an airheaded ‘featherfolk’ girl who looks like an angel but is about as useful as a bag of doorknobs and whose voice causes faces and palms to collide in unison throughout the universe. The insane thing about the inclusion of these horrible throw-away anime stereotype characters is that there are scenes in which the other characters, and perhaps even the scriptwriters, seem to call their very existence within the story’s framework into question.
Like every other ‘Star Ocean’ game, “SO4” features ‘private actions’ that allow Edge to increase his affinity with the rest of the crew as well as to increase the crew’s affinity with each other. These private actions are one-shot things that can be missed and are only available while the Calnus is warping to a new location for the first time. I never liked private actions in “SO2,” and I still don’t care for them, as they only seem to exist to add a layer of cryptography to getting the game’s ‘best’ ending (which requires an impossible amount of fiddling around with things that aren’t apparent or explained in-game).
Overall, despite the annoyance-factor of nearly half the crew and the annoyance factor of not understanding what private actions I needed to complete during each warp sequence, I enjoyed the main plot of “SO4” quite a bit. When I see other people complaining about “SO4’s” plot, it mostly seems to be based around the way “SO4’s” story relates to the crazy plot twist at the end of “SO3.” I honestly don’t think the two games even take place in the same universe, so I was never bothered by that. The thing that does bother me about “SO4’s” narrative is that each of the planets the characters visit feels so small. Of course, I have yet to see a game featuring interstellar travel that doesn’t boil each planet down to a single area… even “Star Trek” did this, so I don’t foresee the problem resolving itself any time soon.
Gameplay
The thing I have always liked the least about the ‘Star Ocean’ series is the button mashy combat and over-reliance on AI teammates. This same battle system returns in “SO4,” though minus some of the interesting tweaks from “SO3” (MP kills, infinite juggles, guaranteed stunbomb hits) that I really liked. In general, I hate playing melee characters in this series, so during the course of the ~60 hours I put into the game, I only ever played as Reimi and Myuria. I only ever played as other characters when I had to momentarily switch to them to make them perform some action that the AI wasn’t capable of handling.
The basic battle system boils down to 4 active characters at once running around in real time trying to kill enemies. Enemies are visible on the world map, and touching them triggers a transition to a battle screen. The X button makes the player’s currently-controlled character attack, the Triangle button opens the menu (which conveniently pauses the action), and the L2/R2 triggers can be used to activate whatever special ability has been assigned to them.
The main changes in the battle system for “SO4” that weren’t in previous games are the BEATs system, blindsides, rush mode, and the bonus board. The bonus board is a small row of tiles on the games HUD that fill with different-colored gems when specific things happen in battle (such as killing an enemy with a critical hit or killing two enemies with one attack). Bonus board tiles provide bonuses depending on their color (like a 10% increase in experience earned), but can be taken away if the character being controlled by the player is hit by a critical hit or killed. Since it’s based mostly on random occurrences, the bonus board isn’t really something to rely on, and just seems to be a superfluous added layer of complexity. Rush mode is a meter that fills up as a character lands hits in battle or gets hit by enemies. Once it is full, hitting the Square button places the character in a temporary state where they can’t be knocked down, don’t suffer any form of hitstun, and have an increased critical hit chance. Alternatively, a character can channel their rush gauge into one of their special attacks and attempt to form a chain of special attacks with an ally via QuickTime Events. Blindsides allow a character to hold the O button while being targeted by an enemy, then tap the left analog stick to the side at just the right time in order to whip around behind the enemy and attack it’s back. The BEATs system provides three alternatives skillsets that increase in level (max 20) based on the number of battles fought and provide bonuses for either blindsides or rush mode. It’s also possible to equip a neutral BEAT that never increases in level but applies all of the accumulated bonuses from the other two BEAT modes. Overall, I found rush mode and blindsides to be completely situational and almost worthless, while the only benefits my characters seemed to receive from the BEATs system were the stat bonuses that come with each level.
Overall, the battle system is nothing to get excited about. And unfortunately, there is a significant difference between normal battles and boss battles. In normal battles, it’s always possible to see how much HP each enemy has remaining and the battles themselves only take a minute or two. Boss battles, on the other hand, leave the boss’ HP a complete mystery… and the bosses have SOOOOO much HP that the battles frequently take a half hour or more… for ONE battle! That’s insane! It’s also boring and makes every boss encounter feel like a battle of attrition as the party burns through MP regenerating items.
Speaking of items, “SO4” also features the series-traditional item crafting system. In “SO4,” each character has a specific item crafting skill and groups of characters must team up to invent recipes. After a recipe is created, crafting the item is just a matter of finding the necessary ingredients and doing it (there is no chance of failure, but a small chance of crafting an extra copy of an item of an enhanced version of an item). The problem with this item crafting system is that a lot of the materials are tediously difficult to come by, even if they are something as common as coal. Reimi and Bacchus have the ability to harvest crafting materials from specific points on the world maps, but running around huge areas over and over gets old quick. Of course, for the most part the only reason anyone would NEED to craft items is if they were planning on delving into the two post-game bonus dungeons. But when one bonus dungeon is just filled with bosses with too much HP and the other bonus dungeon is a roguelike-inspired random disaster, I never felt compelled to mess with any of it.
Overall
“Star Ocean: The Last Hope International” isn’t quite as good as “Star Ocean: Til the End of Time,” nor is it as bad as “Star Ocean: The Second Story.” It is a game that falls right in the middle of its franchise, quality-wise. Those who like “Star Trek” might enjoy it for its story, while those who like grinding and button mashing might enjoy it for its gameplay. Either way, it’s a better attempt at making an HD RPG than most of what Square Enix has fumbled out in the 7th Generation and nowhere near as awful as it was initially made out to be.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
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