Review: Star Ocean: The Last Hope –International
For a JRPG starved PS3 gamer like me, the announcement of an International edition of Star Ocean: The Last Hope for the PS3 was a god-send. Previously an XBOX360 exclusive, the game was reported to be suffering from a number of issues that hampered the gamers’ enjoyment – long load times, disc swapping, and terrible voice acting to name a few. The International edition however, comes with the ability to switch over to a Japanese voice track, and was reported to have fixed a lot of the issues that plagued the original. However, a port cannot fix what is fundamentally wrong with the game. So in the end, Star Ocean: The Last Hope –International- is a huge disappointment and quite frankly, it amounts to a painful gaming experience.
The biggest reason for that is the plot. It’s not non-existent, but it’s terrible. Playing as Edge Maverick, you control a team of galaxy voyagers, and along the way encounter mysterious evil rocks that transform into bosses, a planet in a parallel universe, indestructible armies and a huge planet-like being that threatens the existence of the universe. Yup, the plot keeps switching focus throughout, and there’s a distinct lack of direction in the story. To add to that, there are completely wooden characters, poor attempts at overtly melodramatic scenes that you feel no connection with, and you have the perfect melting pot of awful.
Cringe-worthy dialogue and mediocre character animations in cutscenes do nothing to help. There were periods when I had to stop myself from bashing my head against the nearest immovable object because of long cutscenes that had dialogue going around in circles. The whole thing just feels very amateurish, like it were a bunch of third-graders enacting their first ever school play.
The private actions on-board your ship the Calnus, are a bit better though. While travelling from planet to planet, you have the chance to interact with the members of your party. These interactions have a huge role to play in deciding which of the character endings you get, and are the only parts where your characters feel alive. The cutscenes which involve Welch, in particular are hilarious and are the only shining lights at the end of a very long, dark tunnel.
Anyway, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s focus a bit on the positives. The Last Hope is a very smooth and pretty game. While the character designs aren’t all that special, the variety and quality of the world and level designs more than makes up for it. The worlds and dungeons are massive and expansive, and Tri-Ace has done a pretty good job of retaining each one’s unique flavor. That said, one would expect quite a bit of load time issues, but they’re non-existent. The levels load very quickly, and the game maintains a smooth framerate throughout, with only a few noticeable slowdowns. Sure, the game suffers from a very low draw-distance and texture pop-ins, but they don’t affect the experience much.
Another interesting aspect of the game is item collection and creation. You can form a bunch of compatible teams in your party that brainstorm for ideas. And once you’ve got the ideas, if you have the needed resources, you can go ahead and create the items. This is quite a fun activity, because there is quite a long list of things that you can create. Ranging from edibles that replenish your HP/MP, or boost your stats, to weapons and accessories, there are a whole bunch of them, and you’ll be spending a lot of time in here trying to improve your inventory.
I spoke about how good the levels and the dungeons look earlier, but they play well too. Most of them have puzzles that you have to solve, and while the million random monsters running around make them just a bit annoying to solve, they’re still pretty cool, and a neat distraction.
The music in this game is pretty decent. The background score across the various worlds and levels are surprisingly good, and while the battle tracks get repetitive towards the end, that’s not to say that they’re bad.
The real-time battle system is fantastic. You can control one of the four active party members at any time, and use items, skills and attacks on the fly. Basic attacks are mapped to the X button, and the skills that use MP, called Symbolisms, are mapped to the shoulder buttons. These range from weapon combo skills to the ability to use attack and healing magic. There is also a Rush gauge that fills up when you deal or receive damage, and once activated, the Rush mode gives the character more speed and defense boosts. The other three characters are controlled by the AI, but you have a certain degree of control over them via the tactics that you can assign to them. However, you’ll find yourself switching characters often to make sure all of them stay alive, or just to have a more effective battle plan against certain enemies. Battles have a feverish tempo to them, and they’re really fun, especially when you’re fighting some of the more challenging bosses.
Next Page – What’s New, Final Thoughts and Scoring
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