The First 3 Hours: Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth main installment of developer tri-Ace’s flagship sci-fi action-RPG series, and a prequel to the events of the original Star Ocean on the Super Famicon. The game is the third title in the Square Enix x Xbox 360 project, and certainly the most high-profile. It also happens to be my most anticipated RPG of 2009.

I sat down for most of Friday and Saturday with the English version of the game, and thus have more than 3 hours of experience with it. However, I’ll try to let you know how I felt after 3 hours compared with after 12 (which is where I am now).

Being a long-time Star Ocean series fan, the first thing that I can tell you is this: if you love Star Ocean, The Last Hope will be 100% pure joy to your soul. Don’t bother reading this preview, just go buy it. I promise you’ll like it.

SO4 starts off with the launch of the first official SRF (Space Reconnaissance Force) – an effort to explore and colonize habitable extraterrestrial worlds in order to save the human race, which has destroyed their own planet through nuclear war. The mission consists of 5 faster-than-light enabled spacecraft piloted by a handful of specially trained explorers. The protagonist, Edge Maverick, is a crewman aboard the SRF-003, Calnus, along with his childhood friend Reimi Saionji.

As you might expect, the expedition hits a bump in the road and 4 of the 5 ships crash-land on the destination planet of Aeos, which becomes your first area, and (if you play at a similar pace to me) your first three hours.

During your stay on Aeos, you will learn the basics of combat, explore a rather large area, and gain your first insights into the larger overarching plot. But to be completely honest, these first three hours are all kinds of boring. Aeos is a relatively small, uninteresting planet, with almost no variation in enemies or scenery, and virtually no interesting plot to keep things moving. Really, you’ll mostly just be spending time trucking around the jungle fighting big bugs and searching for treasure. I literally almost fell asleep while doing it.

Thankfully, as you near the end of the area, the plot picks up almost immediately, and things really start getting cool. It’s too bad, then, that the game forces you to backtrack your way through the level (though a short cut is available), sort of robbing you of that sense of excitement.

Battles play very similarly to Star Ocean: Til the End of Time or Tales of Vesperia (depending on which you are more familiar with). You are given a team of up to four characters who are each balanced differently, and then are given an enclosed 3D virtual space to slug it out against baddies in real-time action-based battles.

Your characters can perform standard attacks, trigger combo special moves or magic, or use items. Attacks can be chained together for bigger combos and damage, and the advent of Rush mode allows you to hit faster and harder after receiving and dealing enough damage. Your Rush gauge is emptied after each battle, so you might as well use it whenever you get it filled.

New to this style of fighting is the Jump command, which is activated simply by pressing the B button. Each character has an individual jump, which adds to the enjoyment of trying out other characters. Holding this jump button allows you to “charge” your jump, in turn allowing you to jump higher or farther (depending on the character). This is typically used exclusively to perform “Blindside” moves (known as “Sight Out” in the Japanese version) that allow you to break out of your enemy’s line of sight and deliver critical attacks from behind. Each character’s Blindside animation is unique, and occasionally has different effects, making it fun to try everyone’s out at least once.

Battles are high-paced and extremely fun for the most part, but are slightly cheapened by the copious amounts of them. If you buy the game just to fight enemies, you will never be bored, but the large amounts of enemies on the map can often get frustrating when trying to figure out a puzzle or get out of a confusing area.

The bonus board and copious amounts of Battle Trophies (a carryover from SO3) make you feel good about trying new things in battle, but don’t necessarily make or break the combat experience.

However, there are several low-points to the combat that I really should mention. Any gamer picky about framerate will likely be annoyed with the frequent blips that pop up in the middle of big battles, though they typically aren’t big enough drops to ever mess with your pace. Second, the glaring omission of multiplayer co-op is really a “what were they thinking?” moment. With all the depth and variety involved in battles, it is a huge loss that someone else can’t take control of your other character(s) to help out, and I’m really not sure what they excuse is on this. Third, though rare, the game can freeze during battle, forcing you to restart your console from your last save. This only happened to me once during my 12 hours, and occurred after I have been playing for quite a long time without a break, but I thought you should have a heads-up.

SO4 plays out in with a much more science fiction feel than its predecessors, which I really enjoyed. The addition of the controllable Calnus, which lets you travel to planets at your leisure, is a great feature, and the overall story of the game feels like a large improvement for the series. The Private Actions, handled almost exclusively aboard the Calnus during warp, are much more fun than previous games, both to watch and participate in, though it’s a little odd not to have them in towns.

The game has plenty of drama and action to keep you interested, but also keeps a sense of humor throughout, careful not to take itself too seriously. If you like Japanese storytelling, there isn’t much to complain about here. However, to get the whole story, you will have to read the game’s included dictionary and collection synopses, as the game proper doesn’t cover all of the details (which is, imo, too bad).

The game’s presentation is, for the most part, quite praiseworthy. Running on the same engine as Infinite Undiscovery, the locations and character models are absolutely gorgeous to look at, and SO4 manages perhaps the clearest graphics of any RPG this generation. That being said, the same awkward animation found in IU is also present in SO4 to a lesser degree, but is not as noticeably bad as IU’s (at least, I didn’t think so).

One big complaint I have is that some of the more futuristic landscapes are so detailed that they become incredibly difficult on the eyes. You’d think that multiple textures, transparency, and lighting would be a good thing, but it can all too often be very taxing to look at. Also, the game’s rotatable camera frequently bounces off of things in confined areas, further adding to the pain. These are complaints I had after playing for more than 6 hours straight though, so if you keep your play sessions shorter, they shouldn’t be too big of a hassle.

The English voice acting is, for the most part, rather solid. The lip-synching is very good (especially compared to IU), and most of the voices fit very well. There will be people who won’t like it, but that’s just how localized JRPGs go. However, the omission of a Japanese language track is, again, a terrible decision by Square Enix. Honestly, I think a lot of people would pay a little bit extra to just download the Japanese track from Xbox Live if it didn’t fit on the discs. But for it to be absent completely is ridiculous. The same goes for the anime style portraits and Japanese menus. It’s fine that they wanted to replace them with something more “accessible,” but I don’t see the problem with offering fans the option.

In the grand scheme of things, however, these complaints are minimal, and certainly not frustrating enough to be deal-breakers. The CG portraits are not as terrible as you might think, and the localization, in general, is very good.

I should add, for fans of the series, though the gameplay is more reminiscent of SO3 (except way better), the overall game is much closer to SO1 and SO2.

If you are a fan of the series, or just a fan of the action-RPG genre in general, Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a no-brainer. Though the game isn’t quite as polished as Tales of Vesperia or Lost Odyssey, it is definitely the best title with the Square Enix logo on it in a while (even though it’s a tri-Ace game), and provided the rest of the game holds up to my first 12 hours, is what I would feel is the first must-own RPG of 2009. I seriously haven’t put it down for 2 days, and would rather be playing it than writing this.

If there’s anything you think I missed or have any questions about the game, please feel free to ask in the comments. As usual, no spoilers please and thank you.