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Write-Up:

Well, it’s been almost one year now since I reviewed Star Ocean: The Last Hope for the Xbox 360. I didn’t have anything exciting planned for this week so I went ahead and asked Square-Enix for a copy of the PS3 version of the game. Developed by tri-Ace and released on February 9th, the International version exclusive to the PS3, brings us several new features and combines all of the content on a single Blu-Ray disc. Now, I didn’t beat the game on my first play-through, and now that I’ve been doing that for all of my game reviews, I figured I’d take the time to check this out and beat it for all of you, and I’ll tell you what, I actually enjoyed my second play-through even more than my first. But stay tuned, Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a hard-core role-playing game and is certainly not for everyone. Over the past week I’ve uploaded my game-play footage to my other channel, ZeitgeistOther, so make sure to check that out; and if you aren’t following me on Twitter yet, you probably should be, and of course, don’t forget to subscribe to this channel and click the thumbs up button on this video! So with that, here are my thoughts on the International release of Star Ocean: The Last Hope.

If you didn’t catch my first review of the game, I’ll give a quick recap of what’s going on. The story takes place a few hundred years in Earth’s future, where nuclear war has devastated the planet making it inhabitable and forcing the survivors to live deep underground. In an effort to re-colonize, emphasis was placed on space exploration and light speed travel. You play the game as Edge Maverick, a young space pilot of the USTA and are on the first mission to take 5 ships through warp to begin exploration for a new habitable planet. In warp, something goes wrong and all 5 ships lose communication with one another and some crash land on the planet Aeos while the others are missing in action.

The game has several story plots and the first revolves around both finding the missing ships in your fleet and then playing Star Trek by helping and saving any alien inhabitants that you come across. You’ll travel to several planets helping people until about the middle of the game when the real plot is revealed to you and shit gets serious. There are 9 playable characters that you’ll gain throughout the adventure, each with extremely well defined back-stories and unique personalities. If you don’t like reading lots of dialog and watching lots of cut-scenes, just stop right here, as this game is loaded with them and certainly will not be for you. For those of us that enjoy a great story woven into a game, let’s continue.

While I was more efficient my second play-through, I was able to beat the game in about 35 hours, and that was probably only about 70% of the content. There is a lot of backtracking and side quests that I did not do, and upon beating the game, additional content is added for you to continue your adventure, and you can go back and finish everything that you missed; so you’ve got a lot of game for your money here, especially considering how massive the maps and dungeons are. Star Ocean is a single player game but I think it could have benefited from a jump-in, jump-out same-screen co-op to allow a buddy to play one of your additional characters while in combat. Not that the AI isn’t any good, in fact, they are quite efficient, I just think that feature would be pretty cool.

One thing that likely will annoy some players is that save spots are few and far between. You might get one at the beginning and ending of a dungeon, and near towns, but nowhere on your way. You might actually go an hour or longer without finding a place to save. Now, I’ve got lots of time to devote to gaming, so it wasn’t a huge issue, but if you can only play for a little bit here and there, this is certainly something you need to consider.

Unique to the International version of the game, you’ll have access to the Japanese voices that you can swap instead of the English ones, and the text can be read in 6 different languages. You can also change the menu system to a classic anime style instead of the modern CG style. If you are big into anime, likely this is a pretty cool feature for you.

Like the 360 version, the game-play revolves around open world traveling where you can see the monsters on the field. If you touch one of them, you enter the battle screen where your 4 active party members are controlled in real-time. The combat system was the most fun aspect of the game to me as each new series of monsters forced me to adapt my strategies to kill them, and reacting in real time really gets my blood pumping. The boss fights can be pretty freaking difficult as well, especially the final boss. It’s not often that I cheer after defeating a boss in a game, but after killing that dude, I screamed my ass off.

In combat, you can only control one character at a time, but you can switch between any of them at the push of a button. As you kill monsters in special ways, a bonus board will begin to fill up on the right side of the screen, which offers things like additional experience, money and restored health at the end of each battle. When that thing is full it is usually a good idea to grind for a bit to take advantage of sometimes double experience points. Each character can focus their build on one of two mechanics, rush and blindside. A character who focuses on rush will fill a rush gauge in combat and then unleash additional damage for a set period of time once it’s full, or even string together rush combos with a partner for a devastating burst attack. Characters who specialize in blindsiding will quickly dodge a monsters attack and then quickly run behind them to attack them while they are exposed for additional damage. Both play-styles are fun and it’s good to have a balance between your characters.

If you enjoy crafting and gathering, there is a very extensive system built into the game and it is an absolute time sync as you’ll attempt to learn all of the recipes and gather all of the components necessary to craft.

I tried the game with both the English and Japanese voices and eventually stuck with the Japanese ones because so many of the English characters were just annoying as hell. To me, the Japanese actors were significantly better. In addition, some of the cut scenes are seriously fucking long. There are several that are 25 minutes plus, and these can really slow down the momentum of the game. Hell, you don’t really even start playing the game until about one hour in because of a series of these.

The soundtrack in the game is wonderful, as every area has great fully orchestrated music and the International version has some additional tracks not included in the 360 version. While the graphics are not top of the line, the art style is very pretty, but like the 360 version, it often suffers from frame rate issues in combat when there are a lot of effects on the screen, which is pretty much constant as you gain a bunch of moves later in the game.

I really enjoyed my play-through of this game. In fact, it’s all I could think about as I sat at work each day, just waiting to get back to see how the story was going to unfold. But with the long cut scenes and few and far between save spots, you really need to dedicate about 2 hours each time you want to play this game. The graphics are not top of the line but the art style is very appealing and the combat mechanics are extremely fun and require a lot of strategy and lots of practice to master. Likely many of you out there will not like this game, but for those hard-core RPG fans, I’d say that this is a must-have. For those that already have played it, who do you think the most annoying character in the game was? Leave your questions and comments below!

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