Hey everyone; Today I’m going to jump right into one of my favorite gaming genres, the Japanese RPG. Being a fan of RPGs since the first Final Fantasy on the Nintendo, I’ve seen my fair share of them over time. RPGs have tried new things to try to make their title a little different from the rest like real time combat, interesting magic systems, and crazy characters; but it really just comes down to a great story. What’s great with RPGs, is that they give you LOTS of content for the cost, and when done properly, you get more than what you’re paying for. So with that, lets take a look at Square Enix and tri-Ace’s newest RPG, Star Ocean: The Last Hope.
Story
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fifth installment in the Star Ocean series of games. This was actually the first Star Ocean game I’ve played and it turned out I didn’t need to know any back-story from the previous games because this game is a prequel to the series. The Last Hope takes place some 80 years into Earth’s future where a worldwide nuclear war has completely destroyed the surface of the planet, forcing the survivors to live underground. The major powers of the world combine into a single nation with a focus on space exploration to find a new suitable planet to inhabit to save humanity. The United Science and Technology Administration discover the ability to travel at warp speed and space exploration becomes possible.
The game begins with the 20 year old lead character, spiky haired clichéd badass Edge Maverick, as a pilot of one of five ships about to go where no man has gone before. Of course, upon entering warp, something goes wrong and all five ships lose communication with each other. After crash landing, it’s up to you to find the other ships and figure out what the heck just happened.
Unfortunately, the game takes some 60 minutes before you really get control of your character for the first time. The opening cut scenes take forever and then you are taken through a “battle simulator” acting as a tutorial, which is actually kind of difficult to learn some of the new gimmicks to the genre, which I’ll get into later.
The theme of the game seems to be a lot like that of Star Trek. Basically you are in command of a ship that will navigate the galaxy to explore suitable places to live, and aid anyone in trouble that you find along the way.
Design
Star Ocean appears to be an RPG potpourri. We have the planetary travels of Mass Effect, skill customization along the same lines as Blue Dragon, Swords, Guns and Magic in the future like in the Phantasy Star universe, and the need to boldly go where no man has gone before as in of course Star Trek.
Throughout the game Edge will come across 11 additional companions that will join him in his quest. Some of these characters are really cool, and ALL of them are really fun to play as. But I don’t know what it is with RPGs these days. There seems to be a growing trend to include the most annoying characters imaginable as some of your side-kicks that for whatever reason, NEVER shut up! What’s worse, all of these characters have turned out to be some of the most powerful characters in those games. What gives? Lost Odyssey gave us drunken womanizer Jansen and Blue Dragon gave us the squealing Devee MaruMaro. But Star Ocean gives us a frigging smorgasbord of annoying bastards!
Now, to be true to Japanese games, we also get a small taste of the scantily clad women we’ve all come to expect. Reimi joins you from the very start and totes around a schoolgirl body with a short skirt and later, we get a few run-ins with this nasty little beast.
This game has A LOT of cut scenes. There could be times where you literally aren’t really playing your character for up to 40 minutes. It’s kind of like watching a movie, that you get to take part in. The game is 3 discs and should take you between 40 and 60 hours depending on how many side quests you take part in.
Gameplay
Lots of people don’t like RPGs because they are turn based. You set up your attacks and wait to see what happens. With the plethora of fast paced action packed first person shooters and a world full of ADD gamers, many of you simply can’t get into it. Well not anymore. Star Ocean gives us Real Time combat and it is badass.
Now with that, Star Ocean provides a rather in depth tutorial that shows you every aspect of the combat system. Unfortunately it seems kind of overwhelming at first as there is really a lot to it. Being that you have a party of people fighting with you and you can only control one at a time, it takes some good reflexes if you want to properly execute spells and combos and still prevent incoming damage. Like most RPGs, Star Ocean is single player, though a split screen co-op really could have enhanced the gameplay for these reasons. But once you get the hang of it, it is really fun, fast paced and very addictive.
The AI certainly aren’t anything to complain about. They are very useful and you can even specify how aggressive you want them to act while in combat. They are a godsend when compared to some of the AI in other games I’ve played, such as your dim-witted companions in Lego Star Wars.
Now one really cool feature of the game is the item creation. You could literally spend hours alone on this mini-game if you will. I won’t get into the details, but it’s pretty complex and you get to create some really powerful items and weapons here.
Star Ocean isn’t without its pain points. One particular grimace of the game is the inability to save your game anywhere and everywhere. Now I understand that most RPGs have certain locations for you to sporadically save your game, but in Star Ocean, they are so spread out, you might go for over an HOUR without being able to save!
Another problem I had initially was that I found it extremely difficult to control the character. It turns out that my main problem resided with the camera controls. Once I found the options to invert the left-right and up-down movements to the familiar style of your favorite first person shooter, movement became a lot more fluid.
Presentation
First things first, the graphics in Star Ocean are freaking awesome! The character models are kind of cartoony while the background is more realistic looking. It kind of reminds me of an updated Final Fantasy 7. The graphics engine is an enhanced version of the engine used in Infinite Undiscovery yielding the ability to create much better graphics and render lighting effects on the fly. You really notice its awesomeness during combat with all of the awesome spell and combo effects!
Though the graphics are wonderful, I do have a few negative comments. The camera on the world view is a bit too zoomed out, and some environments are too bright to really see the detail. When you get new armor, the graphics of your character’s armor does not change. You are stuck with the default initial look of all of the characters. After playing MMOs for years, I guess I’m spoiled by the character customization options you get online, but whatever, I’m over it.
As mentioned earlier, this game has a TON of cut scenes. Now, all of the cut scenes are pre-rendered and beautiful, but the voice acting is TERRIBLE! I think the only character whose voice acting is even semi-decent is that of Edge. Haha, you’ve just got to hear the other characters for yourself. They are absolutely ridiculous.
Overall the music is mediocre and doesn’t always go with the content. I recall a series of battles near the end of the first disc where all of the combat music is soothing and completely un-inspirational.
Summary
All in all, Star Ocean is a really good game. It has great graphics and SUPER fun, action packed real-time combat and it has all of the customization, character building and item collecting elements we are familiar with. The cut-scenes get to be a bit long and the voice acting is ridiculous, making the handful of companions terribly annoying. I don’t know if it is the game to bring non-rpgers to the genre, but it is certainly entertaining enough to hold us over until Final Fantasy 13 is released.
