Game Details

Title: Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Developer: Tri Ace
Publisher: Square Enix
Website: Square-Enix Star Ocean Page
Game Type: Japanese RPG
Multi-player: None
Age Rating: 12+
Length: Long (>20 hours for story playthrough, >100 hours for all achievements)

My Impressions

I am a fan of Role Playing Games, and enjoy the story driven action that the best of them offer. Star Ocean is made by Tri Ace who also worked on Infinite Undiscovery and uses the same engine, and in many ways is a satisfying game that will keep fans of JRPGs happy for hours. Unfortunately it suffers from a few flaws that will prevent it from being thought of as a classic RPG.

From a gameplay standpoint I found little to fault with Star Ocean, as it works on a monster encounter system where you can see the monsters in the environment and choose to try to encounter them or avoid them, unlike the random encounters of Lost Odyssey. Unlike Tri-Ace’s previous game Infinite Undiscovery where the battles largely took place on the field, when you encounter monsters in Star Ocean you are taken to “an arena” where the battle with a group of monsters takes place. While I personally prefer a what you see is what you get system, the battles themselves are satisfying and while the controls can initially seem overwhelming in the tutorial, the game eases you into it and it becomes second nature.

While the game suffers a bit from the generic JRPG flaw of the main character being a teenage boy and having a relatively young cast with the odd older hand. The majority of the characters are likable enough and you can get to learn more about each character through “private actions” that take place as you are travelling between planets and occasionally on planets. The only character I couldn’t stand to watch was a “background antagonist” and thankfully (minor spoilers) they were killed off late in the game.

There are however several flaws in star ocean that seriously impacted my enjoyment of the game, the first being the save points or rather lack of them. Now while there are save points at the start of a dungeon and just before every boss, there is a distinct lack of savepoints mid dungeon and the respawning of monsters every time you re-enter an area means it is normally not possible to quickly backtrack out of a dungeon if you need to quit the game for some reason. A linked flaw to this is that most of the time after facing bosses you cannot “fast-travel” back to a safe location but instead have to fight your way back. This flaw was especially annoying after the first boss which did not have a nearby savepoint and had you refuse an option to quickly go back to base in the post fight cut-scene as you wanted to “explore” some more.

The regeneration of harvest and mine points was also poorly implemented since unlike the monsters they only regenerate when you go back to your ship the Calnus. This made gathering resources even more time consuming than they needed to be, and while I could understand the developers not having them regenerate when you enter and leave the area, they could have at least have them regenerate if you rest at an in.

The cut-scenes are another major problem as there are too many and they are too long. So long in fact that your wireless controller will automatically switch off due to inactivity in several of them if you are not careful.  Now I enjoy cut scenes as they can be used to great effect to progress the plot BUT they should not be so long that you start to tire of them and want to play the game again, which several of the cut scenes in Star Ocean where. Another major flaw is the plot, which I found to be unintelligible in terms of the enemies motivations and quite unbelievable. This is a pity as the character driven parts of the plot were quite strong

The final flaw is the achievement implementation which suffers from having too many secret achievements which are not spoilers, and being too collection driven. This latter aspect is especially true for the “battle trophy” achievements since while some battle trophies are fairly standard, there are too many along the lines of “Character wins battle with 3hp left after killing 2 monsters with a spoon”. Well maybe not quite that bad but they might as well be, especially as for characters to gain most of their battle trophies you have to be in control of them further adding to the time needed to gain them.

Despite these flaws I have found myself investing a lot of time in Star Ocean, however part of this is due to being a gamerscorewhore rather than actually enjoying the game.

My Recommendation

Consider

While the Game will keep fans of Japanese Role Playing Games happy, the game suffers from having overly long cut-scenes and needing to constantly swap discs later in the game. The achievements are also very time consuming and tedious if aiming for the full 1000 points.

Screenshots