[Game Review] Star Ocean: The Last Hope (360)

So, it has come to my attention that I haven't done a video game review since June. I didn't even realize I've had this blog for that long. Wow, time in the Summer really goes by quick. And I know that my last review was of another Star Ocean game, but don't think I'm doing these because I'm some huge fanboy of the series. I'm fairly new to the series as a whole, actually, and gave the last one a 7.3. Star Ocean: The Last Hope, however, I was tempted to give two different scores to. By the end of this review you might understand why.

Storyline

This isn't intentional, but I'm starting out with the bad. There is really nothing good to say here, unless your definition of good expands to mediocrity. The plot isn't bad but it is poorly presented and at times is nonexistent. The game starts you off as up and coming officer, Edge Maverick, and only five minutes into the game you're already left wondering who was in charge of the character design. In fact, the characters in this game are so bad that they shut out any hope that this game's mediocre story could ever have. I could write about 10 paragraphs nitpicking little annoying things that they did with this games script and voice acting, but instead I'll just talk about Lymle. If you've already played this game then you don't even need to read the rest of this paragraph to know what I'm going to say. Actually, words cannot even begin to describe how much of an utter gutwrenching abomination Lymle is. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to take a 6 year old character, call her 15 and put her in situations that many adults wouldn't be able to handle. And as if that's not enough, in her world every fucking sentence has to end with the word 'kay. It might not seem bad, but when you have a game with hours and hours of cutscenes, bad cutscenes, 'kay 'kay 'kay is the icing on the fucking cake. I've never hated a set of characters in anything as much as I hate the playable characters in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. That is saying a lot people.

Score: Below Average 3/10

Gameplay

Gameplay in The Last Hope is a mixed issue for me. Unlike the game's storyline, the gameplay has some goods to go with its bads. Some of the goods include its real time action based combat system that plays like a fighting game in ways, as well as the fact that many of the dungeons and areas in this game are designed to be long, challenging and consistently entertaining. So what are the bads? Well, there's a lot of them, but most are just minor issues. Almost every quest is collect a bunch of some obscure item that involves tons of backtracking for an irrelevant reward or "Hey! I'm lazy as shit. Can you find this person for me?". And it wouldn't be so bad if every city didn't have 50 NPC's, or if there were a more convenient method of travel before disc 3. Also, the customization is both promising and a let down. When I first discovered the item synthesis in this game allows you to combine any two items in the game I was really excited. The only problem is that it is incredibly tedious and it often isn't worth upgrading equipment until the end of the game, otherwise it just gets outranked by the next best thing you pick up in a dungeon. And as for the actual item creation, this game creates the illusion that you're going to have a lot to look forward to. Especially later in the game. The only problem is that you keep playing and playing and playing and then you realize you've beaten the game and you still don't have any of the materials required to make the good stuff. In fact, the only way to get most of the best items is to do tons and tons of sidequests that the game doesn't even hint to you exist. You have to just spend about 20 hours guessing, talking to random NPCs or look it up online. And even most online guides don't know about a lot of the secrets. Overall, the gameplay offers a lot but it isn't offered in a very convenient or accessible way. In fact, by the end of the game if you want to revisit older areas in the game you actually have to take out disc 3 and put one of the old discs in. This can get very repetitive if you are gathering an item that is only on disc 2, because you can only do item creation/customization on disc 3. Usually, I like to mess around near the end game and see the extra content these games offer but it's so poorly presented in this game that for the most part I just said "Fuck it!"

Score: Above Average 8/10

Sound & Graphics

At least there's one area of this game to be appreciated. In terms of sound and graphics, this game excels beyond most other games of the genre. The environments in this game have tremendous amounts of detail put into them and the music is almost always perfectly fitting throughout the game. My only complaint here, yet again stems from whoever's job it was to work on the characters. I got this impression that some of the characters, notably Reimi, felt inhuman by their lack of expression. For the most part they didn't even bother to program the character's mouths moving during dialogue. That seems like a pretty big detail to leave out to me.

Score: Above Average 8/10

Final Thoughts

Although certain aspects of this game are atrocious *cough*LYMLE*cough*, I still don't regret playing it. With over 60 hours of immersive gameplay and a genuinely fun combat system, for the most part I enjoyed it. If you happen to have a 360 and you like longer RPGs then maybe you should check this game out, but it's definitely not worth going out of your way for.

My overall score is: 7.0/10.0