Star Ocean 4 is a tragic creature. It’s not a great game, nor can it even see greatness from where it is now. Instead, it feels like it was dragged, kicking and clawing, away from greatness by wicked beasts that feed only on the worst excesses of Japanese pop storytelling.
So its story is almost unfathomably bad. Here is one Edge Maverick, who goes against what his parents wanted for him by being neither edgy or a maverick. Born on a post-apocalyptic earth, he is but a cog in the government division tasked with finding a new home world for the remainder of humanity. A coincidental calamity sees him promoted to captain of his own ship, with his mission clear: mankind is choking on fallout, so go find a new planet for them. Preferably one without giant man-murdering insects.
He immediately loses the plot. Long before he finds himself embroiled in a conflict for the fate of the universe, Edge is compiling his ragtag team of horrifying cosplay clichés: there’s a winged girl in there, and an embarrassingly clad catgirl, and at least two different varieties of space elf. He takes this merry band of awfully voice-acted annoyances across a series of nearly non-sequitur adventures, none of which have anything to do with colonizing the galaxy. Perhaps because he has confused being the universe’s most incompetent space captain with being a maverick, he messes up nearly all of these missions, which apparently excuses him to spend hours and hours as a mopey drama queen.
Eventually we do get to the battle for all life, and things get even worse. It’s a turn of events that gets all of the actors talking incessantly about “evolution,” except none of them know what “evolution” is, giving it at least three different definitions but using them interchangeably, to the point where it’s no longer clear what the main villain is doing or what anyone should learn from any of it. So it’s no surprise when all the characters take the wrong lesson away at the end, though it is hilarious.
This complete mess is relayed in a never-ending barrage of excruciating cutscenes, but the real tragedy of Star Ocean: The Last Hope isn’t that it’s a terrible game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. It’s actually quite a good game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. From a technical perspective this is about as good as the JRPG has ever gotten—Tri-Ace’s lovely engine pumps out some lush and colorful vistas while keeping framerates high and load times nearly nonexistent. The super-fast realtime battle system balances chaos and twitch with an incredible amount of tactical depth. The difficulty curve forces you to learn all of its many nuances, so by the end of the game you’ll be juggling quick attack chains with methodical menu-based magic, mixing fully aggressive attacks with slower but more damaging blindside attacks, and switching characters in and out of the party while switching which character is under manual control. There’s even a customizable bonus board, which rewards certain battle actions like critical hits with percentage increases to things like experience and gold acquisition. And the increase persists from battle to battle until you take a critical hit yourself, adding a level of tension to the affair.
This battle system is well integrated into the game’s other subsystems, which include character growth, item creation and data collection. These systems are for the most part well implemented. Character development is primarily handled through the enhancements of skills via scarce skill points, forcing the player to often make difficult decisions about who needs to be better at what right now. Item creation is based on a tangled web of dozens of collectible doodads, with item recipe discovery based primarily on character skills. The data collecting element rewards battling enemies with increased enemy info—battle a specific type of creature enough and you’ll be able to capture their essence into an accessory, providing stat gains based on the nature of that creature. There’re a huge number of interlocking gears for the maximal player to keep in mind, which is good. It’s interesting. And the reward for playing long and well isn’t just better characters and loot, there’s also a wealth of contextual information to read through.
This is all well and good, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is designed in a way that minimizes its strengths. Combat is fun, but dungeons are long and strenuous affairs with architecture often repeating and save points spread far apart. The sheer number of battles will begin to grate, and then you’re rewarded with…another shrill, nonsensical cutscene.
The reason I spent the beginning of this review on the game’s story is because Star Ocean: The Last Hope is an incredible case. It’s fun, on several levels. But here fun is not enough, because the game’s universe is simply a place that you do not want to visit. If you watch the cinemas and leave on the voice-acting it’s like going to Disneyland except you have to ride the teacups for hours at a time and it’s “Douchebags Get In Free Day”. Turn all of that off (and there are a wealth of options to do that, including turning off character voice individually) and it becomes an empty, more joyless sort of fun.
I requested the review for this game having not played a Star Ocean before because it was made clear to me that Star Ocean: The Last Hope, being a prequel, would be a good way for a JRPG fan to jump into the series. Unless you can watch all of the embedded cutscenes in this review without wincing, I would recommend you do not follow my lead.
Rating: C-
Past Reviews:
Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3