About half my life ago the Nintendo Power magazine had a section called Epic Center. It was dedicated to RPG’s and tactical war games of the time, and quickly became a favorite of mine. I remember first reading about the original Star Ocean in there, impressed with the screen shots and amazed that the game featured actual voice acting. I eagerly awaited the announcement for it to come to America, but as any and all new games for the Nintendo 64 began to crowd out any Super Nintendo title in the magazine, I lost hope.

I was overjoyed when the second title in the series actually managed to release in the States for the original Playstation, and after buying it on the day of release quickly fell in love with its combat system, characters and setting. Unfortunately I never got around to beating the game, but it always had a place in my heart nonetheless.

Now comes Star Ocean: The Last Hope, my first encounter with the series since high school. I was hoping to relive some of the better times of JRPG’s through it, but instead was met with a lot of disappointment and problems plaguing the genre today.

On the plus side, the combat is better than ever. The basics have remained the same, applying a simple system of walking up to an enemy and mashing the attack button, occasionally throwing in a special move to bring in some extra damage. The companion A.I. is also intelligent enough to fight adequately while managing their magic conservatively.

The game has a sort of “aggro” system to control who enemies are attacking, but it is awfully finicky. Sometimes all you need to do is strike at an enemy once and they’ll focus their aggression on you, while other times you may wipe out the majority of their health and they will pay you no mind. This is irritating if you are trying to get a powerful enemy off of a weaker ally, but also in order to pull off something called a Blindside.

Blindsides are one of the additions to the combat that makes it enjoyable, especially in combination with the Battle Bonus Board. In order to pull off a Blindside, the enemy you are currently targeting must also be targeting you. When the enemy has you in their sites, a reticle will appear around your character. To Blindside, the player must hold down the B-button and then move to the left or the right when the reticle is either yellow or flashing. Some enemies can counter a Blindside, indicated by a red reticle. The advantage of this move is that an enemy will become confused temporarily and greatly increase the chances of a critical strike.

The most common use of Blindsides is to try and finish off an enemy with a critical strike, adding a jewel to the Battle Bonus Board. Finishing off enemies in different manners adds different colored jewels, each which increases the rewards after combat. This varies from an extra percentage of experience, of money, or of recovering a small amount of health and magic or gaining skill points. Being able to determine what sort of bonuses you can get after combat is somehow a very addictive and fun aspect of the battle, and even more rewarding. Earning an extra 90% of experience while recovering 5% of your health and magic makes you feel like some manner of God among the world.

Characters also gain skill points through leveling up, exploring the world and accomplishing side quests. These can be used to increase combat capabilities, as well as abilities used to retrieve or create items. The item creation tools are a nice aside, but overall don’t provide much added gameplay. Just a nice distraction once in a while.

The fun combat and interesting item creation are about the limit to the game’s fun, however. From there on it is downhill. For starters, why an action RPG like this has no co-op in this day and age of the world wide web is beyond me, especially since the Tales games include it as a regular feature. The major boss fights also throw the game’s difficulty balance off, going from moderately challenging to frustratingly hard. I always like some added difficulty, but not when it makes me feel as if my character is almost worthless unless I devote my entire time to keeping my party’s health up. Even so, the difficulty never quite reaches impossible. It does mean you should fight every enemy you see to make sure you gain a lot of experience.

This goes from fun to tedium as the dungeons are all huge but lack any fun of exploration. Early on you can get a skill called “treasure sense” which, fortunately, cuts down on fruitless exploration. However, the dungeons are still massive and take hours to go through. Occasionally they will come up with an idea that adds some fun into the typical dungeon crawl, but the designers then use it over and over until it has lost any charm and become another frustration. Dungeons swiftly go from fun to a real pain.
This might all be worth it if progressing through the story offered any reward on its own. Instead, this is the weakest part of the game and just about makes the whole thing not worth it. There is no single plot arc that really ties everything together. It is just one sequence of events that happen to set up the villains for the other three games. While the characters are mostly searching for one person throughout most of the game, it is almost like this goal takes back seat to all the other random events that occur. A random encounter with a black hole sending the characters to an alternate Earth in 1957 is so painful, and with no greater purpose than to try and force a character to go through a period of angst and fake development.

See these people? I hate them. You will, too.

The characters might be the only thing worse than the game’s story. Only the male characters seem to be an attempt to be interesting, but none of them are truly likable due to poor writing and little actual personality. They would all seem flat if it weren’t for the voice actors doing an overall decent job, but in the end none of them feel real in any way. They just seem to be the product of someone that has watched way too much anime.

The female characters are the worst and only endorse the latter statement. You have the generic love interest with no personality, the more mature woman that shows off all of her assets, the annoying computer A.I. with an equally annoying voice actress, a six year old with Asperger’s Syndrome, a cat girl and retarded seraphim with perhaps the worst voice actress in the entire world. Only some crazy fanboy pedophile would find any of these characters likable. Anyone else will downright hate them and wish for nothing more than their death.

I’m typically no advocate of children dying, but there are honestly few things I long for more than this girl’s demise.

For most, this is the game’s deal breaker. Sure, the combat is fun, but the story is so poor and the characters so bland and easy to dislike that it just doesn’t justify it. You’ll spend over thirty hours playing a game where you will get maybe five hours maximum of total combat time. If you want to be certain, just play as Edge most of the game and you’ll gradually get battle trophies (in game achievements) that will notify you that you’ve spent maybe 180 minutes playing him in combat after being well over twenty hours into the game.

At best, this game is a rental. I can only imagine a die hard fan of the franchise wanting to actually spend money on it, and even then $60 is just too high a price to ask. If you really want to play it, rent it. That way you won’t feel obligated to beat it, and you’ll at least have gotten some enjoyment out of what is actually a pretty decent combat system. There are better things to spend money on, though.