Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth game in the Star Ocean series. Originally released exclusively for the Xbox 360, it was ported over to PS3 with both English and Japanese voiceovers plus an optional change in menu aesthetics (from 3D character portraits to anime-styled ones). For a game released in 2009, The Last Hope has decent graphics but it will not wow you. Initially, a lot of the environments appear grainy and shiny, the type you get when it's trying to put in too many details. The Last Hope is a JRPG so you can expect a deep and involved battle system. You will not be disappointed and it is hard at the beginning of the game with the high learning curve of the battle system coupled with stun locks from enemies that can easily kill you. Once you get three party members though, it helps immensely and you find yourself not so close to death after every battle. You are in a party of four, controlling only one character while the AI controls the rest. The battle system takes place on a separate screen with enemies roaming the environments. You press X to attack and Circle to jump.
You can hit up to three times as part of a normal combo before a brief pause by your character. It feels kind of like a Tales game but the difference here is the Blindside ability. You can time your dodge just before an enemy attacks and your character will run to behind the enemy. If you have a successful Blindside, the next strike is a guaranteed critical hit and also breaks the enemy's target lock. Apart from physical attacks, there are Skills which are special moves that you can chain together to keep your combo going. Passive abilities are available but you are limited to only equipping two at a time. There are Symbology which is basically magic attacks. Lastly there is a rush gauge that is filled whenever your character lands a successful hit or is hurt by the enemy. Once it is full you can either activate it such that you won't get any knockbacks from enemy attacks and higher attack power, or you can activate a Rush Combo which allows you to chain multiple skills together with other characters without fear of enemy retaliation. All these form a complex battle system that works well together with different layers of play styles.
Unfortunately, the battles are sometimes hampered by stupid AI where they will not use items to heal a party member if they are paralyzed or affected by other status ailments, you will need to manually use it yourself. This is super annoying especially when you reach some areas with enemies that constantly paralyze you which could potentially wipe your party out and send you back to your last save file. Other annoyances include the fact that there's no manual targeting. The game chooses the target for you which can get annoying when there are bosses that require you to defeat certain parts first or you're facing against a huge crowd of enemies and the target keeps changing so you can't even reduce their numbers. You can switch and use any character even during battle, this means even though you can only use four characters in your party at any one time, you can swap characters as they get incapacitated during the battle and you won't get a game over until all eight of your characters have fallen. There are Battle Trophies relating to each character which require you to perform specific actions while using that character.
Battle Trophies end up being one of the biggest grind of the game if you want 100% completion and the Platinum Trophy. For the grinders out there, there is a Bonus Board feature which allows additional experience points, money etc if you perform specific special moves, such as defeating an enemy with a critical hit. This is cool and handy to help out with grinding and levelling up. Of course, there are a number of boss battles but not as many as you would expect. These boss battles are usually about recognizing the boss's attack patterns and striking where they are weak. You might need to use the Blindside ability smartly and while the boss battles can be difficult at times, it is very satisfying once you defeat them and none of the boss battles during the story, except maybe the final boss, that was too hard causing you to die unfairly. One of the most common complains about The Last Hope is the lack of save points. Rather, it is that the save points are definitely too far apart. You cannot save anywhere, only at specific placements decided by the developers.
Save points on average are around 30 mins to 1 hour apart, which is not acceptable especially when you die, you revert back to the last save. This is a terrible and unforgivable design in this day and age, forcing players to go through literally the whole dungeon before they can save is frowned upon. It's manageable for most of the game but the final story dungeon where it can take up to 3 hours to get through properly without a guide if you're unlucky, since there are a few confusing areas, and having no save points is a stupid idea. Compounding this aggravation is the fact that a lot of the times, you'll have a save point literally 1 minute after the previous one in the most unusual of areas (i.e. two in the ship and another one right after you step out of it). The story of The Last Hope is fairly bland and uninteresting. It has a really neat premise. It starts off with a cutscene showing World War III and the near total devastation of Earth, forcing humans to quickly advance their technology and explore the "Star Ocean", i.e. space, for hospitable planets. We follow Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, a pair of childhood friends as they explore the outer reaches of space, meeting new alien species and eventually uncovering a plot by a sinister alien force wanting to destroy the universe.
Edge and Reimi travel to various planets, developing friendships and all the other predictable events that come in JRPGs. The English voice acting and lip-syncing is poor. This is somewhat expected but you do end up getting used to it. You can switch to Japanese voice acting if you wish. More jarring are the character animations which can be awkward at times, plus, the character models have a plasticky shine and their eyes can be downright dead at times. As a staple of the series, there are Private Actions which are effectively additional scenes improving relationships between characters. These are crucial for unlocking specific endings at the end of the game. Most of the story is told via extremely long cutscenes where 90% of the time, are too long and boring to keep your attention. It is obnoxious that you are forced to sit through 30 mins to 45 mins of cutscenes after a boss battle. Frequently, you will be watching cutscenes at least 20 mins long but there are no substance to them. Tri-Ace needs to improve their storytelling skills. The ending is approximately 1 hour long but it is satisfying and wraps things up nicely.
Since you spend so much time with the characters, even if the story was boring you become attached to them and feel sad that the game is ending. It takes roughly 40 to 50 hours to finish the story alone. Since The Last Hope takes place around the galaxy, you'll be exploring various planets and terrains. There are huge environments which makes exploration fantastic. However, these areas can at the same time be a bit empty. Chests, harvest points and mining points scatter around the environments to keep it interesting. As mentioned earlier, enemies roam the environments and battles take place in a separate screen. There are no random encounters which makes traversing the large environments much better. However, in tight dungeons this doesn't make much of a difference when you are forced to fight an enemy every few steps as there is not way to dodge around them. This is frustrating especially when some of the dungeons have environmental hazards making them more like a "maze". Considering that you're trying to figure out a path to the next area, it doesn't help that you are fighting a battle every two seconds.
Compounding the annoyance factor is that enemies chase you and by the time you want to finish up the dungeon and skip all these enemies, you can't. Considering that you are at a much higher level compared to those enemies, it would have been nice if the developers made all the enemies run away instead of just a select few. One thing that is for sure, The Last Hope has a lot of content in addition to the story. There are sidequests which are all boring drab affairs, these are mainly fetch quests and forces you to walk a lot between cities. It's annoying that there's no fast travel feature in this game which means that after the initial awe of exploring the environments for the first time, it becomes a hindrance. Granted, it becomes a little bit better at the end of the game with more warp points, but it's still too cumbersome. Even if you do not care much for the sidequests and only want to unlock all the story endings, you will have to complete some horrible time-wasting quests which force you to trek to and back in order to use harvesting points which only respawn by heading back to your ship.
When collecting items, what makes it worse if that you will need items which aren't guaranteed plus you need quite a number of specific items to create other items. It's these little things that make The Last Hope extremely aggravating and annoying to play. Post-game content includes two bonus dungeons, one of which has many floors and no save points... topped off with superbosses which can decimate your party without proper preparation and strategy. There's also a colosseum (i.e. fighting arena) and bunny racing minigame, both of which are time-consuming and not that rewarding. Surprisingly, the game loads really quickly when travelling between planets. Still, it will take you literally hundred of hours to get 100% on everything which makes the game grindy since most of the content is uninteresting unless you like farming monsters repeatedly. Overall, Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a love/hate game. It has so many addictive elements such as the fantastically complex and fun battle system, but is hampered with many tiny flaws including lack of save points, boring story and mundane quests which all add up to ruin the experience somewhat. Nevertheless, The Last Hope is a meaty JRPG that is a lot of fun to play and extremely enjoyable but be prepared to throw your controller in frustration at certain points of the game.
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