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Sign In Sign in to add your own tags to this product. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. VAT included in all prices where applicable. View mobile website. Fast paced combat, friendship building and corny dialogue ensue. Players can dive back into the interstellar adventure when it releases on PlayStation 4 and PC next month. If tri-Ace has polished the systems to match the new graphical fidelity, it could be a fun return to the game's world.
Join Sign In. Yet, lying beneath that straightforward game is a slew of reasons to keep playing and exploring for those of us that are a bit more hardcore. And if you fall into that hardcore category, you'll likely take solace in the knowledge that you'll have to play through the entire game multiple times to see everything.
Beat the game once and you'll unlock a harder difficulty. Beat that to unlock the ultimate mode. You can carry all of your collection data Battle Trophies are back and boy are they ever numerous over from one play through to the next -- something you'll have to do if you want all of the achievements.
But the best reason to play the game a second or third time is to see the different endings. The Private Action system, a series of optional story sequences that help to flesh out characters and determine which game ending you see, which you may remember from Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time, is back here in a more accessible form. The last Star Ocean game was notorious for forcing players to do lots and lots of backtracking, wasting hours wandering the game at specific times to get Private Actions and collect other hidden goodies.
There is very little back tracking in The Last Hope at all and most of the Private Actions can be done on board your starship, the Calnus. With this streamlined approach and the Private Actions emphasis on relationships between characters, the whole system feels like a rudimentary form of what we saw in Mass Effect. Star Ocean: The Last Hope clocks in at hours of playtime if you stick to the beaten path and power through it.
That saga spans a packed three discs worth of content, but it probably should have been expanded to four. There are no obvious compression artifacts and one of the climactic cutscenes at the end is downright awesome. However, the last disc is so packed with end-game cinemas that there isn't enough room for the universe worth of content. That means if you want to go back to a planet from the beginning of the game to complete a side quest, grab an item for synthesis, or look for bonus bosses and dungeons, you'll be prompted to insert one of the previous discs.
That disc changing annoyance is an example of one of the few small oddities that you'll experience throughout Star Ocean. They aren't anything that should deter RPG fans from picking this game up, but they are the sort of things that prevent Star Ocean from sitting in the elite level of timeless classics. Movement can be awkward with only two speeds --a full stride and a slow walk -- that makes precision a pain. You can't change the inversion on the camera control.
You can only save 20 files before overwriting past ones. There is no original Japanese voice track included. Again, these aren't game killing oversights, but they're still oversights.
It's truly a shame that the Japanese voice work didn't make it into the US release. The lip synching in cutscenes is painfully bad with English dialogue and the voice work itself is not good. Some of the characters are just plain annoying to listen to.
That's a pretty stark contrast from the musical score which I found soothing and, despite putting in over 40 hours with the game, never stale. There's more to like in the graphics department, though not everything is perfect. Though the members of your misfit crew do undergo some fairly heavy changes as the game progresses--both as part of the standard narrative and in optional cutscenes and events--it's always in extremely predictable ways that ultimately fail to break them out of their original molds.
Despite these shortcomings, The Last Hope is a fun and engaging game thanks in great part to its deeply engrossing and highly addictive combat system; if the story is the heart of a Japanese RPG, then the battles are its soul, and Star Ocean's shines brightly. Monsters appear on the field, and once engaged, they're fought completely in real time with a party of up to four characters.
You actively control one of your crew members and navigate him or her around a wide-open battlefield, dishing out damage at your own pace, while the others act according to basic AI routines that you've given them. At any time, you can switch over to manually control anyone who you have deployed, and you can even swap out active characters with reserve ones at your discretion.
Every single character plays vastly differently, and it's fun and engaging to experiment with each character in order to find the play style and party combination that works best for you.
These major battles in The Last Hope often play out like simplified versions of encounters in an massively multiplayer game such as World of Warcraft. Each boss has a specific strategy that can be followed to take it out--though it's not necessary to follow these tactics if your party is powerful enough--and figuring them out during the fight will make your life a whole lot easier and dramatically reduce battle times.
Another concept taken from online games is monster aggro, or aggression. Though enemies will wander around the battlefield, you can draw aggro from them with attacks or by using specialized skills for doing so, which is useful for pulling a monster off of your physically weaker magic-slingers to give them a chance to cast their powerful spells.
Once you have aggro and the monster gears up for an attack, if you dodge out of the way with the right timing, you can break its line of sight on you, leaving it temporarily confused and open to special counterattacks called blindsides. Another powerful tool at your disposal is Rush mode, which can be activated once you've taken or dealt enough damage to grant you an array of bonuses and the ability to chain attacks together with other party members.
Perhaps the most interesting part of battle is the bonus board. By performing specific tasks in combat, such as defeating enemies using only skills or killing two monsters with one blow, you add a tile to this onscreen grid that grants you an extra reward at the end of battle based on your achievement. You can have up to 14 such bonus tiles active at any one time, and these carry over from fight to fight; by carefully manipulating the types of bonus tiles you have, you can customize extra rewards that are given after every single encounter.
With this, you have the flexibility to power level your characters, grind for cash or skill points, minimize the number of restorative items that you need to use, or all of the above in any combination.
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