Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Boring"

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a generic JRPG which has some fun in it, but ultimately it just feels dated. In the past few years role playing games have taken huge leaps forward with games like Mass Effect and Fallout 3, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope forgets all that and the whole experience feels like I´m playing a remake of a ten years old game.

NOT THAT GREAT OF A STORY

Most important aspect of any RPG is the story and its characters. Here both of these requirements are barely passable. You play as Edge Maverick and in short you are sent to space to investigate it and in the end your job is to save the universe from destruction. When playing lots of western RPG games I've come to expect that I can make choices and in a word play a role. But here there are no choices to be made: you just follow what's happening on screen and then act accordingly. There's lots of cutscenes and dialog, but the narration drags on and on: it's boring. Characters are not that interesting and the English voice acting is horrible. For some reason you can't choose to play with a Japanese soundtrack.

IT JUST FEELS OLD

Gameplay mechanics are old. There's an overworld in which you control one character and when an enemy hits you the game enters to a battle arena. Combat is in real time and there's a lot of depth in it, if you're prepared to use a lot of time into it. I have never enjoyed combat in a role playing game so very fast I just tried to avoid enemies and concentrate on making progress in the story. Boss fights are usually big, epic and extremely long. It can take over 30 minutes and it can still end to an utter defeat. I just hate when that happens and every single boss fight was just an irritating job that I had to do: it's not fun at all.

BE PREPARED TO DO LOTS OF WORK

There are many items to collect and characters to build up. For some reason the game doesn't have any decent tutorial so you just need to learn pretty much everything by yourself. There are spells, combo attacks, poisons and so on, so be prepared to use a lot of your time just navigating through menus and managing your characters.

Story progression is uneven at best. Sometimes you can breeze through a mission in 15 minutes, but other times you can get stuck into a single cave for 5 hours. You can only save in certain spots and sometimes they can be as much as 2 to 3 HOURS apart from each other. This means that you can't play Star Ocean in short bursts: you really need to focus and dedicate your time to it. On top of all this there are frequent points when you just don't know what you are supposed to do. This means that you must be prepared to search through the Internet on how to proceed in the game.

LONG GAME

Star Ocean is a long game and it easily takes 40 to 50 hours to play it through. Since the narration drags on and on it would have been better to tighten the story to around 30 hours or so and no one would have noticed.

BRIGHT ANIME GRAPHICS

Graphics are detailed and colorful with that familiar Japanese anime style. Unfortunately the draw distance is horrible and you may not see things until they are right in front of you. At least the environments are varied ranging from jungles to ice bergs.

ONLY TO A HARDCORE JRPG FAN

If you enjoy JRPG games and you don't have anything else to play right now then there is some fun to be had in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Just remember that there are better game to choose from.