Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

I played Star Ocean: The Last Hope a while back and I thought that this game was good. There were a few drawbacks to the game though. First, some of the characters have annoying voices and not much development in them. I felt that some of the characters were thrown in for comedy purposes like Meracle and Sarah. Some of the charcters though were good and I liked them, but Square-Enix could have done a better job with the characters. Another drawback is the story. The story in this game was confusing. It felt like that in the beginning that the story would be just simply exploring the outer edges of the universe, but instead Faize turns into the final boss of the game in this weird disguise and you have to fight him to stop him from becoming overpowerful. The story was too confusing, I could not understand the story. For gameplay, this game has the normal free-roaming real time battle system that every Star Ocean game uses. So you can basically run around on the battlefield fighting enemies from any angle. There is a special technique you can use called Blindside which lets your controlled character sneak behind the enemy to deal more damage. It's a very useful technique. You also have a Bonus Board similar to Star Ocean: Till the End of Time where you get bonuses on things like: EXP, Fol earned and HP, MP regeneration. There is also the BEAT system, whihc lets you chain together special attacks from your characters. It's like the unison attack in Tales of Symphonia where your characters are attacking with chained combos. It can be useful especially in boss battles. The graphics in this game seem realistic, but of course it's CGI. The visuals in each of the places look really nice and very sharp and contrast. The soundtrack in the game is well done, but there are few forgettable tunes though. So anyway, this game could have been epic, but with the letdowns I mention, it just isn't epic simple as that.