Stop me if you have heard this one before: It is the future, shortly after the big WW3. Everything is destroyed except the White House. Since Earth can no longer sustain life, the surviving humans have teamed up to find another suitable planet. They are mankind’s last hope! All eyes are upon these heroic pioneers, risking their lives for our salvation! Can they find the answers to our survival in the infinite expanse of the great Star Ocean?

If this sounds a bit melodramatic, I have to apologise. See, Star Ocean: The Last Hope (International) is the fourth installment in the Star Ocean saga. And it is a Japanese RPG, cast in the mold of great classics like Final Fantasy. However, the mold has been used a little too much, and some of the healthy goodness of the classics has seeped through the cracks.

On the cutting Edge

Edge Maverick (I kid you not…) is a low ranking member of the Star Reconnaissance Force, tasked with finding a habitable planet. His best friend and love interest, Reimi, is also a member of the SRF and on board the same ship. However, their mission is compromised and they crash land on an alien planet infested with huge insects! The other ships in the armada, one of which was captained by Edge’s brother Crowe, have also crashed and it’s up to Edge and Reimi to find the survivors. Fighting through the insect hordes they find the last ship, devoid of survivors. However, they also meet Faize the Eldarian, an alien whose race has helped mankind reach the stars. The Eldarians set up base on the planet, Edge is made Captain of his ship, which is now fixed, and is sent out with a total crew of three to find the last missing ship of his brother and a safe new planet. And all along the way he fights monsters and meets new friends.

Normally I hate ruining a story for everyone, and the above description takes place in around three hours of exploration and fighting. In the first hour of the game there is a total of 15 minutes of actual gameplay, the rest are in-game cinematics. The story progresses really slowly. In fact, I have seen glaciers move quicker than this. So even though I described so much about the story, I have not actually ruined anything for you. This game is huge and should take a good couple of hours to complete. And there is still a LOT of cinematics for you to endure.

Nutty cookie jars

Since this is a JRPG, you can expect a few more clichés. First of all, the only way you can distinguish between male and female characters is by their voices. Everyone in the future appears to be of the same sex. It also means the game is full of dramatic twists (which you can spot a mile off, by the way), very big swords, and at least one crazy character who serves as the whacky comic relief. In this case it is a purple haired girl named Welch. She has to be the craziest cookie in the nutty jar! But it is so over the top that it’s not funny, and she makes me feel uncomfortable.

JRPG’s are also renowned for their combat systems, and each one tries to do it slightly differently by adding some new twist to it. Where the old Final Fantasy games used to have a semi turn-based fighting system, Star Ocean 4 (SO4) allows for real-time combat. This gives you a bit more tactical freedom as far as placement on the battlefield goes, but really restricts the freedom in which you choose what attacks to use. Its weapon based combat is not quite the next Soul Calibur, and the magic, known as Symbology, is greatly lacking, especially in the beginning. Combat rapidly becomes tedious.

Enemies also respawn, so thinking you can complete a mission and quickly run back to base would be a mistake. Endless waves of enemies appear out of the blue. Inevitably you reach the end of a level, beat a much bigger monster, and then you have to return to base. Luckily during exploration mode, while on planet surfaces, you can sprint in short bursts. This is very handy in avoiding combat. But those Japanese developers realized the combat can thus be bypassed and made some of the levels so narrow you HAVE to fight a few times.

The surface exploration shows off the pretty graphics of the game. You can explore beautiful alien vistas and dark and damp alien caves. Along your exploration you find pods and chests containing treasure and items. Some characters can harvest from certain plants, and others can mine minerals from rock formations. Items can also be bought on the various planets, or given as quest rewards. Some of the items can be used in their raw form, but most of them are best suited for crafting bigger and better items equating to more than the sum of its parts. But rather than just mashing them together, you will need instructions on how to do this. Yes, even in the future you will need recipes!

Pukka recipes!

Recipes can be bought, but the best way to get them is in the think tank! Each character has different skills, like cooking, artistry or smithing. Using up to four characters at a time, you can combine their collective minds for a while and they can make up new recipes. Use a good cook and a good artist, and they will come up with great new food recipes that look and taste great. Combine cooking and smithing, and the result is less spectacular. Combine two good smiths and you will soon discover cool new weapons.

Once you have your recipe you can then use it with your collected items and ingredients to make the desired items. Some rare gems are required for certain types of items, and thus you are limited to the smaller items in the beginning of the game. The crafting process may sound like fun, but it turns out to be just more tedium.

One of the pet gripes I have with games lately is the ability to use proper lip syncing. It is clear that SO4 uses software based lip syncing. It can “hear” certain sounds and moves the lips in accordance to those sounds. If it “hears” an O sound the mouth of the speaking person is rounded. I would imagine that the reason this was used is for the sheer amount of talking happening in the game. The International version of the game also contains the Japanese dialogue on the disc, and having to do manual lip syncing for both languages would have been an impossibly massive task. But this technique backfires when a character has a raspy old voice. It hears no sound so the lips only burst for certain loud noises. Other characters’ mouths will stay open the whole time. It’s just so distracting! I have seen great lip syncing recently and it really adds so much to a game if it is done properly.

Since they went to the trouble of adding auto lip syncing, and since the magic of Blu-ray should give the developers plenty of space, it is really surprising that the game has lots of text to read with no voice overs. Some scenes have voice, some scenes have text and then some scenes have novels. They saved the novels for the boring parts of the game, but rather than skip whole conversations you can only skip one sentence at a time. This is the first game I have EVER fallen asleep to! Shocker!

Out of control

The controls are also a bit iffy. Edge and his gang either run very fast or stroll at a Sunday afternoon pace, nothing in between. They also get stuck on the smallest of objects and then they have to run around it. See that little pigeon on the ground? Be careful! You have to walk around it as it will not budge, and you cannot step over it. The camera is also a real pain to control. It is about as smooth as a number 20 sandpaper. It does not change on its own, it does not rotate smoothly, and is much more of a hindrance than a help.

My final critique of the game is the graphics. I know I said the explorations show it off, but when inside a ship the textures are so busy it’s hard to make out anything inside. Some of the exteriors are similar, and the effort to make high resolution textures has backfired a bit. Too much detail and bland colours make for very sore eyes!

As always it is easy for me to sit here and give harsh comments on a game that is someone’s pride and joy. However, in a world that has moved on to more action packed RPG’s with great storylines and amazing character development, Star Ocean falls way short. If it launched with the PS3 it would have been a best seller. Now with games like Mass Effect on the Xbox and Final Fantasy XIII the bar has been raised significantly. If you want to stay ahead of the bunch you have to innovate and dare to do more than anyone else. Sadly, Star Ocean will go down in the books as just another Japanese RPG.

The good: Interesting recipe think tank; initial real-time combat; certain exploration vistas.
The bad: Tedious exploration and fighting later on; bad lip-sync; horrible camera.
The ugly: Falling asleep! Shocker!

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