Star Ocean: The Last Hope: Xbox 360: Video Games
Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the latest release in the celebrated science fiction and fantasy Star Ocean RPG series. This prequel set during the aftermath of Earth’s fictional World War III combines sci-fi and fantasy elements spanning multiple planets and the vastness of space itself to recount the origins of the Star Ocean Universe. Exhilarating combat expands upon the franchise’s famous real-time battle system, introducing amazing graphics and next-generation visual effects brought to life on the Xbox 360 gaming system.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Players:
Offline: 1

Other:
HDTV 1080p.

Crystal clear graphics.
View larger.
Compelling combat.
View larger.
Classic RPG functionality.
View larger. Story
A.D 2064…Planet Earth was on the brink of destruction as clashes between the World Republic Federation and the various nations that opposed it sparked the outbreak of World War III. Weapons of mass destruction, deployed with complete impunity razed the land in the blink of an eye. The dire situation forced the two opposing factions to negotiate a cease-fire and an agreement was quickly reached, but although the war may have ended, its effects remained. With the deteriorating environment, Earth’s population was drastically reduced and those who survived lived a confined existence trapped in underground cities. Eventually countries joined together to form the Greater United Nations and turned their eyes skyward, to space. With the establishment of the USTA, the Universal Science and Technology Administration, man began to seek new worlds beyond the stars.

AD 2087…The first year of the spacedate (SD) calendar. Thanks to the success of Professor Trillas Bachstein’s warp drive experiments, mankind’s dream of a spacebourne existence has inched closer to reality and the USTA secretly began to implement its SRF project, the Space Reconnaissance Force. Now it is SD 0010, and the first official SRF mission and your adventure has begun.

Characters
Players of Star Ocean: The Last Hope will meet and interact with a wealth of characters from different parts of the galaxy, each with their own history and weapons of choice. Just a few of the more prominent characters to familiarize yourself with include:

Edge Maverick
Although generally possessing good judgment, this young Earthling commander of the maiden deep space voyage of the SRF ship the Calnus, can be reckless. His signature weapon is the sword. Faize Sheifa Beleth
A young Eldarian committed to etiquette and logic, and capable of astounding feats of engineering, Faize is always honorable of those possessing abilities he lacks. His signature weapon is the rapier. Reimi Saionji
The kind and levelheaded navigator of the Calnus, Reimi was born in an aristocratic Saionji family and has a shared history with Edge back on Earth. Her signature weapon is the bow. Lymle Lemuri Phi
Orphaned on her home planet of Lemrick long ago, Lymle is mischievous, but friendly and inexplicably retains the appearance of a young girl. Her signature weapon is the wand.
Gameplay and Combat
Although Edge Maverick is the main character in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, players will of course experience gameplay action in the form of a number of different characters and utilize the signature attacks assigned to each. The game features a real-time combat system which allows for up to four party members to remain active in battle at a time. Improvements to the game’s combat system include ‘Rush Mode,’ where players can switch out active members of their combat groups for reserve members in real-time; ‘Sight In/Sight Out’ which allows for timed evasive and counter moves against enemies; and the BEAT (Battle Enhancement Attribute Type) system, through which players can change a character’s fighting style at will. Other actions players will master through gameplay include piloting of the spaceship Calnus, a first in the Star Ocean series; item creation in the form of weapons, healing items and accessories; and Private Actions (PAs), a cause and effect relationship between character in-game actions and the acquisition of new abilities and scenarios. Through the increased flexibility mastery of all these skills provides, players should be able to more easily increase their team and individual team member’s combat experience and status, and so unlock more advanced combat styles and linked combinations.

Key Game Features:

Series prequel - Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a prequel in the classic series, combining sci-fi and fantasy elements, spanning multiple planets and the vastness of space itself to recount the origins of the Star Ocean universe.

Exciting Battles - Exhilarating combat expands upon the franchise’s famous real-time battle system, including the amazing graphics and visual effects only possible on Xbox 360.

Compelling Scenes - The game features breathtaking CG movies by Visual Works, the cutting-edge studio whose previous work includes cutscenes for the acclaimed Final Fantasy RPG series.

Product Description
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth entry in the long-awaited continuation of the celebrated science fiction and fantasy RPG series. This prequel set during the aftermath of World War III combines sci-fi and fantasy elements spanning multiple planets and the vastness of space itself to recount the origins of the Star Ocean Universe. Exhilarating combat expands upon the franchise’s famous real-time battle system, introducing amazing graphics and next-generation visual effects.

See all Product Description

Good but Same,

By Draken (Maracaibo, Zulia VE) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

The game is good, but to tell the truth is pretty much the same last Star Ocean, i didnt give it the 5 stars because of that

Seems like some people need to get their TVs replaced.,

By M.D.C. “ReVeLaTeD” (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

“Terrible graphics!!!”

That’s what stands out when I read all of these reviews. I find nobody that thinks these are great graphics. Hmm. I’ll get back to this.

Anyway, Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth of the series. Its roots are in space and time travel, and often takes place on faraway planets, though its protagonist is generally from Earth. The first Star Ocean (Blue Sphere) never came stateside; instead, we got Star Ocean: The Second Story. During a time when the first PlayStation was hurting for role-playing games, this was a breath of fresh air. It introduced concepts that were new to gamers but taken for granted since: synthesis, cooking, and customization. In truth, The Second Story was really a 100+ hour game if you wanted to accomplish all there was to do.

What The Second Story also brought to the table was challenge. Other games were hard, but TSS is known even to this day as having one of the worst final bosses in RPG gaming history, a man known only as Indalecio. His original form was bad enough, but when you went to a certain private action, he became “Unlimited Indalecio”, a true GOD that gamers were not worthy of. Being level 99 didn’t do you any good either. That’s not even counting the bonus dungeon’s boss, Iseria Queen, who is even worse. Bottom line - the game was blatantly difficult near the end.

Star Ocean: Till The End Of Time was released on PlayStation 2, and it wasn’t well received by gamers, mostly because for the most part it deviated from what made Star Ocean so good. But what gamers don’t see is that the third game actually added a piece of gaming goodness to the overall series. It introduced a new character in Welch Vineyard, adored by fans, almost to cultish dimensions. It also had a lot of small “throwback” things like science centers named after famous inventors in the previous and subsequent games, and bonus dungeon battles with notable characters from the past. It wasn’t a bad game really…and didn’t get the fair shake it deserved.

Not too long ago came two PSP remakes: Star Ocean: The First Departure and Star Ocean: The Second Evolution, based on the first and second Star Ocean games, respectively. While the gameplay is identical, these are definitely remakes in that a number of things were changed, most notably the difficulty of the second game being toned down and the skill tree being a lot more friendly than before. For those that never played the first game, First Departure was a great opportunity to find out what the first game was about, and when you play it, you get a better sense of the overall storyline.

Enter The Last Hope. This story takes place prior to the events of the first Star Ocean (using First Departure as a reference point), so if you never played the other games, a lot of the things you’ll notice won’t go over with you, but if you did play the others, you’ll hear music that will remind you of each game, and meet characters that you either recall from the other game or who must be related to others from the previous games. There’s definitely a lot of fan service to be had here.

Your protagonist is Edge Maverick, a young crewman on the Calnus. A disaster on Earth has rendered the planet unsuitable for human life, and the SRF (the organization you belong to) has been ordered to seek out habitable planets to identify their viability as a new place to live. If that story sounds familiar, at least somewhat, it’s actually quite close to the story in Star Trek III: The Wrath of Khan, and one of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes where terraformers are attempting to find planets that would be suitable for colonization. Unlike those however, a space “bubble” knocks you and your other ships off course, causing you to crash land on your first planet. While the plan appears to be quite like Earth, there is a darker side (this story is commonly seen on the original Star Trek). You can hopefully see where I’m going with this…there’s also some instances of time travel that are quite interesting, yet infuriating at the same time. You’ll end up hopping from planet to planet to achieve your objective.

Now that you have a sense of the basic storyline, let’s get to the game itself. As mentioned before, it spans three full DVDs; that’s over 13GB of data, for those too lazy to do the math. You can do the install to the hard drive, but be forewarned that there is a going speculation that doing so causes the game to freeze. I did experience a freeze, but I can’t confirm for a fact that the install was the cause. I do installs to keep my drive from going out, and don’t intend to stop anytime soon. Part of the problem with the spanned disks is that different planets are so large that they literally exist on specific discs. I know other games have the same issue. The problem is that if you wanted to go back to an older planet (and you will have to, for mining and such), you need to insert that disc. What I don’t know yet is whether or not you can just install all three discs and avoid the disc swapping altogether. I assume you can, but haven’t yet tested that theory. Seems though that you’d still need to swap discs, since the 360 requires the disc be in the drive in order to even access the stored data.

The music in the game is quite excellent, but for the fact that the tracks are quite short indeed. Older Star Ocean games also had short tracks, but keep in mind they were limited by the space on CDs during the PlayStation era. Either they kept the tracks short in order to emphasize the nostalgia, or they just didn’t have the space left over to accommodate the music tracks in full. Of particular exception are the tracks from older planets like Roak (First Evolution) where the music from that game is playing, instantly inciting nostalgia. The extremely short, repeating nature of these beautiful tracks is the only issue here. As far as the voice acting, people are complaining about it, but I found it quite good, honestly. I mean compare this voice acting to Infinite Undiscovery or Tales of Vesperia…and you see there is no comparison. At least in this game, the personality of each character is brought to life extremely well, except for maybe Reimi (because she sounds like every other video game heroine). Part of the measure of good voice acting is whether you are emotionally moved by the character when they’re speaking about something - and yes, some people don’t get moved at all by game characters - but when someone like Lymle is expressing how sad she is, in a way a child definitely would in the same situation, you can’t help but appreciate the voice acting that much more.

In terms of challenge, I found the game to be quite balanced compared to other RPGs of this style. Regular enemies for the most part are not difficult; you do get multiple difficulty settings to choose from, but even on the harder settings you can still reasonably work your way through the majority of regular enemies. They’re aggressive, but your characters are even more aggressive. Once you master all of the nuances of battle, you will find yourself breezing through the majority of battles without a scratch. The challenge comes in when you encounter bosses though - these behemoths (and they’re always behemoths, aren’t they) will almost always give you at least a slight challenge, whether it’s juggling you in the air, blasting you with flames or freezing you to death. But that’s how it should be, in my opinion: regular enemies are moderately challenging, bosses even more so, but neither so difficult as to throw your controller against a wall.

Speaking of battle, the gameplay engine in The Last Hope is a throwback to the older Star Ocean games who really pioneered the action battle along with the Tales series…but The Last Hope threw in just a little bit of uniqueness to break the mold. Here you control your main character as he hacks his way to victory, and yes, you can take control of your other characters as you see fit. But this game offers some flavor. You can do some short range jumps in the four directions; so to the left/right, toward or away from your enemy. This is great if you need to dodge, or cut down distance to your enemy to effectively defeat them. You can also transition from the jump into the Blindside attack, which allows you to quickly run behind your enemy. If done correctly, not only will you dodge the attack, but you will surprise the enemy and do critical hits on their backside. From there you can throw regular or special attacks; even chain special attacks together if you’ve got a skill that allows you to do so, racking up major damage. Rounding out the feature is the Rush attack, which can be best described as a limit break. When executed, you and another team member will unleash a flurry of blows to one enemy to multiply the damage dealt. I found myself not really using this, simply because it takes a long time to build up the gauge that drives it, and the damage wasn’t all that great compared to regular attacking and special moves.

As you fight and pull of special attacks, you’ll build up slots on the Bonus Board, which gives you various bonuses such as Exp and Fol. It also can give you free SP which can be used to build up your skills, or HP/MP to heal you after each battle. But be careful; the enemy can destroy part of your Bonus Board if they hit you hard or frequently enough, so you really can’t just bull rush every single fight. You need to pay attention and stay on the move in order keep the advantage. The Bonus Board also apparently disappears when you save and cut the game off, which I understand, but don’t care for.

Making a return in a toned down fashion is the item creation feature. In Star Ocean 1 and 2, you could create items anywhere you wanted just by having the skill active. That meant cooking, alchemy, blacksmithing, etc…could all be done on the road so you could get stuff ready for that next cheating boss. Star Ocean 3 (Till The End Of Time) did away with this and centralized Item Creation to Welch Vineyard, with some exceptions. The Last Hope forces you to go back to the Calnus whenever you want to do any Item Creation whatsoever. While this does increase the strategy, it becomes a bit of a chore, because not only do you have to do the creation back at the Calnus, but also the recipe creation (you can’t just find the recipes out and about and you can’t just randomly mix ingredients to make stuff like parts 1 and 2). Some characters are better than others at specific skills, and unlike the previous games, you won’t have a situation where the entire team can do blacksmithing or alchemy; each character has a specialty that they stick with, and while each character might have tendencies toward one skill or another, they will never do it better than the one who owns the skill. It is good to see Welch back of course, but her “edginess” has been toned down from part 3. No more witnessing her ’special dreams’ here, as she’s really just a holographic projection from Earth headquarters.

The Last Hope boasts some rather massive landforms for each planet and expansive dungeons. It will take you a couple of hours AT LEAST to complete a specific area, assuming you’re not rushing. This has to do with the size of the areas, but also some of the puzzles that are thrown at you, which honestly aren’t bad as..say…Equinox (SNES game), but they’re certain to get on your nerves. What’s funny is that often the item you need or the door you need to go into is just very cleverly concealed, and when you do find it, you’ll likely groan at just how hard you made stuff on yourself. That’s what the game does well: force you to feel bad about yourself because it seems like something is really difficult, when it actually is dirt simple.

Okay, boys and girls…the graphics. I save the best for last. All I’ve seen on every review is how the graphics are poor. Quite honestly, I think people need to upgrade their TVs or they don’t know how to configure their TVs properly, because on my DLP LED 61″ Samsung (http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-HL61A750-61-Inch-1080p-Powered/dp/B001415FIG/ref=cm_cr-mr-title), this game is as beautiful as they come. I’ve heard people say Lost Odyssey looks better? Nuh uh. The individual hair strand detail of The Last Hope blows Lost Odyssey away, and at times the true 3D effect is so pronounced as to be mind blowing. The draw distance is the best yet, and looking out on some planets makes you truly feel as though you’ve traveled to another place; Roak is a prime example of this. I believe what people are having issue with is the bloom lighting effect; it is somewhat strong, but no more so than Gears of War, which is what this game looks like. It uses the Unreal engine, I’m told…as did Infinite Undiscovery, another beautiful game - and the game is simply gorgeous, all the way around. There are some intermittent places where the blending was not done properly, most notably in some shadowed areas, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Setting contrast just below maximum, brightness at max, and sharpness midway results in just a striking game. People…upgrade your sets please.

So what are the game’s issues? In a nutshell, I wasn’t happy with the fact that the Blindside doesn’t always execute. You’ll follow the conditions explicitly, yet nothing will happen, and then you get put in a spot where you are getting pummeled. Or you’ll do the Blindside, it executes, but you get cut off by another attack that didn’t even touch you. Or my personal favorite, when you try to dodge enemies on the field, and get stuck behind an invisible object (hit detection issue with some of the scenery) and get attacked from behind. All issues with the engine, and not the overall game, which I find to be quite excellent. Not perfect, just excellent.

In summary: I have no idea what these other cats are talking about putting this game down. This game clearly pushes the 360’s capabilities more than most of the other games that are out for the system, and hopefully KOEI and others can sit up and observe how it’s done. This is a must buy, in my opinion, and I hope to see other games like this.

(3.5 Stars) Might Leave You Hoping for More,

By Sean A. Rhodes (Aurora, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)
  

  

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

Pros:

+Well developed characters
+Lots of customization
+Battling is fun and addictive
+A decent challenge

Cons:

-Slow paced story
-The story isn’t too memorable
-Laughably bad voice acting
-Some areas are filled with more exposition than they need to be
-Bland environments keep the overall world from being immersive

Recently, Square-Enix just released the first two Star Ocean games for the PSP, in hopes of attracting new fans. The series itself has, for the most part, seen its fair share of good games. Yet it’s strange to see that Star Ocean: The Last Hope doesn’t come close to achieving what past games in the series have come to achieve. It’s in a new generation, but suffers from flaws that you wouldn’t expect a game produced by Square-Enix to suffer from.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope centers on Edge Maverick and his crew. The world has been devastated by a third world war and the only hope of survival is dependent on the human race surviving in outer space. You are eventually tasked with not just saving Earth, but the entire universe. The story, for the most part, is standard fare. The characters are likable and well developed for the most part, but the story is very slow paced, and just not all that rewarding in the long run. Some of the writing is also not up to the standards of past Star Ocean titles.

Star Ocean has always been a game that has really presented sci-fi elements really well. Star Ocean: The Last Hope is no exception, but even in this regard the series feels like it didn’t want to dwell too much into the sci-fi realm. This isn’t such a bad thing, but unlike past games in the series, it doesn’t really come alive. Matters aren’t helped any by the sheer lack of detail in the graphics. There are some things that look nice, such as water effects and the like, but for the most part, you get the feeling Star Ocean hasn’t really jumped into the next generation. That is, until you see some of the beautifully rendered FMVs. Beyond that, however, most of the in game details look pretty stagnant. Along those lines, the voice acting can be laughably bad at times, and much like previous games in the series, there’s a lot of exposition. At the very least you can turn the voices off.

For the most part, a lot of the dungeons you’ll be exploring are big. Some of them perhaps a little too big. You’ll enjoy exploring them, but you might feel that some drag on for a little too long. As with much of the games graphics, dungeons don’t look particularly exciting. In fact the majority of them are rather bland. When you’re not exploring a dungeon it’ll be because you’re either in a town talking to NPCs and watching the story progress, or you’ll be battling.

The Star Ocean series is very well known for its battle system. For some it is reminiscent of the Tales series. Star Ocean: The Last Hope does its share to really evolve the battle system and make it fun. And make no mistake, you’ll have a lot of fun battling. You’ll be able to pull off a string of attacks as well as pull of some special abilities every now and then. At times battling can feel like button mashing, but you’ll be surprised at just how little this technique works. Star Ocean: The Last Hope is not an easy game. Boss battles in particular, can really keep you on your toes. There’s some actual strategy involved, yet each time you defeat a boss, you’ll feel a real sense of accomplishment from doing so.

While it may not seem very different from the last game in the series (Till the End of Time) there are quite a few things in The Last Hope that show the series is moving forward in some way. The first is that you can blindside enemies, which is really useful in certain battles and deals massive damage to your enemies. Along those lines, characters can also take on three different fighting stances called “Beats”. One Beat focuses on Defense, another on Offense and a final one that mixes the two. They each serve to help characters learn new techniques that can be used in battle.

As with previous games, there’s also personal skills that you can use to bring out character talents, and there’s also item creation which has been standard in Star Ocean for quite some time. For such a simple game, there are quite a few ways to customize things up a little. Spending time just raising characters can be fun, and you’ll find yourself having to do it quite a bit. It’s rare when an RPG actually makes you want to battle, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope does. It’s enough to distract from an otherwise uninteresting story.

Musically, The Last Hope doesn’t sound bad, but like just about every other game in the series, it’s not particularly memorable either. The battle themes are really cool, but aside from that, you probably won’t find yourself humming any tunes any time soon. Don’t get me wrong, the music itself isn’t bad, it just isn’t memorable. There are no tunes that really stick out. Along with the bad voice acting comes more annoying voices in the battles as well, and this can be really annoying to some gamers.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope isn’t a bad game. It’s a lot of fun to battle in and it’s great to customize your characters, but in other key areas outside of the gameplay, Star Ocean: The Last Hope doesn’t add up. While it has some well developed characters, the rest of the story isn’t really memorable. The game has moments where it looks like a dated PS2 game, and the voice acting isn’t worthwhile either. It’s not a bad game by any means, just a game that could’ve been a little better.
Search Amazon.com: Star Ocean: The Last Hope: Xbox 360: Video Games from AmAzon

No tag for this post.

Related posts

• No related posts.