DPrime Review: Star Ocean The Last Hope

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a console RPG that brings many new aspects to the series. The Last Hope is the fifth installment in the series and takes place just a few centuries before the original Star Ocean. A few years earlier World War III broke out and weapons of mass destruction ruined most of the planet and made the air almost impossible to breath. So the countries united together to form the SRF (Space Reconnaissance Force) with the intentions of traveling to new worlds and finding one habitable to the human race.

You start out as a member of the SRF  Edge Maverick and with his childhood friend Reimi Saionji and you are about to depart onto a possibly habitable planet Aeos. Once your ship (the Calnus) you begin to warp, along with a few other ships, but during you warp there is a gravity change which sends you all spiraling into Aeos. Everyone exits the ship to see a very natural forest type planet. Your ship crew exits as well and starts checking out the the planet for things that could be harmful to other humans. While exploring you are encountered by giant bugs who kill most of your crew, and you are forced to fight to survive.

The gameplay is similar to the others, but this time around you can have four people in your party and you can switch between them and use their special skills and magic. You can choice between nine different characters throughout the story. The combat is real time (as always) and for the first time instead of a overhead view you can use a third person camera that you can control. You also have the ability to dash when your outside of battles, which is a good way to save time or avoid fighting enemies.

Every character has 10-20 weapons, most of them looking different with the occasional look alike. There are 158 different enemies, and seven different planets each larger than the last. The planets are enormous and the setting are giant forests, icy plains, an alienspacecraft, Earth, a medieval world, floating diamonds, and a nasty vein covered black planet. There are tons of quests and every shop you find has their own where you trade certain items for experience, SP, and money. You can collect information about different ships and find out the history of the aliens that you meet along the way.

The game has three discs that each take over 16 hours long if you explore and train very little. After you finish the story it gives you the option to go back to your last save, which unlocks a series of dungeons and bosses leading up to the hardest bosss in the game. Two of the three discs have secret dungeons after you finish the game. Two dungeons open up that are both many times harder than anything you encounter in the story. In these new dungeons you will fight much harder versions of bosses you have fought in the past.

Star Ocean has a great story that is unclear at first but as you get farther into the game you start to understand. Along the way there are many plot twists that are shocking even to Square Enix fans. There are four different difficulties, but you only start with two and you must beat the game twice before the last one is unlocked. Star Ocean isn’t an incredibly hard game but it may surprise you sometimes because the difficulty between bosses seems to be strangely odd.

What I Liked:

• Great Story: The story keeps you drawn it and wanting to find out more about it.
• Long: It takes a many hours to beat this game and it is well worth the money you pay for it.
• Combat System: It has a different combat system from the traditional RPG but it seems to fit the game just fine.

What I didn’t Like:

• Strength Between Characters: Normally I train all characters evenly in RPG’s but the difference in the characters abilities were so obvious it was hard to train them all.