Before jumping into my full reaction to the game, I have to be honest up front and say that I did not complete it.  When I wrote the Spectacle Rock review policy, the conditions clearly stated that I would not review a game until I completed it, or until I quit it out of frustration.  In this particular case, Rule #2 has come into play.  Despite my best efforts, Star Ocean has forced me to throw down my controller, throw up my hands, and shout plaintive cries to the game design gods as to how they could ever let such a game come into being.  With that made clear, we can take a deeper look into what could cause such hate to fester in my gaming soul…

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the most recent entry into the Star Ocean series which began back in 1996 on the Super Famicom.  Last Hope is the 6th title in the series, but actually takes place before all of the others chronologically speaking.  This is part of the reason that I, as someone who had never played any of the other titles, decided to give it a try; it did not require any familiarity with the rest of the series.  The game is set towards the end of the 21st century, years after Earth is mostly destroyed by nuclear weapons in WWIII.  The survivors are forced to live underground, hashing out a meager existence on the now-barren planet.  With Earth ruined, people start to look towards space as humanity’s only option, and most of Earth’s remaining resources are put towards developing interstellar travel.

After the invention of warp travel, Earth assembles a fleet of ships and a corps of troops to set out and explore space for a new world to settle.  This is where the player enters, taking on the role of Edge Maverick, SRF officer and commander of silly names.  Edge is a little upset that he wasn’t made a captain, while his best friend/closest rival Crowe has his own ship.  Fortunately, Edge has his other best friend Reimi serving along with him in her space mini-skirt to keep him upbeat.  With much pomp and circumstance, the fleet departs from Earth and races towards a potential new homeworld, the planet Aeos.  Disaster, as you might suspect, strikes immediately;  the fleet is separated, ships crash, and Edge and Reimi end up being sent to scout around this strange alien world full of very angry bugs.

With that set up established, Star Ocean quickly devolves into what I would call a showcase of everything wrong with modern JRPGs.  Its many flaws are numerous, and its positive points are few and far between.  Many of the things the game does wrong would be forgivable if they occurred in isolation, but the combined effect of all of them together cannot be ignored.

Star Trekkin’ Across the Universe

Before we get into the flaws of the mechanics of the game, let’s first look at some issues of plot and of aesthetics.  The main problem with that plot is that, as someone who was already almost thirty hours into the game, I honestly wasn’t entirely clear what the thrust of the story was supposed to be.  JRPGs tend to be epic in scale by their very nature – battles against threats that will destroy the world and that sort of thing – and they generally get you heading down that track in relatively quick fashion.  By the ten-hour mark in most JRPGs (and I’m being generous here) you have a sense of your ultimate purpose, and a sense of who you have to fight to achieve that (barring the expected twists and turns along the way).  To me, Star Ocean presents a series of separate vignettes strung together with little obvious cohesion.

There is an initial hint of an over-arching plot, involving the evil influence of mysterious black crystal stones called the Grigori that seem to want to spread destruction throughout the galaxy.  This thread persists for the first three “chapters” of the game, but is then quickly abandoned in lieu of a completely pointless trip to an alternate 1940′s Earth, and another planet with a demon summoning problem.  Honestly, the only point I could find from the time-travel trip was to create a situation to send Edge into the classic “mid-game main character depression spiral,” as popularized in Final Fantasy VII. Personally, I do not find dealing with a whiny, self-pitying sad-sack particularly enjoyable, and unless a game really handles it well, it’s probably going to irritate me and most other people.

The game seemed to be hinting at a return to the Grigori concept by the time I got chapter 6, but by that point, I was completely disconnected from the story – everything that was going on felt arbitrary, and I had approximately zero interest in any of the characters.

In regard to the characters, the game throws the usual assortment of them at you, some more interesting than others.  The main character, Edge Maverick, is an orphan who grew up in the care of his friend Reimi’s family, and became best friends with the aforementioned Crowe, who always managed to outperform him at everything.  As such, he has a bit of an inferiority complex, which makes itself evident in his constant dithering as leader.  Reimi, his second in command, is a girl.  I make this distinction because, as far as I can tell, the creators of Star Ocean view women as falling into three categories: annoying, stupid, or evil.  Sometimes, they fall into more than one.

Perhaps the prime example of what’s gone wrong with characters in this game is your party member, Lymle.  Lymle is a young girl you meet on the planet Lemuria, which is inexplicably populated with humans, though no one ever stops to wonder why.  After helping Lymle try to save her grandfather, and discovering she is a talented sorcerer, she joins you on your adventures through space.  Now, to any astute observer, Lymle appears to be approximately 5 to 6 years old.  Her voice actress made the bold decision to perform her lines while on lithium, so she also sounds like a mentally challenged five year old.  She speaks slowly, with no emotion, and often talks of “nappy time” or her “doggy”.  Now, strange as it was to have a five year old in my party, what became even stranger was when a subtle romantic sub-plot began to develop between her and one of my other party members.  That was when I discovered that Lymle was actually supposed to be FIFTEEN.  I will digress any further from getting into Japan’s deeper social issues that this brings up, but as a player, it was unsettling.

Your party gets rounded out with a half-naked cat girl, a half-naked set of boobs with a woman attached to them, a fully-dressed angel girl, a giant robot man, and a fey alien genius.  All of them manage to be slightly developed, but never very deeply.  Perhaps I quit too early, but I would hope that by 30 hours into a game I would feel some attachment to at least a handful of them, but no such luck.

Again, this is a failure in storytelling, but that doesn’t necessarily make a game terrible.  What makes a story bad and characters annoying are subjective things; game mechanics, on the other hand, tend to be quite definitive.

JRPG TROPES #1034 – #5640

There have been many, many lists made of little cliches or gameplay tropes that pop up over and over again in JRPGs; some of them are goofy but harmless, and some of them can be incredibly annoying to a player.  It is my supposition that the designers of Star Ocean took one of these lists and decided to use it as their core design document – and it would explain an awful lot.

Let’s start with basic gameplay design; Star Ocean does not divide up the game into an overworld map and dungeon maps, but instead sections everything off into “chunks” of connected dungeon.  The world is presented in 3d, with monsters (and NPCs) roaming freely.  Running into a monster triggers a combat, which takes place in a separate, open 3d arena.  Treasure chests litter the environment, as well as “resource” points where the party can mine or harvest special ingredients needed for crafting.

The maps themselves, both in dungeons and above ground, as it were, are generally large and sprawling.  While this does create some lovely vistas and an excellent sense of size, it also means the player has to spend a lot of time running across them.  The game allows you to move in either Walk Mode or Run Mode, and for the life of me, I found absolutely no reason to ever use the Walk Mode other than if I needed to slightly adjust my angle to approach a treasure chest.  Even in Run Mode, you don’t travel particularly quickly, and perhaps because of this, the game also lets you sprint with a press of the X button, giving you a short burst of double speed.  I would image this is supposed to help you in evading monsters, but for me it functioned as my main method of travel.  While it was a little faster, having to press the X button every three seconds was less than enjoyable.

“But wait,” you say, “if you were sprinting everywhere, didn’t you miss out on a lot of sightseeing?” This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask; as someone who has previously touted my love of exploration in games, sprawling maps would seem like my cup of tea.  Unfortunately, in the case of Star Ocean, exploration is rendered more or less unnecessary very early on.  Entrances and exits from sections of the map are always marked, as are any special interactions points (levers, buttons, etc), so you always know exactly where you need to go to advance through a level.  On top of that, after acquiring the aforementioned Lymle, you are given a skill that allows you to view all treasure chests and resource points on any map.  With these skills, there is never a moment of wonder as to what may be down a particular ally or beyond a distant cliff; just check the map and see if anything is there; if not, don’t worry about it and start X-sprinting to the next marker on the map.

Of course, it’s not really as simple as running to the next point; you’ll probably have some fights along the way.  A lot of them.  While enemy encounters are not random, and you can avoid them, you’ll eventually run into one by accident, or have one come up on you unawares.  On the “outside” maps, it’s easier to avoid them, but on dungeon maps, you’ll often find corridors and rooms overflowing with roaming enemies, arrayed in such as a fashion as to make avoiding them almost impossible.  On top of that, every time you leave and re-enter an area of a dungeon, all of the enemy parties you’ve already defeated will respawn.  Additionally, they seem to respawn anyway after a minute or two.  Top that off with puzzles in many of the dungeons that require you to backtrack through the same area two, three, or even more times, and you quickly get the picture: you’ll be fighting very, very often.

Now, in its defense, the combat system in Star Ocean isn’t awful by any stretch; very similar to that used in the Tales series, you control one character at a time, while your other party members act according to tactics you assign ahead of time (heal, gang-up assault, etc).  Characters all have an array of special moves they can unleash, and after taking or dealing enough damage, you can enter a “Rush Mode” that allows you to chain together multiple attacks.  Additionally, players can time their dodges of enemy attacks to allow “Blindsides,” where they are given a few seconds of guaranteed critical hits against a targeted enemy.  Overall, it’s a simple but robust system, with some room for tactics.  The main problem is that after fighting the same enemy group for the fiftieth time, it’s just plain boring (and your thumbs are probably sore).  The designers would have been far better served by decreasing the overall quantity of combat and increasing the quality of the remaining fights.  Create fewer, more varied encounters and let the player explore some of the tactics available to them instead of assaulting them again and again with the same enemies so much that they will resort to blindly hitting “attack” over and over again.

Not only are the dungeons very large and crammed full of enemy encounters, they also generally only have save points at the beginning and the end, another factor adding to the general feeling of constant grinding.  As I’ve discussed before, limiting a player’s ability to save, especially when you have a very large dungeon, is an invitation to frustration.  In one particular dungeon, it took me a solid hour and a half to get from one save point to another, doing nothing more than fighting enemies over and over again and solving some very repetitive puzzles.

IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

In case it isn’t obvious yet, Star Ocean seems to take great pleasure in wasting your time.  Perhaps the most shining example of this is that during any cut scene (of which there are plenty), there is no way to advance the dialogue on your own; the player must sit and listen to every line fully spoken out, despite the fact that the subtitles are available to read and can be digested much faster.  What this does is guarantee that every scene stretches out as long as possible, and even some of the most minor story sequences can go on for five or ten or more minutes.  Add to this some solidly mediocre voice acting, and advancing the story becomes an exercise in frustration.  One of the few positive points of the game that I was able to discover is that after you’ve viewed a scene, if you have to see it again for whatever reason, you can skip it completely and instead read a one or two paragraph summary of what happened; the fact that they won’t let you do this the first time through is a real shame.

Then there is the item creation system, through which the party can generate a huge number of unique items.  Creating new recipes is a multi-step process, requiring players to observe various weapons and armors by fighting enemies and speaking to NPCs, in addition to leveling up unique skills for each character such as Blacksmithing and Alchemy.  Then, once that’s done, players must set “brainstorming” groups of various characters and spend Party Skill Points to take time developing new ideas.  The process does go quickly, but it comes across feeling completely arbitrary as to whether or not a new recipe is discovered.  Once a recipe is developed, it can be built if the party has all the component parts, which usually involves grinding more enemies for unique drops, or running around planets checking out various resource points for the exact item you need.  While item creation is not absolutely necessary, it is generally the main source of unique weapons and armor and certain useful items.

Additionally, shop owners and NPCs will often grant you small side-quests you can undertake to generate more money or more unique ingredients, and these also focus around endless grinding and hoping for specific item drops; it wasn’t fun in World of Warcraft, and it’s even less fun here.  Fortunately, it’s all optional.

OVERALL

As is painfully obvious, I view Star Ocean: The Last Hope as an exercise in frustration; poor storytelling combined with poor game design cannot possibly lead to anything good. Built on the foundation of a disjointed, uncompelling story, the game was already hobbled in a narrative sense, but to have it paired with a litany of outdated JRPG game mechanics guarantees some serious problems.

I feel that I gave this game a very gracious chance, playing it for almost thirty hours, and I can say, in complete honesty, that I am a little shocked by how well this game was received by many reviewers.  Much of what others have praised about it are exactly the aspects of it I found so poorly conceived.  This leads me to suspect that either I am terribly picky or that they didn’t play the game much beyond the first few hours.  And while I am often pretty picky, I think the latter is more likely the truth.

If you really, really like formulaic JRPGs that delight in forcing you to waste as much time as possible, populated by unlikeable characters that force you to endure every last word they speak, then maybe Star Ocean is your cup of tea.  On the other hand, if you aren’t a masochist, maybe you should try something else.