Star Ocean: The Last Hope – Edge Maverick’s Godawful Adventures

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the final entry in the long-running and pretty well-liked Star Ocean series.  It follows up on the godawful story of Star Ocean 3 and ends the series with a longer, more epic tale of spaceships, symbology, and silliness.

On paper, Star Ocean 4 is a no-brainer.  It’s a series that has always thrived on its interesting and fun realtime battle system, combined with a general tendency to fill the games with a ridiculous amount of hidden things to find.  It can appeal to more action-oriented gamers as well as poopsockers just as easily!  It should be a fantastic game, right?

Wrong.  Oh, goodness, how wrong you’d be if you asserted that.  Star Ocean 3’s biggest weakness was its story, which ended in a completely out of place revelation that, essentially, Star Oceans 1 through 3 (and ostensibly 4) take place in some super future MMORPG, with some important NPCs in 3 being revealed to be random kids in the “real world”.  Star Ocean 4, to its credit, decides to take the prequel approach, and in doing so enables itself to reference the series’ “later” games without having to acknowledge the fact they wrote themselves into a corner with 3.

But good lordy, did they try really hard to equal the badness of 3’s story.  Not since Xenosaga have we seen an RPG so in love with its own storytelling, and while Xenosaga’s cutscenes were ridiculously long, they at least told a story that was interesting and well thought out.  Star Ocean 4 opens with a 30-minute plus set of cutscenes that only serve to establish that EDGE MAVERICK (easily the worst name for an RPG protagonist in history) is every protagonist stereotype ever, right down to the symmetrical clothing and the penchant for trusting people he just met.  The story just gets worse from there, and doesn’t even bother to wait until 1/3 of the way through the game to get into ridiculous time travel crap.  The voice acting, in general, is horrendous C-grade anime voiceover quality, and doesn’t even have the option to switch to Japanese (which would be at least somewhat more bearable).

It really is quite a shame that the story is this abominable, because it makes what would otherwise be a really good RPG practically unplayable.  The battle system in Star Ocean 4 is similar to other games in the series, with a completely realtime battlefield on which you control one of 4 onscreen characters at any given time, with the other 3 using servicable, if rigid, AI.  Little twists like a RUSH Mode that increases your critical hit chance if you do a DBZ-style charge move, or blindsides, which are neat little dodge maneuvers that guarantee a few critical hits, add a flair to the battles without feeling too cumbersome.

And then there are the Battle Trophies.  One of Star Ocean 3’s more prescient features was the inclusion of 300 Battle Trophies, which were a collection of achievements before the concept had really been popularized.  The biggest knock against the trophies were that some of them required 3 or 4 runthroughs through what was a rather long game to begin with to be able to ge them.  Star Ocean 4 decides to one-up 3 by tripling the amount of Battle Trophies, and attaching them to particular characters rather than just being general achievements.  This is a double-edged sword, because while none of the trophies are particularly HARD (time-consuming or requiring luck like healing yourself to full HP exactly twice in a row, sure), the fact that they are attached to characters means that most of them will not just trigger while you’re using EDGE MAVERICK through the entire game.  It feels a bit more splintered than it has to be, and while they’re not AS stupid as Star Ocean 3’s, the fact that the achievements tied to them are worth 100 points for all 900 of these trophies (10 per 10% earned) makes them feel not nearly worth the effort, relatively speaking.

Speaking of double edged swords, Star Ocean’s graphics are another mixed bag.  The environments that you move through look fantastic, with the exception of too much bloom lighting going on in the first one.  They look detailed, vibrant, and interesting.  The cutscenes, however, were made in Barbievision.  The environments continue to look great, but all of the characters are not even close to being properly lipsyncing, move around with the fluidity of a boulder, and the facial designs of all of the characters make them look like bad dolls.  The cutscenes are made hard to watch by the one-two punch of bad voice acting and bad characters that they’re attached to.  Fortunately, skipping these cutscenes provides you a textual summary of what happened.

All in all, Star Ocean 4 is a real shame.  There was a lot of hope (ha ha, get it) that I’d get one final dose of the great battle system that I enjoyed in 3 WITHOUT its story baggage, but unfortunately, that hope was dashed about 3 hours into the game and never really came back.  I cannot recall any other RPG where I have actively dreaded the story sequences and wished the dungeons were longer.  Plenty of times I’ve played RPGs where the story carried boring gameplay (Xenosaga, ironically), but somehow it feels worse when fun gameplay can’t overcome a godawful story.