Speaking of battle, the way you level your characters in Star Ocean games is a little different from the usual grind. Also worth mentioning is the fact that you can switch out between these characters in battle and actually play as all of them, and you have something on your hands that’s a little cooler than toting around a cast of characters you can’t truly play as. Speaking of your party, you will meet quite a few people on your travels who will join you, allowing you to make a pretty varied party whenever you want. If you stick with it though, you’ll find there’s enough reward there to keep you interested, especially as your party grows and their interactions become more engaging. Call me crazy, but I need a good story to keep me hooked. The interaction between Edge and his childhood friend, Reimi Saionji, for instance, points in a direction that we’ve traversed many times before, and I found myself wondering if the descent into boredom was inevitable regardless of how good the gameplay itself might be. The truth of the matter is, at first (and for the first five or six hours), The Last Hope feels like a solid entry into the RPG genre, but it also feels generic in that way that too many RPGs do these days. I know, you can feel the cliche coming already, can’t you? It all begins a few centuries before the first Star Ocean, placing you in the role of Edge Maverick (a name even Iceman and Goose would have been proud of), your typical young spiky-haired kid trying to find his place in the world after World War III effectively destroyed the planet we know as Earth. Take a few moments to watch the opening sequence of The Last Hope before pressing the A button and getting your game started, and you’ll surely feel you are in for nothing less than a grand adventure. Does The Last Hope actually come through and provide more than just memories of the great sci-fi of the past, though? Only hitting the jump will tell… Like Star Trek.įunny enough, series creators tri-Ace have actually cited Star Trek as one of their main influences, and any fan of that series can surely see the similarities when your crew is about to throw your ship into warp or facing the impeding doom that only a black hole can present. It’s easy to feel that way with all the genre’s releases as of late (and it makes me a bit nostalgic for the days in which I would patiently wait through the months between releases), but Star Ocean: The Last Hope stands out from that group for one reason: the setting is not medieval or even in some fantastical invented country, but in space.
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