But if you actually want your Star Ocean game to continually murder you late game and not let up, then I highly recommend you ignore Arumat, leaving him among your inactive characters.
He’ll wipe the floor with any obstacle you come across, no problem. Once you get past the difficulty spike, you’re even rewarded with Arumat, the strongest and best character The Last Hope contains. Nope, now you merely lose a few jewel shaped pieces out of the meter, and the complete thing refuses to shatter all at once. It helped that in this entry your bonus gauge (various bonuses from finishing off enemies with criticals, specials, etc.) won’t shatter completely when hit too many times or after fleeing from battle. This time around it only took me an extra two or three hours to get past the well known late game SO difficulty spike.
Oh and did I forget to mention the standard Star Ocean difficulty spike this time around isn’t nearly as impossible? You won’t be stuck for an extra 20 hours using a guide to find how to craft the perfect items, nor grinding forever. You can view your game/save file statistics after crafting a memory plate item to place on your ship. In fact, my battles fled from stat was below 10 in the end and I fought a good few thousand enemies in my 50 hour playthrough. I never found myself running from battles more often than fighting it out. Battles no longer feel like the pain in the neck chore from past entries. If you find yourself in a pinch, make for a quick dodge and/or blindside to once again gain the upper hand. And with the right skill book acquired, you can even chain your special skills together for non-stop destruction of your opponents. Instead you get non-stop repeatable combos, no need to quit slicing away and wait for a meter to fill up. No longer are you stuck with the technical combat from SO3, nor the regular attack combo limiters. The gameplay in Star Ocean: The Last Hope is positively glorious. Like I said, not an ideal place to live anymore. If you read through the game menu’s dictionary entries, perhaps you’ll even find out some characters are voice acted a certain way on purpose, ‘kay? Oh, you find average English voice acting unbearable? In that case they’ve got you covered, the original Japanese dub is once again back as an available option. What you will find is decent enough voice acting which fits the characters perfectly. Now don’t get me wrong, you won’t find Atlus-hired Persona quality voice acting in this game. Speaking of characters, if you listen to others you might think this game has garbage voice acting. You can rest to heal up, save, craft new items courtesy of Welch Vineyard (once again your NPC host at the crafting station, much like she was in SO3) and get to know your party members better through private action story bits at various points in the game. This is essentially somewhat of a home base. You’ll be taking their ship, the SRF-003 Calnus, to quite a few different planets and places. The main characters, Edge and Reimi, gladly volunteer to go along. Five different SRF spaceships and their crews take on this mission. The SRF (also known as the Space Reconnaissance Force) are charged with finding a new home for the humans of Earth to live upon. Because what’s a review, or any game for that matter, without a plot? In The Last Hope, Earth is no longer an ideal place to live. There’s no getting away from Edge: you’re stuck with him as your walk around character.įirst off, let’s get the plot out of the way. Make sure you’re settled in and comfy while I enlighten you (hopefully a lover of JRPGs), and let you know what makes this title worth your time. This is a wonderful game with wonderful characters and an entertaining story for any everyday JRPG fan-one who isn’t sitting through a game taking notes, looking for any plot hole or fault they can find. Well, throw out any preconceived notions you have of how rotten SO4 supposedly is because it’s not. What’s that? You heard Star Ocean: The Last Hope was a trash game not worth your time? Perhaps you even read this original review found right here at oprainfall (be warned, it contains subtle spoilers).
It’s a remaster of the already enhanced PS3 port titled International.
Square Enix recently ported Star Ocean: The Last Hope to PS4 and PC, all new remastered graphics and settings options included.