Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope Review

Another day, another Square-Enix JRPG that's not Final Fantasy XIII.

I'm getting fed up of the whole genre, really. They're all so samey, and the saving grace of the best of them - storyline and characters - are usually absent in favour of whiny American-voiced Japanese-anime-looking teenagers on some ridiculous fate-of-the-world mission that's impossible to take seriously.

Star Ocean 4, developed by Tri-Ace and published by Square-Enix, is more of the same. The same problems that pervade all the games of the genre are still painfully present.

Why is there an abundance of invisible walls that funnel you down a corridor you can't see in seemingly massive areas? Why do fights have to take place in some magical arena that appeared out of nowhere rather than the actual game? Why do all the characters look thirteen or have ridiculous moustaches? And so on.

That all said, this is still a much more enjoyable game than The Last Remnant. While the trappings of the JRPG still remain - the storyline is clichéd over-exaggerated ridiculous nonsense, and the characters annoying, whiny or annoying and whiny - the game itself is actually.pretty fun.


A lot of this is thanks to the battle system. Yes, you still get warped to an arena as soon as you touch an enemy, but once you're in those arenas the combat is quite unique and, dare I say it, enjoyable.

It's in real-time, and (apart from items and certain skills) there's no 'menu-choosing;' it's all button-pressing. The main buttons are basic attack, special attack, dodge, and swap. You can swap between characters at will, and each one has a unique spread of attacks. The main thing to get used to is Blindsiding, which you can pull off after holding dodge for a second or two. Do it correctly and main huge-sword-wielder Edge (or whoever) will dart around an enemy, confusing them long enough to get in some easy hits.

Once you get used to the controls, which I'll talk more about in a moment, the battles become great fun, especially when the enemies become more varied and allow for plenty of strategy. Boss fights follow the same rules, and while occasionally frustrating, it's quite easy to stay in control.

While I'm feeling so positive, I have to mention how great it all looks. To mention The Last Remnant again, I thought that game looked dull and lifeless, but Star Ocean has a wonderful sheen to it. It looks like a Japanese version of Mass Effect, at least in the graphics department.


Okay, so it's not going to challenge the best graphics out there, but it's certainly not ugly to look at. The bosses are quite impressive too. The battle arenas aren't quite as visually impressive, with a few dull textures and blocky arenas, but there are a fair few flashy animations and special attacks to keep it interesting.

Unfortunately, my praise stops here. Despite the graphical niceness, the characters are quite poorly designed. In fact, all the characters and enemies reek of cliché. You're not fooling anyone Tri-Ace - those aren't 'Rodarians,' they are quite blatantly elves, or failing that, Vulcans.

Now for those controls I mentioned; they're just weird. You'll get used to them, but even ignoring the fact that World and Battle have completely different and equally arbitrary control schemes, they never feel completely comfortable or natural. For example, what kind of idiot would make the Right Trigger toggle run/walk? Not only are analogue sticks sort of built for those types of differing speeds, but also, toggle? Not just a Run button like every other game that's forgotten what analogue sticks are for?

Of more frustration though is the Save Points, of which there are only a select few per map. I hate Save Points at the best of times, but these ones are just ridiculous. Not only is there no auto-save, and not only can you not save anywhere you want, but Tri-Ace will let you save before a boss fight...and not after.


After the boss fight you have to get back to a different save point (the last one having been made inaccessible), which is usually right on the other side of the map. So you have to fight and dodge through enemy-covered areas knowing that if you mess up or die you'll have to face that boss you spent half an hour desperately taking down again.

Fortunately for my hair, the battles aren't random and you can quite easily dodge them entirely for the most part, and if you do get in a fight, you should have levelled-up enough to see off most monsters. Still, that's not the point. After we spend ages taking down a boss, we actually want to save Tri-Ace. It's not an unfair or game-breaking demand, is it? We just don't want the constant worry that dying will result in having to do it all again. That's not fun.

The storyline is the typical end-of-the-universe plot that Mass Effect did well and Star Ocean doesn't. It's all too silly here to take seriously, and the characters are utterly impossible to sympathise with.

The quests range from finding lost items to saving the world, and while many of them are optional, there's plenty for RPG fans to tuck into. And I should mention: three DVDs! There's a lot to see and do here obviously.


But will you want to? If you're a JRPG fan waiting impatiently for Final Fantasy XIII, you could do a lot worse than this (I know, I've played them). The battle system is intriguing and entertaining, the graphics are excellent and while the characters and storyline are nothing special, they're not excruciatingly bad or anything.

As usual there's far too many cutscenes and they're mostly too long, but I think that's to be expected. To my great delight though you can actually skip them, at which point the game gives you a two-paragraph summation of what you missed. Nice!

It may not be Final Fantasy, but it's not The Last Remnant either. And that's a very good thing.

6.5/10

Chris Capel