“See ya…on the other side…of the star ocean.”

Xbox 360, Playstation 3

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth and latest installment to this ever-growing space exploration series. Going against the trend that JRPGs have set in over time, Star Ocean uses its famous real time battle system, and after a decade of work on the title, it has been perfected. Although TLH is the newest publication it takes us back to the series’ origin, S.D. 10, where Earth stands on the brink of destruction after World War III. The protagonists, Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, take off on a journey across the universe for the Space Reconnaissance Force to find a new home for humanity. These two young heroes are humanity’s last hope.

In the year 2064, World War III had broken out on Earth, and weapons of mass destruction were used without hesitation, razing the planet. Critical situations began to occur, and both factions of WWIII signed a ceasefire, but it was too late; most of the Earth’s population had been killed, and the land was deteriorating at an extraordinaryily alarming rate. Any surviving population were forced to live in underground cities, and countries formed together to create the Greater United Nations. The Universal Science and Technology Administration was formed by the G.U.N. with one sole mission: to find humanity a new home in the outer reaches of space. Humans soon discover travel at warp-speed, starting the space date, S.D., calendar. Space date 10 comes along, and you have been selected as humanity’s first venture into the outer reaches of space. Will you be the one who saves humanity? Or will you parish in your attempts to find a planet suitable for human life, surrounded by monstrosities unimaginable, dooming humans to extinction?

Star Ocean: TLH comes with a whole new pack of features tagging along with it’s original. The first and foremost new features are those in the battle system. One of the most useful new technigues is the Blindside, which can be used to slip behind enemies, confusing the enemy as you attack it from behind with automatic criticals. There is also a new system called the “Battle Exalted Action Type System,” refered to in game as the “BEAT System.” There are three different choices for each character’s BEAT settings. BEAT.S, an offensive setting; BEAT.B, a defensive setting; and BEAT.N, a neutral setting which combines the stat enhancements of other BEAT settings. The “Fury” Gauge from the previous installment has been removed, and replaced with a “Rush” Gauge. The Rush Gauge build up as you land attacks and take damage, and can be released to attack faster, with more power, and without being interrupted by enemy attacks. On a sad note, MP death has been removed from this game. Yeah, now it’s harder for them to kill you! But it’s also harder for you to kill them. One final battle feature is the utilization of characters. Not only can you use four instead of three characters, like in Till The End Of Time, but death finally makes sense in this JRPG! After all four characters die in battle, you may select one reserve member to take their place in battle until everyone’s been knocked out. Not only that, but you can change party members during battle too, which can be extremely helpful.

The other big feature to TLH is your ship, the SRF-003 Calnus. With your ship, you can travel to previously visited planets to recollect items and complete mini-quests, meet with your other party members in the conference room for Item Creation, and has a quarters in which, with the right character pairings, can trigger special Private Actions, a feature from previous Star Ocean titles.

The graphics, like any other modern Square-Enix game, are near breath-taking. The quality really brings out the interstellar feel of the game, and makes it that much more interesting to play.

The audio quality itself is very good. Unfortunately, the voice acting did not meet the bar set by the former titles. The facial movements of the characters is downright terrible to a point to where it’ll make you feel like you’re playing a modern Sonic The Hedgehog game. Music, on the other hand, is fantastic. The soundtrack lives up to Sakuraba’s name.The composition is precise, and it fits most situations perfectly.

Cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes. Everybody knows how RPGs love their cutscenes, and TLH is no exception.  Not only are there many of these out-of-game videos, but they are extremely lengthy. Some reach a point that your controller will hibernate and force the video to pause. There is an upside though: during any of these monstrous progressions, you can just press “Start” on your controller and select “Skip Cutscene,” which will promptly end the video. In return you receive a summary, and (if followed by a battle) will receive a warning before you’re thrown into a fight for you life. This feature is extremely useful for those with little to no attention span, or for those that just don’t have the time to waste on a drawn out sequence of events.

Unfortanately, the five people who actually enjoyed the Battle Arena from Till the End of Time will be disappointed in hearing the multiplayer aspect has been removed from this installment.

Throughout this massive three-disc game, no errors were experienced. The cutscenes are lengthy to a point to where your controller may shut off though, and the cutscene will pause. Don’t mistake it for a frozen game as many others have done.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a pretty lengthy game, with a story of about 40-50 hours if you watch all the cutscenes and level as you should. It’s always a nice, fun challenge to run through again on a harder difficulty, with alright re-playability. It’s full of a bunch of little twists that will catch you off guard, but nothing less is expected of Tri-Ace and Square-Enix. With that, this game gets a solid

8/10