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Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Release Date Feb, 24, 2009
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Tri-Ace
Credits: 1up, XGC Yoda
What's the game about? The Star Ocean series is developer tri-Ace's longest-running franchise, a more ambitious take on mechanics seen in the Tales series. According to producer Yoshinori Yamagishi, The Last Hope is Star Ocean's final chapter -- yet it's also a prequel set years before the first entry in the series (which will arrive in the U.S. soon via PSP remake First Departure). There's a simple reason for this: The previous game, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time for PlayStation 2, more or less painted the series' storyline into an inescapable corner. At the end of that game, players were surprised to discover that the universe that had been so richly developed through the course of three adventures was in fact a virtual-reality simulation, a self-contained reality within fourth-dimensional space.
With the plug more or less pulled on the worlds of Star Ocean, the only place left to explore is the VR realm's past -- although Yamagishi stresses that "VR" isn't entirely the correct term to use here. "It's more accurate to say the games take place within another dimension," he says. But he confirms that The Last Hope is set within that dimension and, he hopes, will help resolve the mystery behind its existence.
"The reason we've created Star Ocean 4 [The Last Hope] is because the team wanted to explain why this world came to exist," he says. "If players pay careful attention to the story, they'll be able to understand its meaning."
What's new for TGS? The Last Hope has been teased steadily since last year's Tokyo Game Show, but this week marks the first time it's been playable. That means it's the first chance we've had to see something of the game besides some CG renders -- and it looks pretty good. It plays well, too, not straying terribly far from the previous games; it features a fairly slick reworking of the visual and camera style seen in Till the End of Time, but it offers the four-character battles of the first two games rather than the pared-down three-man battles of the previous Till the End of Time.
As always, it's an action-oriented combat system where players control a single character while the A.I. controls the remainder of the party. The A button attacks and builds combos, and skills can be mapped to the shoulder buttons. The ability to jump in combat is something new in this entry; this isn't a platform-game style of jumping, though, but rather works more as a sidestep technique. However, Yamagishi says that you can link it to special skills. Jumping is also the key to a system called "Sight In/Sight Out." Holding down the jump button allows players to focus on an enemy who's targeting the player and dodge an attack, ducking behind the foe and breaking its line of sight -- which then leaves the enemy wide open to counterattack.
What's our take? Star Ocean: Till the End of Time left a bitter taste in many fans' mouths, but Tri-Ace has copped to the series' missteps and hopes to make things right with this chapter. The Last Hope seems to encapsulate most of the elements of the previous games. Private Actions return to allow relationship-building and strengthen the party dynamic; numerous "collections" are available for the obsessive types; and Yamagishi also promises other subsystems in the style of Star Ocean 2's cooking feature, though he wouldn't give further details on the specifics.
If Till the End of Time was an absolute finale for the series, The Last Hope seems like a definitive beginning. The game begins with a sequence in which the modern-day world is all but annihilated in a nuclear Armageddon that leaves the White House fortuitously unscathed, allowing the U.S. president to make peace with his former rivals and look to mankind's eponymous last hope: space. From there, it seems, the world of Star Ocean will be formed -- making this a clear bookend for the series. So long as this final chapter digs into the concepts that made the earlier titles so popular instead of treading the same path as Till the End of Time, fans will likely come away satisfied.