Formerly thought to be a 360-exclusive, this ‘International’ version of Star Ocean: The Last Hope comes with a few minor alterations to make it worthy of the title: Japanese and English voiceovers (both awful), a less muddy look and some pointless motion blur. It’s not exactly a special edition for the ages.
If you’ve ever played a Star Ocean game then you’ll know how this one plays out – characters who look like female children travel around the galaxy getting involved in nonsensical fights, being melodramatic and generally annoying the piss out of anyone unfortunate enough to be paying attention. Players take control of Edge Maverick – no joke – and his motley crew as they, well – do that stuff described just before this sentence. Fans know who they are, no one else will be convinced.

Here, the most annoying elements of JRPG characters are distilled into a single being.

It’s bad enough that Star Ocean is dull, samey and something you’ve played a thousand times before. But these problems are exacerbated by the archetypal problems JRPGs suffer from: astonishingly bad voice acting (Welch in particular will make you want to die), a design template that is the same as anything else in the genre, no indication of where you’re supposed to be going or why you would be going there (which can naturally only be remedied by talking to everyone in the world map. Twice) and a reliance on grinding that we would happily see cast off into the nether regions of MMORPGs.

It’s one thing to complain about difficulty, but quite another to take umbrage with a peculiar system that places save points once every hour or so, meaning when you inevitably die 54 minutes into your quest, you have to go back to the last point. It’s lazy, it’s old fashioned and it encourages a boring style of play that avoids all progress.

Good points? Well, combat is reasonably interesting but generally broken when it comes down to it – allies tend to do nothing or get killed, enemies gang up on the player character and it’s too easy to get cornered and beaten to the ground with no way of getting back up. All in all, it’s a shoddy combat system. Which makes it more difficult to put up with as every so often it has flashes of brilliance.

Captain, I appear to have gotten lost in an anime convention.

More a slog than a game, it’s hard to recommend Star Ocean to anyone other than those who have a lot of spare time and can actually be bothered with it