Introduction

The current generation of game consoles has not been very kind to gamers who enjoy Japanese-style role-playing games (JRPGs). If you like JRPGs, you’re better off having merely a Playstation 2 rather than the current offerings from Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo.

Finally, some of the big names are coming to the current generation of consoles. Star Ocean: The Last Hope is here.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth major Star Ocean game from Tri-Ace. (So, I’ll call it SO4 from now on.) Since the previous game (Star Ocean: Til the End of Time) ended rather strangely, Tri-Ace decided to make this game a prequel to the previous three games. The game is set shortly after the third world war has made Earth practically uninhabitable. Earthlings are using newly developed “warp” technology to find a new planet to live on. I should also mention that the Earthlings have made contact with an older spacefaring race who look like humans but wear things on their ears that give the earlobes a pointy appearance. If that last bit sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because the Star Ocean universe is what you would get if you took Star Trek and dressed it up with magic (“symbology” or “heraldry” in Star Ocean) and swords.

Read my spoiler-free review of the game below the jump.

Story and characters

You play the role of Edge Maverick, an officer on one of Earth’s first warp-capable exploration vessels. Due to a subspace anomaly, Earth’s new fleet gets spread all over the place and half-destroyed. (Isn’t that the way these things always go?) After killing some overly large man-eating bugs that are impervious to advanced weapons but easy prey to swords, Edge finds himself in command of one of the surviving Earth ships. He then assembles a ragtag crew of humans, aliens, and alien cyborgs ranging in age from 6 to 35 years old to explore the universe. From there it gets weird…

Now I’m not all the way through the game yet, but the main problem I see with the story is that it can’t decide whether or not it’s supposed to serious or campy. For the first fifteen or so hours, you’ll likely be shaking your head at how preposterous the plot is.

So, the plot’s a little thin. How are the characters? To get a feel for Edge Maverick, the character you’ll be playing, imagine Luke Skywalker from the original Star Wars. Now imagine a character so self-absorbed and whiny that Luke looks calm and restrained in comparison. That character is Edge Maverick. If there ever was a video game protagonist in more need of a slap in the face than Edge Maverick, I have yet to see him. Add to the mix a six-year-old girl (who the game says is 15) who ends every sentence with the word “‘kay”, a cat-girl with Stockholm syndrome, and a cyborg who drones on about his “cold, steel body” and you have quite the annoying mix. While not every moment with SO4’s heroes is as gut-wrenchingly awful as I’ve implied above, nearly every character has an attribute on constant display that will grate on your nerves.

The plot and characters work best, I think, if you just play the game and not try to get overly involved with either. It’s true that I might be giving SO4 a bit of a hard time here. The last two games I completed before playing SO4 were Persona 3: FES and Persona 4 – both of which had better-than-average stories. Even compared to the previous three Star Ocean games, SO4’s plot and characters come up short.

The A/V Experience

The atmosphere of a game isn’t strictly defined by how much sense its story makes. While the Star Ocean games are not well-known for stellar graphics, they have always been friendly to those of us with modern TV sets. The previous Star Ocean game ran on the Playstation 2 in 480P and could be set to 16:9 for widescreen sets. The first two Star Ocean games were remade for the PSP (and can thus be properly displayed on widescreen TVs). SO4 is made for widescreen HDTVs and does not acknowledge the existence of old, square TV sets. What does that mean? It means that if you have a small standard definition set, don’t buy SO4. You won’t be able to see the in-game text or some of the menus, rendering the game practically unplayable.

So how do the high definition visuals look? Quite good, for the most part. I have some problems with how lighting is used in parts of the game. The first planet’s sky and reflections are so bright, for instance, that I want to put on sunglasses, even though the brightness and contrast settings on my TV are fine for everything else. There aren’t any immediately obvious ways to fix this in the game’s settings menu, either. You’ll see  some minor pop-in issues with vegetation and enemies on the fields

Those gripes aside, the game looks great. There’s lots of detail in the landscapes, and in the character and enemy models. People and enemies move around naturally on the screen. You can rotate the camera to see the scenery from many angles. Streams and rivers have swimming fish and good-looking rippling water. Very nice.

Sadly, only weapon changes are reflected in the character models. Your new fancy armor won’t change the appearance of your character at all. This is a bit jarring because the characters say that they want to blend in with the locals on backwater planets, yet they always walk around these planets in their Glowing Futuristic Space Armor^TM. It’s time for JRPG developers to get with the program. It’s the 21^st century. A character’s appearance should change with his equipment.

Cutscenes are usually rendered with the game engine. Despite some rumors going around on to the contrary, it’s possible to pause cutscenes. Just hit the Guide button.  Some cutscenes are long enough so that the controller turns itself off.  This will pause the cutscene, too.

The sound is servicable. It does what it’s supposed to do, and sounds come from the appropriate speakers in a Dolby Digital home theater setup. Most major scenes and a few minor ones are voiced. Unlike some other reviewers, I think the voice acting is passable. That said, you will want to have the mute button around for some of the more eccentric characters. ‘kay? I don’t fault the voice actors for this, since there is only so much a voice actor can do with horrible, cringe-worthy dialogue.

I should also mention that Tri-Ace has not yet learned the fine art of lip-sync, but that’s a fairly easy issue to ignore.

Gameplay

Tri-Ace is not known for gripping dialogue and intriguing stories. Tri-Ace, and especially its Star Ocean games, are known for innovative gameplay elements and combat systems that replace the monotonous task of selecting your attacks from a menu by something more action-oriented. This is where SO4 really shines – gameplay. Sure, the story is thin and the characters can get annoying, but despite this the game is still addicting and fun to play.

The basic flow of the game involves going to different planets with your starship and exploring them. On each planet, you’ll go to towns or dungeons to explore and advance the plot. As in the previous Star Ocean game, there’s no world map. Each planet gives you a large area to explore, and the way to do that is to walk from one place to another. Along the way, you can hunt for treasure, admire the scenery, and fight. The fighting is one of the better parts of the game.

You control one of your party members during each fight, out of a total of four on the battlefield. You can switch freely between the people you control, and let the computer take care of the rest. The battles take place in real time, and pause only when you want to use an item or cast certain spells. You can use simple attacks, perform combos, use special attacks, and chain all of them together to inflict severe damage onto your enemies. There’s a “rush mode”, where you can attack more effectively for a time after hitting or being hit enough times. You can sneak up behind an enemy and “blindside” him, enabling you to score critical hits without risk of counterattack – usually.

Want to do more in battle? Buy skills and enhance them using “skill points”, which you earn with level-ups and from treasure chests.

There’s a “bonus board”, where you can earn extra rewards after battle for doing certain things in battle. For instance, you can

• earn more experience points by finishing an enemy with a critical hit
• earn more skill points by fighting a chain of battles without resting in between (called an “ambush”)
• earn more cash by defeating two enemies at once
• recover hit points by defeating an enemy using only special attacks

A scene after a battle in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. On the right of the screen is the bonus board. I took this picture of the screen when the game froze up on me after an hour of unsaved play. (This had better not happen routinely!)

The bonuses persist from battle to battle, but are lost if you save and reload the game.

If you’re familiar with the third Star Ocean game, the combat in SO4 is an improved version of that system, but without MP death.

Outside of battle, there is plenty to do. You can perform sidequests for various rewards. You can collect data on the different monsters and weapons of the SO4 universe. You can also hang out on your starship and do things.

On your spaceship, you can create new items from raw materials using the item creation system. To do this, you put your characters together into teams who develop “recipes” for new items. If you have the raw materials on hand, you can then make the new items using the recipe. In previous Star Ocean games, this involved a lot more trial and error (and frustration) than it does here. The only drawback to this simpler item creation system is that needed raw materials are harder to find than in the previous games.

You can also initiate “private actions” while on the ship. Private actions let you change the relationships between your main character and the other characters – which can in turn affect other parts of the game like the endings. You initiate a private action by talking to one of your party members on your ship. Different things might happen. You might watch a scene, answer questions, or even battle. You might even find yourself meowing like a cat. Meowing aside, though, the private actions develop the characters in the story better than the main story does, so you will want to see them.

There are a lot of things to do in SO4 – more than I’ve mentioned above.  If you get lost, you can always check the menus for a synopsis of the game so far and for details on any sidequests you’re currently working on.

I do have an issue with a few aspects of the gameplay.

First: save points. Or rather, the lack of save points in some areas. There are parts of this game where you can play for two hours plus without finding a single save point. It’s as if not a lot of thought was given to allowing the gamer to take a break or get to sleep at a proper hour. If the lack of save points in some dungeons was meant to increase the difficulty, then Tri-Ace could have at least provided a quick-save feature – basically a temporary save that loads then deletes itself when you re-load the game. After all, fans of the Star Ocean series (which started in the 90s) are likely to be older gamers who might have to stop playing because something needs doing in real life.

Second:  the walking/running system.  The 360 has analog controls standard, as did the previous generation of game systems.  So why is it that you can’t push the analog stick a little make your character walk and a little more to make him run?  Instead, you have to use a separate button to switch modes between a glacially slow “walk” mode and a “run” mode that’s too fast to open chests or interact with the environment.

Next:  the targeting system.  Rather than a targeting system where you use buttons or the d-pad to change targets, Tri-Ace decided to use an automatic line-of-sight system.  While this works fairly well for melee characters, it’s a pain in the rear to target the right enemy using a character like Reimi who uses ranged attacks.

Finally: disc swapping.  I’ve got all three discs copied to the hard drive.  Why am I being asked to change discs?  This is probably as much Microsoft’s fault as it is Tri-Ace’s, but it’s still an annoyance.

Replayability

There are unlockable difficulty levels, multiple endings, and bonus dungeons to explore – as well as a ton of things to collect. So this game will have plenty of replay value. Provided you can stand listening to Edge whine all over again, ‘kay?

Overall

I’ve been a little hard on this game in the sections above.  The story and characters of the game aren’t memorable, and the game has some annoying defects in design.  Even so, Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a fun addition to the Star Ocean series.  It’s a must-have game if you like JRPGs and have an Xbox 360.

If you enjoyed any of the past Star Ocean games, you’ll like this. It’s a good game, and I’d give it a solid 7 on a 10 point scale.   But it could have been so much better with better writing and a little more playtesting…

Introduction

The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 have both been out for some time now, but did you know there was still good gaming to be had on the relatively ancient Playstation 2?  Just this past December, the Playstation 2 got what might be its last great game: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4.

Persona 4, for the Playstation 2

The Shin Megami Tensei (“MegaTen”) games, brought to us by Atlus, are for the most part turn-based role-playing games that feature themes that are darker and more adult-oriented than the typical Japanese role-playing game that’s brought over to the USA.  The Persona series is something of a spinoff series, featuring some of the same gameplay elements as the main line of games, but with more emphasis on character interaction than the others.

Like its predecessor, Persona 4 takes place in a Japanese high school (a somewhat ironic setting given that in the USA the game is rated “M”).  You take on the role of “the protagonist” – a character who you name and control throughout the game.  You start off your new life as a big-city boy who goes to live for a year with his uncle in the quiet town of Inaba.  Quiet, that is, until two things happen:

1. Dead bodies start turning up hanging upside down from TV antennas, and …
2. You discover that you’re able to jump into television screens.

Inside the television, you discover you have a power to summon and breed your own monsters (the “persona”s in the game’s title).  Using these monsters, you do battle with other monsters inside the television, hoping to both prevent more people from showing up dead and discover just what the heck is going on with this weird world inside the television.

Graphics and sound

For a Playstation 2 game, the graphics are done quite well.  Environments look like what they’re supposed to represent, and dungeons are sufficiently colorful and weird.  Some of the models for the Personas are qutie bland, but since they are not onscreen very often, it’s not a big deal.

If you’re a veteran to the Persona series, you will also notice that quite a few of the monsters and personas were simply lifted from Persona 3.

The game’s sound effects are servicable.  Things sound, more or less, like they’re supposed to.  The background music is primarily Japanese pop songs with English (or should I say “Engrish”) lyrics.  A typical example of the Engrish lyrics, from the song that plays when you’re inside your uncle’s house: “Signs of love overshadowed by dreams / baby, don’t worry ’cause you ain’t alone / only time running days without nights / tears pass through“. Say what?

The music is appropriate for a game set at a high school, and (either fortunately or unfortunately) some of the songs will get stuck in your head.   In case you don’t get enough of the music in the game itself, the game comes with a soundtrack CD which contains some of the game’s tracks.

Gameplay

Persona 4 is, like its predecessor, heavily focused on time.  You are only in Inaba for a year, so you know the game will end at about a certain time.  As each day progresses, you’re able to perform actions that take up your time.  At the end of the day, you go to bed and the next day starts.  So what do you do all day?

You spend part of your time in the real world, going to school, taking tests (yes, taking tests), studying, doing part-time work, and making friends.  Many of these activities make you money, and develop things that the game calls “Social Links” – essentially friendships between your character and other game characters.  These social links will allow you to breed more powerful monsters.  They also serve to develop the personalities of characters in the game.  For characters that eventually join your party, enhancing their social links also gives those characters more abilities in battles.

You can also spend time in the television world, where you’ll be battling monsters and trying to save the latest victim of Inaba’s serial killer.  Each potential victim has their own 10-or-so level dungeon to explore, but don’t take too much time exploring.  If you fail to rescue a victim before the required day, it’s “game over”.

Rescuing a victim, of course, means more than just walking in and grabbing them.  It means battles.  Persona 4 uses a turn-based system where you (and the monsters) take turns executing either normal or special attacks on one another.  To liven things up, the game includes elemental weaknesses.  If you hit the weakness of an enemy, you get an extra turn and the enemy gets knocked down.  If you knock all the enemies down, you can execute an “all-out attack”, where all your party menbers attack at once for big damage.  To further spice up combat, there are two types of instant-kill attacks (light and dark) which can eliminate monsters immediately if they’re vulnerable.  There are also the usual status effects like poisoning, silence, etc.

Sound good?  Feeling godly?  With the exception of the “all-out attack”, your enemies have access to all of this stuff, too.  Expect them to exploit your party’s weaknesses almost as ruthlessly as you exploit theirs.  It is not unheard of in Persona games for you to be wiped out before you get to take a turn at all, if you’re either unlucky or unprepared for a battle.  Expect, by the eay, to see the “game over” screen a lot.  A typical strategy for bosses, by the way,  is to fight them once just to find the boss’s strengths and weaknesses are, die, then come back the next day to actually beat it.

There’s one other thing I should mention about battles.  The game has resurrection spells and items, and if one of your party members dies during combat, you can revive them.  Or, you can simply leave them dead on the floor until the end of the battle, where they’ll automatically get up (but with only minimal health).  This does not apply to your main character.  If he dies, it’s an instant “game over” – no matter what the status of your other party members is.  Apparently, your other party members are too stupid to use their powerful revive skills/items on your character, while they use them with wild abandon on each other.  (Or perhaps they simply hate your character’s guts?)  It’s an odd quirk of the battle system that adds an extra strategic element to battles, but makes absolutely no sense otherwise.

While the gameplay is, on the whole, entertaining, Persona 4 suffers to some extent from the same disease that plagues all the MegaTen games:  tedium.  While figuring out how to attack new monsters with new weaknesses/strengths is interesting, you will quite frequently be fighting the same groups of monsters over, and over, and over again.  This can get old fast – especially when you find that you need an extra level or three to beat the next boss.  Breeding new personas is also entertaining, except when you have to try over, and over, and over to get one with a usable set of skills and special attacks.  (This happens because there is some randomness in the skills you get when combining old personas to make new ones.)  There are also periods of time in the game’s “real world” where nothing interesting is happening.

Overall, the gameplay is good, but it is definitely tarnished by too much repetition.

Story / Plot

Role-playing games aren’t just about battles.  They’re also about story.  Without getting into any big spoilers, the plot in this game revolves around the serial killer in Inaba.  You try to prevent more killings while uncovering the identity of the killer.  Interesting, but like the game’s battles, it gets repetitive after a while.

The game has several endings, and what ending you get depends on some key choices you make late in the game.  (Tip:  Save at the first opportunity you get in December, and don’t overwrite that save.)  There are a few variants of the (depressing) “bad” ending.  The game also has a “normal” ending, and a “true” ending (which is similar to the normal ending but with an extra dungeon and more cutscenes).  The game seems to go out of its way to prevent you from having any sense of closure with all these different endings – none of which are entirely satisfactory.  But, that’s a minor flaw in an otherwise good game.

Overall

Like I said before, this is perhaps the last great Playstation 2 game we’ll ever see.  So, if you still have a Playstation 2 or are lucky enough to have a Playstation 3 which features backwards compatibility and you’re even a casual fan of Japanese role-playing games, you should pick this one up.  Plus, it’s cheaper than buying a new game for either the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360!

Infinite Undiscovery is the latest JRPG for the Xbox 360 from Tri-Ace, one of my favorite developers.  Tri-Ace is known for producing RPGs with innovative and entertaining battle systems.  Tri-Ace games usually focus more on real-time action rather than slow, turn-based battles.  So how does Infinite Undiscovery look, feel, and play?

Read on for my impressions.

Appearance

Infinite Undiscovery is a beautiful game.  You can really tell that this is a next-generation title.  The introductory video, by the way, is one of the most impressive things that I’ve seen in a video game.  Gorgeous.

In-game graphics are also done very well.  You won’t be complaining about the visuals, unless …

Unless you don’t have a high-defnition television.  To put it simply, this game assumes that you have an HD set, and you will not be able to read the on-screen text and other displays if you don’t.  Consider yourself warned.

My only real quarrels with how this game looks are minor.  The non-player characters (NPCs) in towns aren’t very distinctive, and the main characters do not change their appearance when equipping new clothes or armor.  I know that most JPRGs have the same problem, but come on … it’s 2008!  Impress me!

Audio

Surround sound is used effectively.  Music and effects fit the game, but are largely forgettable.

The voice acting is serviceable, but the lip-syncing with the characters in cutscenes is horrible.  It’s so bad it’s funny.  The trouble is, you might end up laughing during some of the more serious scenes in the game.  Also, you’ll find that about half of the cut-scenes in the game aren’t voiced at all.  This solves the lip-sync problem, but will leave you thinking that your copy of the game is bad.  Voiced scenes and unvoiced scenes look almost the same – and often follow one another.

Story

You’ve probably heard that Infinite Undiscovery is a short game.  It is.  I spent more time on the first CD of Star Ocean: The Second Story than I spent on the entire two DVDs of Infinite Undiscovery – completing the main story, quite a few sidequests, and a little of the bonus dungeon.

The story itself is fairly weak.  You play the role of Capell, a musician who happens to look like a great hero – Sigmund.  Capell is tossed in jail, and broken out by one of Sigmund’s followers.  Then Capell becomes the next Great Hero, albeit reluctantly.  I won’t say any more about the plot to avoid spoilers  If you’re familiar with JRPGs, you will see no surprises, and you’ll roll your eyes a lot..  Tri-Ace isn’t known for their stories, of course, but this one isn’t very good even by their standards.  There’s a large cast of characters you can use as party members (as in their previous game Radiata Stories).  Unfortunately, only three of the characters (Capell, Aya, and Edward) have any real depth, and they’ll be the obly ones you care anything at all about.

Gameplay: Combat

Tri-Ace games focus more on gameplay than on story.  So how does the gameplay fare?

First, let’s look at the battle system.  Battles – and the entire game save for cutscenes – happens in real time.  There are no random encounters, and no real dsitinctions between dungeons and everywhere else – though you won’t typically fight in towns.  battles themselves are similar to the real-time combat found in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, although in Infinite Undiscovery you can control only one character directly.  For the most part, you battle by using normal attacks, strong attacks, and combos.  You can assign two special attacks at a time for dealing extra damage, as you could in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time.

You can ask other party members to heal you by pushing a button, and you can also link with party members for certain special attacks.  This linking – which the game calls “connect” – shows come promise, but the control of things like Aya’s bow-shooting is so bad that you’ll be thankful you don’t need to do it very often.

Buttons are sometimes slow to respond, and there can be slowdown when lots of things are on-screen at once.  This is annoying at times, but usually won’t cause you to lose a battle.

Combat itself is fast and furious, though it occasionally devolves into spamming special attacks and the heal button.  It’s usually fun, and you’ll probably be finished with the game before you’re bored with the combat.  Because combat is fast and furious, you’ll find it very difficult to use things like healing items.  Why?  Because combat continues while you scroll down through a long menu to use an item.  Of course, enemies will beat on your defenseless body while you are fumbling around in the menu.  The game does remember the last item you selected, but it’s still highly annoying to have enemies beating on you while you try to navigate a clunky menu.  Perhaps this concept would have worked if there was a quick-menu of healing/recovery items?  You’d think that an adventurer who knew he was going into combat would pack recovery items in an easy-to-reach place, right?

As Tri-Ace games go, the combat is okay but not great.  The sluggish controls, menu troubles, and clunky “connect” system keep the game from greatness.

Gameplay: Item creation, sidequests, and the bonus dungeon

There are other things to do that combat.  The game has an item creation system, where you can create items using raw materials either purchased or dropped by monsters.  Each character can create different kinds of items, though there is some overlap between characters.  One drawback of this system is that you have to “connect” with characters while in a town if you want to create items without worrying that a monster might attack you while creating.  Since your party splits up while in town, and since towns are sometimes huge in this game, this leads to lots of walling around trying to find the right party member to craft each piece of that new sword you need.  Another drawback is that without Xbox Live and a download code, some raw materials are very hard to get.

There are also quite a few side-quests in the game.  Some of these sidequests flesh out the main characters a bit.  Most of the sidequests are simple fetch quests given by NPCs in towns.  Usually, these quests give very little in terms of reward, and require lots of aimless wandering around the map.  To get from one town to another to complete these quests, you typically have to walk.  And walk.  And walk some more.  And did I mention you would be walking?  You won’t miss much by skipping most of these sidequests.

There’s also a bonus dungeon, called the “Seraphic Gate”, which becomes available after you beat the main game.  Like other Tri-Ace bonus dungeons, it ratchets up the difficulty level and offers almost nowhere to save your game.  If you’re still enjoying the combat after beating the main story, it will add a few more hours to the game.  It’s a challenge, but I found myself getting bored with the game a little ways into the Seraphic Gate.  There’s only so many times I could take walking through the desert.

Overall Impressions

Infinite Undiscovery is a distinctly middle-of-the-road game.  It’s not awful, and it’s not great.  It just … is.  The game is extremely short by JRPG standards, but by being so short you’re done before the flaws of the game make you want to put it down.  With some gameplay tweaks and a story transplant, Infinite Undiscovery could have been great.    Get it when the price drops if you’re a JRPG fan.  After all … what other RPGs are you gonna play on the 360?