Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Summary
I´ve read some reviews of Star Ocean: The Last Hope where all they do is complain about the long caves, the tedious length of fighting, the never changing storyline, not using the great wonders of space that could be used and that the characters are not new but instead we´ve seen them before.
All of this is true. But even so I find that this game is fun to play. Getting to know the different characters trough Personal Actions are a blessing and up to the player him/herself. I like seeing what personal actions they have in store for me. As the image I used for this post shows it can be just about anything. In that particulary PE Lym ensures Faize and Edge that Cerberus is a nice dog and shows them by doing what the image show. Now with all cliches involved, try imagining what happends next?
Keyword is “blink of an eye”.
The stages to get to bosses are long and easy/fun to play trough for me. Even though it takes a long time it is fun to beat enemies up thanks to the battlesystem. One thing I don´t like though is how the bosses are made. For starters they have a lot, and I do mean A LOT of HP which makes the fight tiring and hard. And when you don´t do more than a couple of double digit damage then it sucks. Then all of a sudden you do a four digit damage and you wonder WTF just happend?
Then you realize that you can hurt the boss a lot by doing certain things. But there are no such reminders or anything. You can also get killed in the blink of an eye if you´re not carefull. I had more than one battle where I was pummeled and 3 of my characters died in seconds. Only Sarah remained. Then the boss goes easy and gives me time to resurrect everyone and pummel him instead? Bad programming I guess.
But overall I found this game to be pretty good. Not as dull and boring as others have said about it. But I think that it also comes down to what you wanted from SO:TLH. If you wanted to travel around in Space only then I don´t think SO is the right series for you. If you want a classic SO game then by all means this is for you.
Grade: 8/10 – everything works just fine and dandy, except for the fugly graphics and to long boss battles I find this game really good. AI could be better, so that you don´t run into a enemy when he is charging you or that if you´re not going to be a melee character, then don´t go into melee combat with a foe you can´t beat… which Sarah did more than once and got her killed.
edit – need to know how they spell their names before I use them.
