Star Ocean: Last Hope

"I don't know why I'm such a glutton for punishment..." That was the thought which went through my head many times as I "played" "Star Ocean: Last Hope" the latest in the "Star Ocean" series of JRPGs for my XBox 360. I say I'm a glutton for punishment because I tried to play other games in the Star Ocean series before and found them to be vastly underwhelming if not down right painful to sit through but I just couldn't help myself but give "Star Ocean: Last Hope" a try because, you know they might have fixed things, made things better, etc. Yeah, right.

Let me just start by saying this. If you "play" this game, you will not get to anything even remotely resembling gameplay until... 50 MINUTES after the game "starts"! Yes. 50 minutes and 53 seconds to be exact in my case. Oh, is there any interactivity? Sure. You get to run around on a ship and "talk" to people which really doesn't tell you anything, sit through a boring tutorial of how the battle system works, and what not but Once you've talked to the requisite people and triggered the actual intro, it's literally 30+ minutes before you get to walk around controlling your character and explore the planet you're headed for. So what's going on during the 30+ minutes I'm forced to wait before I "kick ass?" Basically some of the most cringe inducing badly written and directed spikey haired CG anime you've ever been forced to sit through. And the "Star Ocean" series is known for this. This is supposed to be part of the "goodness". I beg to differ and I'll bet you will too. There is nothing like being force fed sugar when all you want is some steak. :p

But tear inducing CG sequences aren't the only thing that makes playing "Star Ocean: The Last Hope" such a cringe inducing experience. Get this. You can't quit out of the game without forcing it to go to the dashboard by pressing the big "X" button. How do I know that? Because during my 50 minute "intro" I often tried to find a way to get the hell out of it but just couldn't. Call me stupid. I guess I could have just pulled the power on my 360. Or maybe that's how they keep you watching. If you can't quit the game then you must watch, no?

"Star Ocean: Last Hope" also suffers from the one thing which of all things JRPG drives me crazy. That's right, kids. There is no saving out of save points. Really? What is this, the 80's? This game was released 2009 for god sakes on a X friggin' Box 360! The only reason why there were save points in the past was because of technical limitations. Those limitations are no longer there now so why still do things this way? Talk about having their heads stuck in their asses... in the past.

But the annoyances don't stop there. For instance, there is this weird game design choice they made where after you've pressed "A" to get rid of all the post battle information, you have to press "A" again to get out of battle mode. Why am I being made to press the button again when I clearly showed that I was done looking at the information and wanted to move on. It's so unintuitive, I sometimes found myself waiting for the game to bring me back to the overworld since I pressed the button to get rid of all post combat data. And speaking of combat, this game has the combat rigged so that if I know an enemy down on its ass I can't attack it while it's on the ground and going through its "getting back up" animation. But that's the whole point of knocking the enemy down in the first place, so I can stomp the s**t out of it when it's down. If I can't stomp on it while it's down, why let me knock it down at all?

But the thing which really pushed me over the edge and finally got me to put down the controller and press the eject button on my 360 was this. The game does not make it possible for you to shop until three and a half hours in to the game! Yes, you have to finish the initial mission, with a pretty tough boss character at the end no less, just with items you scrounge off of enemies you beat and "harvest points" you "harvest". And there are no heal spells or anything to replenish your character's health except for a single refresh point towards the end of the mission which btw you loose access to since you have to "jump down" a ramp to get to the point which lets you close out the mission. So I was rather relieved when a totally new character showed up with a flying contraption because I figured, "great, now I get to go back to base and will at least get to save". Uh, uh. I get hit with the boss, nearly die several times, end up using all my items, then, THEN!, the idiot new character sends the flying contraption away(!) and I'm forced to run all the way through the level I've just had to fight my way through back to base while avoiding all enemies the whole way there because there hasn't been a single shops all this time that I could have spent the mountain of cash I'm sitting on which I collected off the alien monsters I've been killing along the way. Yeah, what a way to make any sense...

So back in the relative safety of the base was when I decided I'm not gonna take it anymore. Maybe it's their way of weeding out the true believers from the riff raff like me but really, after finally getting to the point where the game actually "starts", I was done. Hey, what can I say. I tried but in the end, it just wasn't meant to be. I swear there will be no more "Star Ocean"s in my future. A massive thumbs down from me.