RPGs have come a long way since the days of the Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star-dominated world of the early nineties, since then we have had the groundbreaking Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the free-roaming worlds of Fable and Elder Scrolls and the post-apocalyptic Fallout series.
Though many of the most innovative RPGs are being created outside of Japan these days, the land of the rising sun is still seen as the development center for RPGs. It’s heritage in weaving dramatic storylines with typically turn-based combat is virtually unparalleled, but the (Japanese) RPG formula devised in the ’80s has been left largely unchanged.
The Star Ocean series, does in fact discard a few of the staple features of a typical JRPG. Specifically, there are no random encounters or turn-based battles, which are often the aspects of gameplay specific to the genre. But, in some cases, Star Ocean: The Last Hope (and it’s upcoming “International version”) reconfirmed that the JRPG industry is stuck in bit of a rut.
A prequel to the rest of the Star Ocean series, this Xbox exclusive gives players the insight to the events before the long story-arc of the rest of the series. The clichéd JRPG hero, Edge Maverick is on a mission to discover a new human homeland after the eruption of World War 3 on Earth, along with the usual type of cast including the must-have cute girl, annoying child and androgynous metrosexual (by the way: The voice acting is so embarrassingly typecast to these roles, that I even had to put the game on mute when others were in the room). All in all though, the story’s not all that bad, it’s just presented really badly and to progress through it, you need to sacrifice hours and hours on endless dungeons.
The problem lies in the fact the game doesn’t engage players. After a few hours playing the game, I realised “this is as interesting as it’s going to get!” and with a good 50 more hours to go, I wasn’t sure the ride was worth the 45+ hours of repetitive combat strung together by a really badly paced story line. It’s typical JRPG, level up, beat up monsters, then level up and beat up monsters again. This is not to say the combat isn’t good, there is just too much of it – in fact the combat engine is perhaps one of the best I’ve seen in a JRPG. The likes of Mass Effect and even the more recent Final Fantasies have conditioned me to expect perfect storyline execution in a game now, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope severely under-delivers.
As you can probably tell from the post so far, pacing is the key complaint that underlies all of the criticism here. The story doesn’t develop at the right times for it to be rewarding, XBOX Live achievements are few and far between, dungeons are far too long and lacking in any problem solving to be interesting and the prolonged story gives you more than enough time to hate the characters by the end.
We’ll see how the updated “International” version pans out in the new year, but unless it’s an overhaul of the overall story execution, I’m not sure it will wow non-Japanese gamers this time around either.
