The Star Ocean series has always been a pillar, and lo, the fans rejoiced when the Star Ocean 4 title was announced for XBOX 360 instead of the PS3. When the release date finally came, I poured a mountain of kibble for my cats, updated my social networking status messages, and kissed my husband goodbye, ready to be dead to the world for the next six weeks or so. Less than a week later, I sold the game back.

Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope is not a bad game, but it was extremely disappointing. If this was the first RPG you’ve played in ten years or so, you might be blown away. For the rest of us, this game is weaker in design than other modern RPG releases, and actually devolves the Star Ocean series. Gone are the hours spent burying yourself in maps and item creation. For whatever reason, Square Enix decided to dumb down the Star Ocean games - significantly.

The game starts innocuously enough. You are Edge Maverick (I know, I know), a spiky-haired blonde guy in a post-apocalyptic Earth’s Space Reconnaissance Force. Edge receives a battlefield promotion and is charged with exploring space, finding habitable planets, and clearing the way for colonization. Along his journeys, Edge assembles a motley crew of aliens and uncovers a universal threat to life.

Like most RPG stories, SO4’s is very slow to start and features annoying voice acting. (Unfortunately, there’s no option to switch to Japanese voice acting, which makes me wonder why they even provide the option to turn subtitles on and off.) After awhile, you do actually warm to some of the characters as their stories and lives gain depth. You’re bound to hate at least two of your six instant friends, half of which seem to be bimbos who speak so slowly and vapidly that you wonder if they’ve had a stroke. Thankfully, Edge is not a hate-worthy hero (except for his brief “everything is my fault” period), and the game introduces one NPC who is now my all-time favorite.

Rating:

Gameplay Hours: ~40-60

Replay value: Low

My Party: Meracle, Sarah, Myuria, Reimi

Favorite NPC ever: Eleyna

While the story and characters make a passing grade, the gameplay and user interface is where SO4 really falls flat.

One of Star Ocean’s biggest draws was it’s addictive item creation system. In SO3, you invented your own items in a semi-random fashion, could recruit other crafters, wholesale your creations to automatically make money over time, and even compete with other craftsmen for top rank. In SO4, this has been reduced to just inventing recipes, synthesizing two items together, and creating items for your personal use. The random element’s been removed, and the items are usually not very useful, or the ingredients are obscure and hard to find. Synthesis is very useful, but you gain this ability very late in the game. Even Welch was reincarnated, and her new self is hands-down the most annoying (and unskippable) NPC in the game.

Beyond crafting, SO4’s battle system suffers. Star Ocean features real-time battle where you control one character, and the others act automatically, based off configurable tactics. You can switch which characters you’re using, and in SO4, you can even switch out unconscious party members for conscious ones.

My biggest problem with the battle system is the targeting system: it’s automatic and based off proximity only, so there’s no good way to switch targets. XBOX controllers feature so many darn buttons that you think SO4 might utilize more of them, but in SO4, you can only attack, jump out of the way, or fire off a pre-configured spell or skill; that’s it. It’s a step down from the previous Star Ocean releases, which allow more control over targeting and skill usage. You might also expect the tactics you can set for your inactive party members to be a little more granular than in previous releases, and you would be wrong. Every other current-generation RPG allows you to customize how your party heals or uses items, or even allows you to turn off skills and spells. I don’t understand why SO4 overlooked this powerful gameplay tool.

The game does add some new battle features. The new bonus board provides different types of awards for different extraordinary battle achievements. Some of these are very easy to get, but many are arbitrary or not worth it. (Give me back my bonus gauge!) The new blindside feature is kind of neat: you can time counterattacks by holding down a button just as an enemy attacks you, and backstab them for critical damage. SO4 introduces a rush system, where you can unleash faster and stronger attacks after taking and giving enough beating to fill the rush gauge. Another new system, BEAT (Battle Exalted Action Type), lets you classify your character as “burst” or “strike”. As your characters rank up in BEAT, they gain benefits that suit their BEAT type. This might be cool if there were more than two types, but as is, you’ll probably choose one type for your character, stick with it, and forget it.

SO4 removes map completion sidequests, but adds harvesting. This nets you valuable crafting materials and awards you not a small amount of skill points. With the skill points earned from harvesting, leveling, sidequests and opening chests, you can increase skills, spells, and support abilities for each character. Since all other character stats feature automatic gains and item synthesis is only available rather late in the game, spending your party’s SP is the primary method of customizing and developing your characters.

There are other minor annoyances in SO4 that other gamemakers have ironed out by now. In SO4, there’s no good way to get around from city to city until the end of the game, which makes it very annoying for you to gather crafting items. The store user interfaces are horrendous: they force you to exit the store menus in order to equip your new items, and force you to sell each type of item individually. There are lots of other minor user interface problems like this, but instead of listing them all, I will just express how mystified I am at these newly introduced problems.

On the bright side, the game is extremely pretty. On opening the game case, I squeaked out “THREE DISCS!” in tones that only dogs could hear. To my dismay, these discs seem allotted to lots of space battle scenes and blinding glowy lighting rather than more gameplay. I rushed through SO4 in a mere 40 hours, as opposed to logging over 250 in SO3, 80 in Tales of Vesperia, and 100 in FFXII (which I never finished).

SO4 does offer tidbits of new gameplay mechanics, but removes others and decimates the item creation system in order to make room for more graphics and bad voice acting. The game was entertaining, the game was solid, but there was nothing revolutionary here. If Square Enix had taken the opportunity to build on the features in previous Star Ocean releases, this could’ve been an addictive and revolutionary game. Instead, they’ve surgically removed the intricate mechanics that made the series a standout.