Even better, the rewards are stackable, so you can easily double your party's experience for every battle fought simply by focusing on one specific battle mechanic. Other gems grant extra cash, bonus skill points or even a partial restoration of your characters' HP and MP. If you finish off an enemy with a critical hit, then you'll earn a blue gem, which will in turn reward your party with an extra 10 percent experience boost at the end of battle. The whole mechanic adds a nice layer of strategy to fights and fixes a traditional problem in the series wherein players would run in and hack away at foes until they died.Ĭomplementing the Blindsides is a new Bonus Board feature that rewards battle prowess. Successfully pull off the Blindside, though, and the enemy is temporarily at your mercy. During this time, if a foe interrupts your charge, not only do you take damage, but you'll also likely open yourself up for a wicked combo. Blindsides are handled in a nice risk/reward setup, where players must stop their attacks and hold down the Circle button for a few seconds to set up for the attack. The first big change is the Blindside system, which allows characters to quickly dodge behind enemies, bewildering foes and opening up time to land a few free shots. This flowing combat has been a staple of the series for years now, and The Last Hope keeps the mechanic alive and even improves it with a few cool new tweaks. Players can switch characters on the fly, though, and even swap party members in the heat of battle. The player controls one on-screen character while the others fight based on the behavioral parameters you set for them. Battles are conducted in real time, and special attacks and skills are able to be triggered at almost any moment during a fight. Normally, bad voice acting can be somewhat ignored, but in a game that features cut scenes that run over a half hour in length, you'd think some serious attention would be paid to both the actors and the script.Īside from the audio upgrade, the International Edition plays essentially exactly like its 360 cousin. The characters who do emote jump back and forth from ridiculously giddy to emo-kid somber so quickly that it's hard to take anything they say seriously. The counter argument to this is that some of the characters aren't really supposed to experience emotional highs and lows, but that's a flimsy excuse, to say the least. Most characters are guilty of the classic over-emoting, while a couple are so stiff and wooden you'd think they just ran the lines through a computer to have them read aloud.
This is due to the fact that the English voice acting is awful, and every time someone opens his mouth to speak, it's an assault on your ears. Normally, this is something only the otaku care about, but for once, the ability to switch over to the native language settings is a near necessity.
The main addition is the inclusion of a Japanese audio track, so players can hear the original voice cast rather than their English counterparts. The Last Hope was released on the Xbox 360 last year as a timed exclusive, so the International Edition features a few new features exclusive to PS3 audiences. What is meant to be a routine mission quickly becomes anything but, and suddenly Edge, Reimi and the cohort of companions they meet along the way face a much larger quest than finding a new home for humanity. One of the ships sent out on the inaugural search features childhood chums Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, the main protagonists. Nuclear winter has left the surface of the Earth uninhabitable, so mankind looks to the stars to find a new home. The Last Hope tells the story of a desperate human population ravaged by World War III. Unfortunately, a few big missteps prove that this series doesn't quite have what it takes to join the ranks of its more popular brethren.
In spite of its second-tier status, this has always been a rather impressive franchise, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope - International continues to set the bar high. Another franchise that is often overlooked but fills this same niche is Star Ocean, the sci-fi series that sees characters traveling through space while battling baddies with swords and spells. JRPG fans have always known they could turn to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest to get their fill of experience grinding and loot collecting, not to mention saving the universe from unspeakable evil time and time again.
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