Just Play it in Japanese, 'Kaaaaaaay?
Star Ocean: The Last Hope International finally brings tri-Ace's sci-fi JRPG to the States, and the rumors of the series' demise have been greatly exaggerated... Provided you play it with the right audio option.
Published: March 7, 2010
The whole BEAT.N discipline showcases a very important distinction in Star Ocean: The Last Hope International: it was built for serious longevity. Those fifty hours I keep spouting? Yeah, that was done with almost no real side questing -- and this is a game where at nearly every shop you're going to have a good half-dozen fetch quest side missions if you want 'em. Talking to people in towns, just exploring a little, all of it will get you more ways to burn hours. If this review wasn't so close to the release of the almighty Final Fantasy XIII, I'd say it was the perfect way to hold you over until then. As it stands, the game is absolutely packed with content, and unlike the 360 version, heading back and exploring things at the end of the game won't leave you swapping discs.
In the end, though, all these mentions of added features and a compelling battle system won't mean a whole lot if the port -- as is also a familiar happenstance -- ends up being the inferior version. Thankfully, this is hardly the case. Sure, the PS3 version ends up getting bogged down a bit, and the game is rife with a weird kind of shimmering on tight bits of line detail I haven't seen since the PS2 days (ah, anisotropic filtering, I didn't know how much I needed you until now), but the depth of field effects and general direction (particularly in the few moments where the game actually employs proper CG rather than just rendering in-game engine moments to video) is so good that it honestly doesn't matter too much.
The game's variety in environments is damned impressive; forests, jungles, beaches, techno-fortresses, organic labyrinths, massive cityscapes, colonial burgs, villages, coliseums... they're all pulled off with some damned impressive variety to things. The only problem with all these expansive lands (and some of them are indeed quite impressively open) is that there's a startlingly close-cropped level of detail system in place. Shadows creep in just a few body lengths head, met with more vegetation and at times more geometry and enemies. In short, the game has one version of things being thrown on the screen and the actual one happens just a few feet in front of you.
Still, it's not that off-putting (just next-gen-feel-destroying), and it's more than made up with the game's soundtrack. Motoi Sakuraba absolutely pulled out all the stops, and his soundtrack regularly culls proper inspiration (some might argue a bit too much inspiration) and invokes scores from Star Trek, the arpeggios from Final Fantasy-era Uematsu (particularly while riding on a bunny in the game -- the accompanying music instantly bringing back the world-roaming tunes from Final Fantasy IV). None, however, are more blatant or outright fitting than the music that plays when everyone arrives on En II (hey, it's been out for a year and that's not exactly a spoiler). The Vangelis influence is powerful, outright ripping off the Greek composer's work in a way that, as much as I hate the full-on cribbing of his work, absolutely works. I ended up loading up an old game and started making the notes for this review while listening to the music even after I'd finished the game.
Something I wasn't so comfortable with, however, was the game's default voice track. There is no question in the matter: Lymle's voice acting is terrible. It's not just her babyish inflection, the localization has reduced her to uttering the dumbest, most useless and utterly retarded shit I've head in a game in a long, long time, 'kay? Though the text stays, the Japanese version is far more tolerable, if only for the fact that her version is, yes, still evident, but for those of us who aren't fluent in the language, it's at least ignorable. The incessant bowing, using of names to indicate characters are appreciative of another person's decision or are being considerate and more are made far more palatable by flipping to the JP track (which takes seconds and can be done from any static point in the game). That said, Welch's voice actress, Laura Bailey, absolutely nailed the holographic helper's particularly quirky... insanity.
That, actually, is a perfect place to end this, honestly. Star Ocean: The Last Hope International is a Japanese game. It revels in its Japanese-ness, and as such should probably be enjoyed by the kind of people that can tolerate the sort of native charm (and it is charm, certainly, though it takes a bit of cultural acceptance that I don't know I could always offer) that Japanese games command. If you get it, you get into it. If you don't, the game will annoy, perplex, embarrass and probably bore you. Even with the awesome 65,535 Dragon Quest reference.
