05-03-2018, 06:04 AM
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is garbage in a lot of ways. The voice acting is pretty terrible and so is the script/translation so good job there to whoever did that, and the dungeons are fucking annoying. It's not fun having to try and find the right corridor to go to when there are so many enemies in each one that it's possible to forget which one you came from or were heading to. In the dungeon I'm currently at, in order to get past these annoying barriers, you have to use a Thunder Ring to destroy some weird monitor looking thing just to try and get past the barriers. Once you destroy them, smoke end up everywhere which somehow messes with some of the barrier enough for you to get by. To make matters worse, there are these large dragon enemies that are practically impossible to hit at close range, and they are extremely good at destroying your bonus meter which can net you extra money, recovery at the end of battle, SP which is used to invent important items etc. etc. Those monsters are large on the map as well so they take up too much space to in the small corridors I'm in so they can't be avoided. A lot of the enemies in this dungeon also blend in with the smoke I mentioned before so it's hard to see them making it easy to surprised attacked or ambushed. Normally neither of those things are a problem because the battles are action-based but with battle screens so you have time to think, but with a large amount of the enemies being the dragons that mess up your bonus gauge, and oh by the way can send you flying up about two hundred feet in the air, launch missiles at you, and hit you while you're recovering after hitting the ground, and do tons of damage, it's hard to enjoy fighting them. I could switch party members to someone who knows symbology, but a good sign for a bad game is giving you the option to change your party, then trying to force you to do it without their being a story reason. I should never feel like I can't play the party member I want to because the game makes it seem like I can't, yet here we are. I don't get why this game is so bad either, nothing else in the Star Ocean line-up is this bad, even if the series isn't fantastic. It's a wonder that will never cease, how there can be more Star Ocean games out there, which is a series than Square Enix owns, than there are Chrono games or tactics games. I can't imagine Star Ocean is more popular or sold more than either of those series. Perhaps Square just does this so that they can keep tri-ace happy? I don't know, but in hindsight, it's annoying.