I love when Welch sees Meracle and comments on her catlike appearance, claiming she feels as though she just walked into an anime convention, because yeah, that’s how this entire game feels. They end up orbiting the Earth and decide to land ship in Area 51, because why the hell not there? This is where they find Meracle, our resident cat girl, who Welch very appropriately calls out for looking like an anime character. Somewhere along the way, our crew gets sent back in time through a black hole. We even get our own filler arc to introduce the character Meracle, because introducing her during the actual story would be much too simple.

I should also mention that while the main plot does rear its head from the beginning, a lot of shit that has nothing to do with anything happens along the way.

The battle system is fun and the visuals are pretty damn good.Īll of that goes to hell pretty quickly once we get our first taste of the characters’ personalities, which I’ll get to in a bit. And as I said, the gameplay is fantastic. Pretty simple, right? It’s a good start to what could be a great game. Thus, Edge, Reimi, and Faize embark on a mission to find it. Something goes wrong, however, and one of the other SRF ships crashes and the remaining one piloted by Edge’s best friend Crowe disappears. Along the way, they encounter Faize, an Eldarian boy, and it’s from Faize that they learn of the existence of intelligent alien life and that the Earth has been in contact with the Eldarians for quite some time. Our two main characters, Edge and Reimi are post-WWIII kids, who worked hard to get into the SRF program, so they could travel together to other planets and find a suitable place to live. It pulls the player in with a more-than-decent beginning and fun gameplay. To start off, let me just say that the plot sucks. While I rejected the latter, because I thought it was ugly, I very much love the Japanese voices, and that’s one of the things that sold me on this game. More accurately, this game is called Star Ocean: The Last Hope – International, as it includes a very welcomed option to play with the original Japanese voice track, as well as the option to change the HUD back to its original design which looks more anime-esque. Now, I haven’t played the first two games, so I don’t know where they fit into on the timeline however, I do know that the third one takes place almost four hundred years after the latest installment, making The Last Hope something of a prequel. Except where each Final Fantasy takes place in different worlds that do not impact the other games, Star Ocean spans across one universe for all four games, just at different time periods. Whatever, right? The Star Ocean franchise reminds me very much of Final Fantasy. Yeah, here’s another thing I’m getting to really late, but oh well.

Star ocean the last hope edge