Star Ocean: The Last Hope

I finally finished Vesperia a few weeks back. I know, it was out forever but my HD got corrupted (bye, gamerscore) so there, I have to forget the story and start a new game. The game was absolutely mindblowing, everythings it upper tier. Top notch. And it's safe to say that ToV is at par with the old scool JRPGS of the yesteryears. 

Gaming is like food - when you have your favorite, you can't seem to get to try a new one. This is what happened with Star Ocean: TLH. I was blown away with my ToV experience that I seem don't want to try any JRPG anymore. So I was pretty slow in playing SOTLH, I was playing for 30 minutes, save and do other things like catching up on my reading, or watching the sucky latest Heroes arc.

But after observing that SOTLH kept its save points scarce, I found myself trying to complete a frigging hour dungeon just to save. At first it was a chore, then it became fun. I was never a fan of big dungeons because I always want to find out what happens next, story-wise. But when you digest the fact that SOTLH will never give you a dungeon which only has point A to B, you'll realize that you can and will enjoy an RPG like this.

Cliche-wise, SOTLH has that everywhere you look - Tale of war, friendship and betrayal, Palom and Porom knockoffs, spiky yellow haired hero, innocent leading lady, androgynous magician, hulky robots, aliens, magic, scifi wars fought with frigging' swords, summons (eidolons, GF whatever it's called nowadays)... the works. But that is overriden by the fact that though cliche ridden, the manner of how everything is brought together works. You get to overlook everything. Yeah, even the shitty voice acting. Never I heard voice acting shitty like this. There's no Japanese voice option so you have to endure 40 mins of cutscenes of pure shittiness. Yeah, the cutscenes is kind of Metalgear4-esque, also as beautiful but with voice acting like that... good luck.

The game spans 3 discs which is most likey because of lengthy cut scenes and the huge world. You get to collect spaceships, travel vast planets and when I say vast - I mean VAST. Good thing you have your dashbutton because it sure is annoying to have scarce save points and running to your next destination in a dungeon as huge as SOTLH dungeons.

Annoying shits aside, SOTLH is an JRPG game worth the time, effort and annoyance. Not as perfect as Vesperia but one of the contenders of this gens JRPG greats.