Star Ocean 4 -- The JRPG of the 360?

Note: This is written BEFORE Final Fantasy 13, which will more than likely top this game, but as of now, it's one of the better JRPG's for the 360, and there is also a newly released Star Ocean 4: International for the Playstation 3, which fixes some of these bugs.

Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope is the first of the series to come to the Xbox, and hopefully not the last. The game starts off on the SRF ship Calnus, one of 5 exploratory vessels into space to find humans a new home, after the earth has been destroyed by a nuclear holocaust, and is no longer habitable. Well, lets just say that during the first mission, things go wrong and all the ships crash land on the planet Aeos, the planet they were aiming for, but most of the ships have suffered severe damage and are scattered about from one another. That's where you come in, Edge Maverick one of the crew members of the Calnus, along with Reimi Saionji his pseudo-girlfriend. After crash landing on the planet Aeos you are soon attacked by giant insects, that are immune to bullets making most of your crew useless because they no longer have standard issue tactical-knives, so your intrepid hero takes up a engineer's cutting blade and kills the threat, more than likely saving the Calnus from certain doom. After Edge saves the ship he's called to the bridge alongwith Reimi to go find the Eramus, the last of the ships that they were unable to group up with and contact after the crash. Near the end of the meeting the captain is told by the higher ups to call in "them", without explaining it to Edge or Reimi, he sends them off onto their task saying he'll explain it later. Once they reach the Eramus, they find a young man lying on the beach a good distance away from the burning ship, near death he tells them that the planet is too dangerous and they should leave. He also tells them he had to blow up the ship in order to stop something and soon dies. Confused yet again, they look at the Eramus and suddenly notice that a alien ship is overhead, and is landing next to them. Your duo, slightly afraid waits for the owner of the ship to step out. Who they see surprises them slightly, a green haired, elf-ish looking alien named Faize Sheifa Beleth coming out of the cockpit and greets them. After some confusion, he tells them that he is an Eldarian, another space fairing species like the humans, and that his race has been in contact with earth for nearly a decade. Once that is explained, a monster materializes behind the trio from a mist-like haze and attacks them. Your team makes short work of the monster and as it disappears, turning into the mist-ish substance again, but instead of drawing back, this time it condenses into a a tiny shard, or crystal that is the same color as the haze that it had came from. Confused, yet undaunted, they collect the crystal in order to study it, and the trio heads back to the Calnus in order to tell their Captain what happened, causing them to be slowly sucked into events of universal proportions. Now, that sounds pretty epic right? Well, it is. But there are a lot of problems in this game's story. Mainly something the main character does and regrets throughout the game, a lot of people have complaints about it. I for one, don't. Edge Maverick goes emo for 1/3rd of the game, for a monumental thing he does that's really, really bad. The main reason why people hate it, is because he did it stupidly. If he used that thing above his shoulders for the 2 hours of game play he probably would have foresaw the consequences of what he was doing. And, if he did use his brain, and thought about it logically, people maybe wouldn't have so much hate towards his whacked out emo phase. But other than that the story isn't so bad, besides the plot twist at the end, which is made obvious the moment you see the final boss and one of your team members reactions to it.

Okay, the summary on Aeos is pretty much the first 3 hours of the game, unless you work fast and know which way your supposed to go and not explore any of the nooks and crannies of the map. Wait, did this guy say the first three hours of the game? Yes, the areas in this game are absolutely massive, and they're chock full of enemies to battle which adds quite a bit of time to this game. The game's settings are varied and different and all beautiful, like one of the planets take you to a snow covered, ruined cathedral, while on another planet your in a dark, foreboding temple filled with cultist's and demons. The only problem with this is that there isn't a save anywhere feature, meaning that if you need to go to bed, and your only half way through a place, that has, say, 10 floors, each bigger than the last, you could either go down to the 10th floor to get a save point before the boss, or trek all the way back up to the first floor to get to the save point there, which causes some frustration when you just don't have the time to get to a save point, usually forcing you to replay the 6 hours of game play you just did.

The graphics, as stated above are stunning in this game, from Cut scenes to just looking at the scenery, each one is vibrant, which is a good thing because some of these cut scenes can last for a long time (I'm pretty sure, that if you achieve all of the characters endings, the ending scene will be over 1 hour and 20 minutes long). This can be seen as a negative, but I have to say I love it. Being able to watch a 45 minute cut scene is just freaking epic to massive proportions to me, but others hate it, saying it drags on and on without really saying much so it could only be me. There is something I must warn you about, do NOT play this game in anything above 720p, because the game can sometimes go into a Miss loop where it freezes during / at the end of a battle. Stupid, and they should have caught that when they were testing it, but theres nothing you can really do about it.

Now onto the combat of this game, the meat of any RPG. This game is a real-time RPG, meaning that everything will be going on at once, making it rather hectic against bosses when your party members are dishing out massive amounts of damage at once.The game has 8 characters to choose from by the end of the game, and you can have any combination of 4 as your party to fight with. You don't even have to use the main character in your party (Edge Maverick), but it's suggested for the fact that you will be forced to fight as him for about 3-5 battles (but you can kick him out once you get to the post-game content). The battle system is simple, yet fun. A is attack, Right Trigger and Left Trigger are specials that can be stacked to produce chain combos, but you need the store bought skill "Chain Combos" to be able to do that. B is to charge your rush gauge and to dodge / blindside charge. The rush gauge is pretty cool, once it reaches 100 tap X and your character will go into "Rush Mode" the mode gives your character higher attack and defense, and makes it so that if your hit your attacks won't be interrupted, there is also a "Rush Combo" where you press X and either of the Triggers at the same time to begin chaining specials together along with another party member (I believe that the other party member is chosen at random) to dish out massive damage, but you should only use this if you have the chain combo skill, because if not you'll only be able to do 2 specials per Rush Combo. Another of the cooler features mentioned above is "Blindsiding", where you pretty much dodge an enemies attack, makes it confused and lose sight of you, and gives you 3-6 extra hits if your quick enough. Blindsides are insanely easy to pull-off though, just hold down B until a targeting reticule is around your character and pull the thumb stick in any direction, and your character should do it, but you can't hold B down indefinitely, because your character will become tired from charging it up, leaving him/her vurnerable for a few seconds. You can choose who ever you play as by selecting a "Party Leader" by either using the right and left bumpers during battle, or changing it through the pause menu, making it so that if your character is ever paralyzed or dies, you can continue fighting right along side your AI party members by switching who your playing as. Also, the battles happen in their own little areas, so once you run into an enemy / begin fighting a boss, you'll be put into a circle-ish arena to fight.

Another part of the battles is as your characters level up, open treasure chests, finish quests and so on, you get SP (Skill Points). SP allows you to level up your specials and passive skills, allowing them to dish out more damage, or give you more of a skill boost per level up. There are two types of SP, Party SP where you can distribute it to everyone, and is generally in large supply, and individual SP, which can only be used on that certain characters skills, which you only get by leveling up I believe. There are a few other complaints of the battle system, like how you can't manually switch targets, the framerate goes down if all your party members are doing epic looking specials at once, and how one of the characters are so broken that you can pretty much juggle the last boss from 100% to 0% without getting hit once, but all of them besides the last arn't much of a problem. The reason the last one is a problem is because it's so easy to exploit, and requires very little timing or practice to do so.

Another one of the games many features, is Item Creation. Back from the other games in the series, you pretty much make weapons, armour, and things for your ship. In order to be able to make the items, you must first have the recipes and the materials, the materials you find out in the wild at harvesting / mining points, and you can find recipes through quests and treasure chests, or by grouping your characters together during the "Find new Recipes" side of item creation. Your ability to create these recipes depends on one thing, your characters level of his / her crafting skill (Alchemy, Crafting, Smelting, Etc), in which you can level up using SP through the pause menu and "Skill Boost", these skills should be the ones you max out first, unless you plan on never using Item Creation. Another thing I forgot to mention is during item creation you can synthesize, by attaching items / other weapons or armour onto your pre-existing gear. This is good because there are some items that give you 30% exp, or 30% Foi (The currency of the game), in which you can stack those onto your gear, allow you to get insane amounts of money and/or experience every battle.

Now onto the characters of the games, you may hate this but most if not all are anime arch-types. Theres the girlfriend that isn't the girlfriend, the logical thinker, the cutesy lolicons, the sexy teaser, and the bad ass guy who is death himself, along with a few others (Including a Cat Girl). If you don't watch anime, you might hate these because they seem so generic, and even if you watch anime you also might not like them. But for those of us who do, some of the cut scenes are just like watching a awesome looking 3-D anime, which is a nice treat. The characters faces are doll-ish, which can take some time to get used to, and sometimes during the most serious cut scenes during the game, the voice acting just falls flat, and if you ever played a JRPG, you'll understand that there is the usual amount of perviness here and there during the laid back sessions of the game, which usually happen during the Private Actions, which are back from the other Star Oceans, where you are allowed to speak to your characters and raise / lower their affinity for you by the reactions you choose (if there are any to choose.) Most of these private actions are funny, and usually have some amount of silliness included in them besides the final few.

Just one more thing, the achievements in this game are incredibly satisfying, but insanely hard, because most tie in with these thing's called "Battle Trophies", specific things you can do during the battles, like Kill 500 insects, kill a monster while your character has 1 HP left, or defeat the hardest boss in the game with the weakest character, in under 5 minutes. These are insane, and there are 900 of them so it'll take you hundreds of hours to get all of them, but once the achievement for 100% battle trophy's pops up, and you know your one of the few people who actually have that, you'll feel like a god.

Overall, this game is another one of those games where you may nerd-rage over the story because of certain events that happen, or you may love it because of it's animeish charm here and there. The real-time battle system is simple, yet doesn't grow old throughout the game and the graphics look amazing and keeps you waiting for what the next area will look like. There are a few problems here and there like that there's no save anywhere feature, but the games pro will more than likely over power the cons for most people.