The Star Ocean system has a long and somewhat checkered history, offering up a long progression of good and bad games going as far back as the original Playstation and beyond.  Thus, when I heard there was to be a new installment of the Star Ocean series, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, I found it all rather ironic.  I’d been burned on Star Ocean titles before.  Frankly, so had other people. The boys out at Penny Arcade, in their grand inimitable style, once described a Star Ocean title, specifically, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time as “being a lot like high school”, in that, no matter what you do, whoever you’re not “currently controlling gets gangbanged by reptiles”.  This basically means that, unless you’re constantly near them or in charge of them, your AI characters will do absolutely idiotic things and your AI controlled enemies will gang up on them and proceed to beat them into a pulp.

So I had my concerns about Star Ocean: The Last Hope, mostly because it was MY last hope that the series could actually generate anything but a gigantic pile of suck.

And surprisingly enough, I wasn’t terribly disappointed.  This time, I got to play as part of an interstellar space force–yes, kind of like Starfleet–that represented a post-Apocalyptic earth.  This may be one of the very few times I’ve seen utopia grow from dystopia, and frankly, I can’t name any others off the top of my head.  Anyway, this interstellar space force launches a small fleet of five ships out to planet Aeos, where hopefully, sufficiently Earth-like conditions will be found so humanity can pack up, leave their shattered Earth behind, and possibly come back to rebuild except from a planet we didn’t just catastrophically screw up.  Of course, not all goes according to plan and four out of the five ships crashland on Aeos, with the fifth being, at the beginning of the game, “lost”.  From this rather shaky start, you’ll have to roam the galaxy, discover corruption at the core of the space force, and do a spectacular amount of other assorted stuff on a game that covers THREE DVDs.

Yes, I said THREE.  I had begun to wonder, after a certain point, when Xbox 360 games would get so large as to make their presence on merely one disk a physical impossibility, and I think I’m starting to see that point.  Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a criminally monstrous game, taking place on, unless I’m miscounting, EIGHT PLANETS.  Your mind should, at least on an instinctive level, recoil from that figure like any other unfathomably big number, like, say, a trillion dollars or six million people.  Eight planets is a whole lot of ground to cover, and in that process, you’ll meet plenty of friends and enemies alike in your travels.

Mechanically, however, Star Ocean: The Last Hope isn’t all sunshine and lollipops.  The cutscene graphics were amazing, but I found the inplay graphics to be a lot less sharp and, in places, downright fuzzy.  This may be because I’m not gaming with a high-dollar digital setup, but then, probably neither are most of you.  I found myself somewhat underwhelmed by the opening of the game, and more than once I wondered just when I would actually get a chance to DO SOMETHING instead of watch an extended CG anime.  But when I actually did get into the game, I got to take on legions of enemies, including bugs straight out of Planet P from Starship Troopers.  And this was sufficiently awesome to change my mind.

All in all, if you really want to get into this game, you’d better clear a chunk of your calendar for your Xbox 360 because it is patently MASSIVE.  But it’s also going to be one you’ll definitely want to give a try.