CantFaketheFunk said:
Star Ocean: The Last Hope shows how archaic JRPGs have become. In a word? It's hopeless.
Funk, I 90% agree with you. I finished the game a week or so ago - yes, I went through the
whole thing. And I think I've figured out where everything went wrong.
First of all, what I thought went right. First, the aesthetics - the game looked gorgeous, and the audio was great. There really can't be any complaints there. Second, the mechanics - with the minor exception of the item creation process, the game mechanics were excellent. The skill system from previous games returned, with more variety, and the combat was genuinely fun. There were no random battles, the difficulty curve was on point, and the AI characters even behaved themselves.
The bad part, in my opinion, lies entirely on the writing. I think this was the most clichéd mess I've ever seen in a game (and I play a LOT of JRPGs - I know my clichéd messes).
First, the character designs are straight out of Anime Stereotypes 101. You have the moody, young, ambitious leader. His loyal childhood friend slash romantic interest. And their other childhood friend, the awesome perfect example of everything, god-like in everything he does. Oh, and they all have secret super-special powers.
Then you have the elf/vulcan. The magic-using child who speaks like a toddler, constantly. The hot elf chick wearing a cape and bikini. A giant robot. And a cat-girl and a bird-girl, constantly fighting but still friends, to fill in the anthropomorphism requirement. Oh, and eventually the taciturn, anti-social bad-ass who ends up having a heart of gold.
That's bad, but the dialogue is even worse. I actually don't blame the voice actors for anything - in fact, I think the voice acting was very well done. Technically. The blame lies entirely with the writers and producers, who seemingly designed these characters and their dialogue to maximize their annoyance value. The voice actors didn't do a bad job, they just had
bad parts.
Second, the plot was just awful. Why did the story have to shift away from the original premise at all? To take a perfectly good story and then turn it on it's head so you can run a generic save-the-universe plot just seems stupid. Then we get the following:
[ol]
[li]An ambush by bugs (who are immune to guns but not swords)[/li]
[li]Spontaneous super-monster creation[/li]
[li]A derelict ship infected by a 'disease'[/li]
[li]Time/dimensional travel through a black hole[/li]
[li]Noble NPC sacrifices to save the party (several times)[/li]
[li]The main character becoming alternately confident and depressed[/li]
[li]Immediate acceptance as a new best friend any person that joins the team[/li]
[li]The ability to not realize the most obvious answers to conversation lines[/li]
[li]The ability to immediately jump to a conclusion and know it to be fact[/li]
[li]An ultimate betrayal (with ham-handed foreshadowing)[/li]
[/ol]
And finally, the ultimate in Anime clichés - the round-robin support speech. Where we need to go through
every single character and have them give a supporting comment. This happens over and over and over and over again.
My new scale for judging how bad an RPG plot is is how many times the dialogue requires a character to have an entire line dedicated to saying just another character's name (usually with an ellipsis). But very emotionally, as if to carry the weight of an entire conversation that the writer is too clumsy and incompetent to write. At the top of that scale is Star Ocean 4.
