Considering the infamous Star Ocean 3 plot twist, the already-meandering plot is only further bogged down by the self-referential nonsense. You spend all your time meeting cameos and fulfilling quests that have no purpose other than to make players remember the previous titles in the franchise. A vast part of the middle of the game (the longest planet in the game) is taken up by a plot that is an extremely extended reference to Star Ocean 1. For every step you take forward, you're pushed into some inexplicable side-quest that has little to nothing to do with the main game. It is possible to skip the cut scenes and get a summary of the events, but the summaries tend to be inaccurate or unclear, which can be a bit confusing … and having to skip the cinemas in an RPG is just silly.Īs if to exacerbate the problem, the plot is a fairly limited 'good versus evil' story with a ridiculous amount of padding. To make matters worse, the cut scenes are all voice acted and done so extremely poorly, so you get the 'enjoyment' of listening to sub-par voice actors repeat the same boring plot points and over. Most plot points are also introduced in the most ham-fisted manner possible. This might be okay if the cut scenes were interesting, but they're long, tedious, rambling and repetitive. You'll sometimes be sitting for an hour or more just watching cut scene after cut scene, occasionally punctuated by a few chances to walk around a town to trigger another cut scene. The Last Hope is absolutely plagued with cut scenes. The game either thinks very little of its audience or far too much of itself because it turns the most simple and basic plot points into incredibly long and rambling cut scenes.

The Last Hope's basic plot is fairly average RPG fare with a few sci-fi twists. This is just the beginning of the story, and before long, Edge is drawn into a quest to save the entire universe. A mysterious anomaly occurs while the ships are warping, separating them and forcing the Calnus to make an emergency landing on a hostile planet. Along with the rest of the SRF fleet, the Calnus takes off from Earth to begin its quest, and of course, everything promptly goes sour. Players are put into control of Edge Maverick, an SRF cadet on the one of the maiden ships, the Calnus. Humanity's only hope for survival lies among the stars the Space Reconnaissance Force was created in order to find new worlds to colonize so that humanity can spread out among the stars.

World War III has decimated Earth, killing most of the population and forcing underground all who remained. Star Ocean: The Last Hope opens up in the not-so-distant future.

Star ocean the last hope edge