I just finished Star Ocean: The Last Hope. I use ‘finish’ tentatively. What I mean is that I finished the story (with all but one of the character’s endings), but then there are the two bonus dungeons, filled to the gills with creatures that make the last boss seem like a cakewalk. There are still items to be farmed in order to craft the game’s strongest swords and there are the coliseum ranks to climb through for each character if you can be bothered. It’s becoming something of an unfortunate cliché that almost every other game finds it needs to pad out its running time by adding a coliseum, which simply recycles the games various antagonists into uninspired arena battles. And the less said about those 900 battle trophies the better…
Star Ocean is a game you can reach the end of only to find your achievement score barely making it into triple figures. The rationalist in me says that 400 hours plus of gameplay for a few gamer points and a vague sense of satisfaction (tempered by a large dose of self-loathing) is not a good deal. The completionist in me (lacking both a girlfriend and a life, I might add) screams “What about the Ethereal Queen?!” There she is sitting at the bottom of the Wandering Dungeon mocking me! A similar impulse compelled me to spend 180 hours on Final Fantasy XII, at least 40 of which were spent acquiring the ingredients needed to forge the Tournesol – even though there was precious little left to kill with it when all was said and done (still, it looked nice).
Square Enix are the masters of (self) deception; like pushers they get you hooked on lush story arcs populated with scantily clad female warriors and battles filled with rad particle effects, and then just before you can say “I can stop anytime”, they dangle sparkly new treasures just ever so slightly out of reach. Then that age old justification makes an appearance: “Well I’ve already come this far…” JRPG fans know that there is a moment when the obsessive compulsive kicks in and a game tips from ‘fun’ to ‘sado-masochistic’ and the primary motivation turns to a hardened resolution not unlike the focus of the samurai warrior pursuing his code of bushido (although with a controller in the place of a katana, and a nice comfy sofa and a cup of tea instead of a tatami).
My friend, who detests JRPGs, recently sent me the below tongue in cheek breakdown (click on it and download for full size). Although it’s slightly unfair, I find myself giggling at it because there are big grains of truth amidst the sarcasm. But even if they are often clichéd, over-stylised and immature I still can’t quite help myself – in spite of my better judgement I’m a sucker for a quirky, colourful and absurdly plotted JRPG. I was going to wrap this all up in an epic and witty fashion, but instead I’m going to leave the final confrontation hanging while I head off on a side-quest to rescue someone’s cat.
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