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Part II: Late Arrivals
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This game originally was released in Japan in 2003, but the initial version was filled with bugs. It didn't even function in some older models of the PlayStation 2! To help save the ailing game, a Director's Cut was released in 2004 to douse the flames of angry players with all the issues fixed. This version was used for the overseas release. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time continues the proud tradition of a complex sci-fi storyline, this one taking place four hundred years after Star Ocean: The Second Story. As the planet Hyda IV, home of our blue-haired protagonist Fayt Leingod, falls prey to attack, he and friend Sophia Esteed exit the sphere by starship, only to have it be attacked as well. Fayt escapes in a pod and lands on a prehistoric planet to gather his bearings; from there, your story begins. There is indeed much more to Fayt's tale and to that of the game as a whole, including one plot twist that I consider by far to be the greatest of any video game I have played to date. I wish I could give it away, but I'll leave that little spoiler...
Till the End of Time is the first Star Ocean game portrayed in a fully three-dimensional world. Battles still take place in real time, although your playable character has more freedom of movement than ever before when fighting monsters. Enemy encounters are not random; you can see what you're up against before you take that plunge. Item synthesis also plays an integral role, just as before. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time actually feels more like it's in the Tales series from time to time, but it's the sci-fi plot that brings the game back to its Star Ocean roots. This is also the best-selling Star Ocean game of the series, boasting well over 1.7 million copies sold.
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The Last Hope is, by coincidence, also the last Star Ocean game, as the series' chief producer Yoshinori Yamagishi proclaimed. First released on the Xbox 360, it was then ported to the PlayStation 3 a year later as "Star Ocean: The Last Hope International" with exclusive new content. The game lets you take control of sassily-named Edge Maverick as he embarks on a journey to seek out other worlds where human life could thrive aboard the starship Calnus, named possibly after the old ship from the original Star Ocean (though they do not exist in the same universe). Unfortunately, the universe suffers from a bad case of meteors, and Calnus crash lands on the planet Aeos. With the help of its inhabitants, the surviving crew blasts into space to an unknown sector, where they find a planet they had never seen before: Earth. Things can only get crazier from here...
Star Ocean: The Last Hope continues the trend of implementing real-time battle sequences with new features, including the ability to blindside your enemy or use a special ability only after building up a Rush Gauge. Members fighting alongside you also have new, more specific styles of fighting that can be assigned to them so that they act in better accordance with your wishes (this has been a part of the series pretty much all the way through, but with greater acknowledgement and tweaking here). Players also get to take control not only of people but of entire spacecrafts, something not yet done before. The need for solid relationships between party members is also re-emphasized, thanks to the return of the Private Action system. Obviously, The Last Hope is the most visually impressive title of the series, being the only iteration in HD. The game also boasts tons of voice acting, which is great, considering the on-screen text is so small, it cannot be read easily on standard televisions. The series went out with a bang, and it's a shame that the Star Ocean saga ends here.
Or so we thought...
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Just when I thought the Star Ocean series would never see an official revival, we get Star Ocean: Material Trader, a card-based social game for iOS and Android systems. Each card you can collect contains information about a character or an item from the Star Ocean universe. You will have to get a researcher named Tima out of mischief by seeking out something called Star Shards, all the while collecting the hundreds of cards available in the galaxy. That... isn't what I had in mind for a future Star Ocean game. The only true returning element is item synthesis; it has not been made perfectly clear how this will be implemented. This sounds... ummm... not quite what Star Ocean fans ordered.
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