Note; This review is based on the PC version, which is an enhanced port of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

Sometimes, great franchises have one game that is the black sheep of the franchise, often casting a pall over what is otherwise a decent franchise. Star Ocean The Last Hope (Star Ocean 4), despite the name, brings no hope to Star Ocean as a competent entry in the series.

Star Ocean is a once-removed cousin to the "Tales" franchise, being founded by many former members of that company, though it's set in a more science-fiction setting. Otherwise, much like the Tales series, it's an RPG that is easy to learn yet difficult to master.

The plot of Star Ocean 4 is set as a distant prequel to the rest of the series timeline, in the year SD 10. After World War III nearly ended humanity a few decades prior, and with Earth greatly crippled by its now radiation-scarred world, humanity began to look to the stars to expand to survive. However, as they set out to explore the vast "star ocean", they find it has its dangers, including an encounter with a threat that could spell the doom of the universe itself.

The gameplay is typical of the action RPG genre. Various areas are explored on foot, and battles are a mix of the classic turn-based combat (with battle transitions) and action style (all commands are given in real-time with allies having adjustable AI). Exploration involves harvesting various resources in certain areas to create new things later and solving certain puzzles in certain dungeons. Due to the fact this game features space travel, you quickly gain access to your vessel which can be used to travel to different planets, all with different places to explore.

There are a few other subsystems, specific to Star Ocean 4. The game has a crafting system, proper use of which can make some of the most powerful items you will ever acquire, though this requires patience and skill. There is also a relationship system where different endings can be unlocked by improving the opinion of various party members in certain cutscenes.

A few things about gameplay are a bit annoying. Some of the longer levels set in enclosed spaces suffer from a camera that keeps backing into your character. It's re-adjustable, but a pain to keep doing this in levels with twisty, tight hallways. Second, it's difficult to disable certain skills from being usable until you are in a battle, which can be annoying when fighting bosses who are resistant or heal from certain elemental skills, forcing the player to quickly take manual control and tweak each character before their AI kicks in to fix it.

Graphically, this game has a mix of high fantasy and sci-fi environments, though compared to prior games like Star Ocean 3, a lot of assets feel slightly generic. Combined with many areas being overly large with little reward for exploring many parts, the world feels a bit empty. Worse, dungeons also tend towards the overly large, and some feel a bit samey with little eye candy variation. Most of the special effects look decent enough, but I recommend turning off the self-shadows, they look ugly and are a performance drain on low-end systems. Otherwise, I can't knock the general quality too hard, the assets were dramatically upscaled from the original console versions like the PC version claims. Animations are also decent, though facial expressions can be a bit stiff.

The voice acting for the English dub is very uneven at best. While there are some standouts, like Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham, most of the voice acting sounds very stilted and corny due to a bad script and poor timing for certain scenes. Matthew Mercer voices the main protagonist, and given this was a role from far earlier in Mercer's career, I'm glad he improved drastically since. The Japanese dub sounds a lot less hard on the ears and has markedly better inflection and emotion and would be preferred, especially if some of the English voicework is unbearable like it was for me.

The music, thankfully, is again an aural feast by Motoi Sakuraba. On top of his usual offerings of progressive rock, a few themes have an ambient horror styling to them, which fits certain bosses like a glove. The sound effects are typical Star Ocean fare, meaning nothing great or terrible.

While this game is playable with a keyboard and mouse, I highly recommend a controller if you want to have the best experience. An Xbox and/or PS3-style controller would be recommended, especially if you played this in its original version on either system. It's quite playable on the Steam Deck controllers as well, though a few buttons are a bit differently labeled so you'll want to get used to that early on.

Stability is generally good, provided your system meets or exceeds minimum requirements. On Linux/Steam Deck, it's possible to get this game running out of the box via Steam Proton, though I did notice a few minor loading skips. This can happen on Windows natively, albeit a bit less often. I encountered no crashes or other fatal issues during normal play on any of the systems I tested this on.

A caveat worth mentioning: I noticed the in-game "achievements" feature will take the game a lot longer to load if you are offline, particularly on the Steam Deck. This is generally harmless, just annoying, and it appears linked to how it tries to sync with the Steam cloud to ensure a stable continuity of data if you play on more than one device.

I do want to avoid writing a novel for this last part, but to be as brief as possible, the story for Star Ocean 4 is atrociously bad. It gets basic sci-fi concepts wrong, has a lot of painfully forced retconning of prior events that cause lots of serious continuity errors, and has several forced game segments that are simply there to coast off nostalgia for much better games. Overall, as regards the rest of the Star Ocean games, while the gameplay is serviceable enough, the story and lore are terrible to the point you could skip this game without it hurting knowledge of the series since it's supposed to be a distant prequel to the rest that is not mentioned much in the games that follow.

Morally, this game does have some concerning content.

Violence is typical of the RPG style. Remains always disappear after death and there is no sign of actual blood (though a few scenes imply it). The language tends to run the gamut of the lower end of the PG-13 scale, with words like d**m, h**l, and b**t**d being heard on occasion.

Sexual content is generally limited to a female character or two with rather skimpy outfits, mostly two playable characters, albeit at least one is admonished they need to wear more appropriate clothing at one point. There is also a mild running gag where the main male character winds up in "not what it looks like" situations and winds up getting a comedic handprint on his face for his unwitting trouble.

Star Ocean tends toward hard science fiction, merely giving lip service to many fantasy tropes while revealing almost all cases of "fantasy" have far more rational causes. Regardless, there are some undead enemies, typically given a Resident Evil-style justification for their existence. There is also a fairly realistically depicted death cult that, while the worship was a deception to achieve a more science fiction-oriented purpose, still depicts ritual suicide and human sacrifice is confirmed to be among their practices. The main villains are loosely based on beings mentioned in some Christian writings (they have angel-style names) and have some vaguely Gnostic-style concepts (as filtered through a science fiction-style lens) to their motives, but it's made clear they are based on science-fiction, with the mythological references generally just that.

Morally, there are some concerning decisions. There is an optional gameplay mechanic to pickpocket NPCs. This is entirely optional, the player can make it through the entire game without using it at any point. It also comes with the penalty of lowering the respect of party members if discovered, thus locking the player out of certain endings. There is also a key story decision that, while done with the best of intentions and good faith on the part of the player character, was of incredibly questionable ethics under the best of circumstances. This story-mandated decision does however have moral repercussions and the folly of the fallout does get made very clear throughout the rest of the plot.

From a technical standpoint, the basic combat and crafting system is sound, but the game itself has a lot of design issues that prevent it from being fun. Morally, it does have some concerning themes not suited for anyone not an older teen on up bare minimum. Overall, while I love the Star Ocean games, this entry I cannot recommend in good faith to anyone and it can be skipped without harming the enjoyment of the rest of the series.