However, the game is visually sound, although the cut-scenes are at times a little lifeless, it does not help that the characters all resemble doe-eyed dolls. However there are some very beautifully rendered environments to explore, the worlds and dungeons are all very individual and some quite stunning. The combat graphics and animations run smoothly, although not ground breaking, some of them are very cool. The soundtrack too for SO: TLH is okay, there is not a huge variety in tracks, but considering the amount of time spent repetitively grinding and levelling up, none of them became intrusive or offensive to my ears.

It is in the battles, monster grinding and levelling up that SO: TLH really shines. There are gladly no random battles, in order to kick off with a monster simply walk into it, you will then be warped to a battle arena where up to four of your eight party members will do combat. This is a lot of fun and something that has yet to lose any of its initial entertainment value. Once in the battle arena you can swap back and forth through your chosen team members. Whoever you have selected is controlled in real time by you and can  move anywhere within the battle arena, with the others being controlled by the AI. You can set the AI on team members to different settings varying their defensive and offensive tendencies. As well as your normal attacks, characters have various powers like symbology, which is basically spell casting, to unlockable super moves that can be chain combo'd for some really impressive arse kicking, very useful against some of the tougher bosses. There is also a bonus board that, depending on how well you fight in a battle, will give you bonuses to your XP and other attributes. Also being introduced is a type of counter system called a Blindside. In order to pull this off you need to be holding the ‘B' button down (which puts you in a stationary charging state) and flick the control stick within a specific time frame once an enemy has locked onto you. This triggers a Blindside animation and leaves your enemy open for a really strong attack dealing critical hits. This is a lot of fun, especially as each character has different animations and moves to experiment with. Levelling up is cool, it's not just a case of level up and a few stat increases here and the like; rather as you progress you will open up more and more special moves and abilities that can in turn be stated up. It is a statistician's wet dream.

What you put into a game is what you get out of it, and this is none more so true than in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Sure you can blaze through on the easy setting, skipping the cut-scenes along the way and complete it in 25 hours or so, but that just is not what this game is about. For the truly anal retentive among us there is a plenty to do to keep it going a lot longer.  Whether it's returning to worlds to get chests that you could not access before, completing the myriad of side quests, levelling up in order to tackle the über dungeons or inventing and creating new items, armour and weapons, there is still a lot of mileage to be had. These are elements that should keep even the most ardent RPG fan, whether of the Japanese variety or not, very happy. Sure it may be flawed, it is a rough diamond, but the more I played it the more I liked it.

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