Friday, October 10, 2008

Hands On: Action-Packed Star Ocean 4

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TOKYO -- My last few weeks of gaming have mostly been about Tales of Vesperia and Infinite Undiscovery, so when I got inside Tokyo Game Show on Thursday, I made a beeline to Microsoft's booth to get some play time with Star Ocean: The Last Hope.

I was really hoping that developer Tri-Ace would decide to go the Infinite Undiscovery route and implement real-time battles with no breaks to introduce combat, which makes grinding infinitely bearable. It instead follows the style of previous entries in the series: Combat itself is real-time -- and quite action-packed -- but we get the classic Japanese RPG style of combat encounters, with enemies in the main world triggering the start of a separate battle sequence.

Once you enter battles, it is fast-moving and fun. A "Rush" gauge lets you perform special attacks -- you initiate it by pressing X -- and pulling the controller's triggers will create other powerful and magic-based attacks.

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