Star Ocean: The Last Hope Full HD Remaster

Played this game in high school and liked it. It's anime-cringey but def a guilty pleasure. The crafting can be a big pain as well as gathering a mats.
All in all a worth its current price and worth the 90+ hours I've spent playing it lol. Worth a play if you like JRPGs.

SO4 is a fine game with mechanics that you can expect if you've played any of the previous entries in the franchise.
Forewarning though, if you cannot learn how to blindside consistently, perform rush combos, perform critical hits, and synthesize items then you will have a bad time with this game. It also does not help when the game tries to skill check you 2 times in the beginning of the game with Barachiel and Sahariel, 2 bosses in the beginning that will most likely wreck you.
Compared to other RPG's like the Tales series, it does however lack the nice little extras like: Party Banter, Unlockable Skins, More room for ship upgrades, New Game+, Setting the party leader should change the in-game model
The worst aspects I would say is that item quantity is capped to 20, meaning that you will have to waste time traveling to previous locations to buy materials or farm them again to reach the required efficiency for mass item creation.
Unlike other similar games, you cannot issue commands to your party members without actually switching to them and then going back into the menu to issue the command.
Tactics are lackluster as there isn't really much explanation on the subtle difference between each one, the best system would be something like from Tales or Dragon Age where you can fine tune the AI behavior.
It's a good game underneath with features lacking from other games you can find on Steam, however if you can get past Barachiel and Sahariel then everything else is cakewalk, even Satanail.

I first played this game on the PS3 when i was 16, i loved it. The story is good, it is directed to a young adult. and the battle system is awesome. Played it again on pc. The port has some performance bugs, but is mostly fine.

This was the 1st game i bought for my Xbox 360, totally at random, and I have never looked back! There's so much content to the game, I've lost hours of time to it! A must play for any RPG/JRPG player!

Star ocean – The last hope is a JRPG, with an OK story and likable characters. Eventually you will have access to a full roster of 8(+1) characters, out of which any 4 can be selected as the starting members for a fight.
The graphics of the game are good, with vibrant colors. The images in store focuses mostly on the interior of the ship, but most of the times you will be exploring the landscape, and fighting the enemies there. Also the UI in those images is the classic one, while the game defaults to the modern one, using pictures of the actual characters instead of hand drawn sketches, and a differently colored menu / UI. I would highly recommend switching the Battle camera movement to Fixed from its default of Active, playing a few fights with either will make the difference clear. During fights fully 3D models will be shown, with decent animations and a huge variety of monsters, each with their own animation set. You can move around the battlefield, and melee characters must close the distance to the enemy.
The save system is based on savepoints. They are set up a bit far (or I could say that the maps are large). In case of a wipe, all your progress is lost since the last save. Later there will be standalone refresh points on the field, entering them will fully restore your party's health and mana. The same thing can be done by returning to the ship and sleeping there, or more likely entering a town and sleeping in an inn there. Strangely, you can exit to desktop only after loading a game, as in the main menu there is no option for exit in full screen mode.
You can expand the map to cover the full screen, but you cannot scroll it, seeing only a fixed portion where you are still present on it. As such you generally cannot determine at the start if there is a savepoint further on, or where are the exits to the adjacent areas.
There are quests in the game, but there are no quest markers. Talk to everyone, and you might initiate a quest. Similarly there are no markers for quest completion targets, you better remember who gave that obscure quest for you several hours before (duh). For example unlocking the colosseum requires a two step questline. I just missed / left unfinished most quests. Some quests will become available only after progressing the main story, so even if you spoke to someone and they didn’t gave a quest, later they might just do.
The game is quite cutscene heavy. Apart a few exceptions, these are rendered in the in game engine, they aren’t movies. After the phantom soldier fight for example there was a full 30+ min segment, and there will be at least one another of such length towards the end. During the travel between planets, around 30 min worth of banter can be initiated involving the various party members – but only for traveling that path for the first time. These ones are optional (I suppose it is allowed to sleep through the whole travel), but I enjoyed this content too. As far as I know the cutscenes are fully skippable, still watching them is part of the intended experience. However when retrying boss fights, I always skipped the repeated intro narratives, as I already saw them just before. Thankfully there are always savepoints close to the boss fights till the very final segment. If you see a savepoint don’t make the mistake I made the first time, skipping it to prevent monster respawn. Boss encounters can and will happen in otherwise seemingly normal mob territory.
As usual, I played the game with the Japanese voices, and English subtitles. The voice acting is great, as expected. However by sticking to the Japanese voices, the fight exclamations and the victory reactions will be in Japanese – without subtitles. Those parts will be much better in English, so you will have to make a choice which is more important, the cutscenes or the fights. The background music was good.
The difficulty level of the fights is very uneven. Most mob fights are trivial, a few are somewhat demanding. However the boss fights can and eventually will get ridiculously hard. I wasted days for the phantom soldier fight, even grinding out levels and the colosseum weapons didn’t help much. To make things even worse, if/when you obviously lost, there is no way to exit to game over in a lengthy boss fight. You will have to manually swap in the rest of the team, with a cooldown on the swap in, and let them each die, to finally exit the boss fight. Even Alt-F4 won’t work, and that with a subsequent restart of the game would have been still a much faster option. The final part after the last available savepoint took me more than 2 hours to finish. Should I lost at the final boss fight, I might had to repeat the whole thing from zero. Sure, I would skip the cutscenes, but repeating all those fights would be grating. At least 2 more savepoints should have been added, with a warning to save to a new spot (as entering the final fight with already depleted consumables would make that encounter very hard).
The targeting in the game is abysmal. The game automatically sets a target for you. You can lock to it if you want. You can pause the battle, but during that there is no way to manually select a new target. During battle you can cycle between the enemies with the options button, but that is only in one direction, and you stand there idle during the whole process in the middle of a hectic fight. For example my healer was pummeled by mobs, Edge stood near her facing those very mobs, and when I pressed attack Edge just run to the other side of the area, because the target was set on some earlier fought enemy – no option even to target nearest.
There is a combo rush option. If you press X and RT or LT when rush level is 100, an uninterruptible sequence of combo starts. If you are successful with the button prompts, several combo attacks will carry out. For a given attack type, those prompts will always be the same, generally either several rapid button presses or one slow press. That is if the game decides that you initiated the whole thing at a “rest” phase between your attacks. Otherwise you merely enter rush state, which basically just wastes the entire rush bar – and most of the times this was the outcome for me with Edge. It was much easier to initiate it with casters, as there was a much easier way to observe that they were in a resting stance.
If you want to extend the game life with grinding out various things, this game does offer a lot of options for them. You can grind out monster knowledges to 100% for one. If you have 100% knowledge of a monster type, a powerup item can be made with monster stones based on that monster. Each character has 100 deeds, not all of them are easy to obtain (for example land a hit on an enemy that reduces its health to exactly 4 – good luck with such ones). You can craft various things, though some materials will become available only after finishing the main story. There is a colosseum, where you can fight solo or in team (though most enemies can be fought only with levels / equipment available after the main story). You can even grind out a bunny race rankings - think of horse race, but with bunnies that you control and level up through consumables. There are two dungeons available after the main story, but they require quite a high level, at least 130 was recommended for the second one, most of my characters were below 60 at the end of the game.
I enjoyed the game enough to give further titles in the franchise a chance. As of now it is only The divine force that is available on Steam, and despite its mixed reviews, based on The last hope I will give it a chance on one of the sales.
The game was stable, it didn’t crash. However if the focus was switched to a different program (for example a summary popup for backup), the game exited full screen mode, and become windowed, with the title bar and borders visible. I had to switch back to fullscreen each time.

I don't really feel like putting a thumb down to SO: TLH, this game is very mistreated, but it's not THAT bad.
To me, the most noticeable flaws are the characters: they're all extremely stereotyped.
If you watched plenty of anime (and I assume you did, or why the heck would you be here), you will probably feel indifferent to all, and I mean ALL, the characters of this game.
We have the brave protagonist, the girl who is secretly in love with him, the cat girl, the clumsy angel girl, the robot, an Elf-like boy, and probably somebody else I forgot.
All flavored with some fanservice here and there.
The fights are...ok, they are barely ok.
I read many reviews that bashed them, but I personally found them manageable, and while they weren't anything original, you still need to fight if you want to level up.
The cutscenes take forever, each cutscene could be watched while you have lunch/dinner/breakfast, they are literally neverending, and sometimes uninteresting even.
There are subquests, but you're not encouraged in the least to complete them, and actually you don't need to do any of them.
Impressively, despite finding all these flaws, I can't for the life of me put a thumb down to Star Ocean: The Last Hope.
Game is not great, but it has its moments and overall it works.
If you dislike the english voices, just put the japanese ones, they never fail to deliver positive vibes, and they frankly add value to this game.
I'd say "mixed" is exactly the kind of ranking this game deserves, 50/50.

Big fan of the STAR OCEAN series, my first game was STAR OCEAN till the end of time, i loved the story. Everything works fine no performance issues. This game does not dissapoint. 7/10.