Star Ocean: The Last Hope (Xbox 360)

Another cut scene, another reason to hit the skip button.

There's a promising moment early in Star Ocean: The Last Hope when the lead character's cutting-edge railgun does nothing to stop a pack of extraterrestrial mega-bugs. Forced to use a construction saw as a makeshift sword, I figured that this sci-fi epic was sending a novel message: The Last Hope would be about wit and craftiness, not flashy gadgets. Half an hour later, my party was rescued from death by a dude in a fancy spaceship. OK, so first impressions can be misleading.

As it turns out, Square Enix's fourth entry in the futuristic Star Ocean role-playing series worships technology above all else, especially wit and craft. As the first Star Ocean title on a current-generation console, The Last Hope is content to flaunt its shiny high-definition graphics without advancing any meaningful new ideas -- or even executing old ideas in a fresh way. The result is a tired, vapid game with all the panache of refrigerator-magnet poetry, rearranging the same set of RPG pieces that everyone has seen a thousand times before.

Blond, idealistic 20-year-old Edge Maverick (maybe the first videogame hero named on a dare) is the leader of the Last Hope journey. The story, a prequel to previous Star Ocean titles, takes place in the late 21st Century, after a nuclear world war has ravaged Earth's ecosystem. Edge leads a skeleton crew of novice space explorers on a quest to find humans a new homeworld.

"You can go anywhere in the galaxy! As long as it's one of these two places."

With that setup and a name like "Star Ocean," you'd expect The Last Hope to focus on exploration -- but deep space has never felt so claustrophobic. For the bulk of the game's 40 to 50 hours of play, your travel is restricted to a handful of bland (but high-def bland!) planets. Each "world" is a small patch of gorgeously rendered terrain that's barren of intrigue -- the landscape is not much more than connective tissue for dungeons and generic towns.

That's because The Last Hope doesn't want you to explore; it wants you to fight. A free-flowing, largely menu-free battle system is the hallmark of the Star Ocean games, and there's a kinetic thrill to just being able to slash and move around the battlefield as you please. It feels more Soulcalibur than Final Fantasy, yet it's a reasonable hybrid of both.

Four characters, picked from a traveling party that grows as large as eight, fight at once. You maneuver the battle leader, who can be switched anytime; and the other three characters are controlled by a smart, adjustable artificial intelligence that needs minimal babysitting. While none of the supporting characters is as much fun to play as Edge, who responds smoothly to every little twitch of the gamepad, the ability to switch between eight distinctive fighters adds a nice variety to the fights.

That said, the fights are relatively simplistic, and despite wrinkles like "Blindside" -- a swishy analog-stick maneuver that momentarily confuses an enemy -- and a Bonus Board that grants extra experience and gold for using certain tactics, the vast majority of The Last Hope's battles go down the same way. You attack blindly until a "Rush Meter" fills with your character's accumulated rage, unleash your Rush power in a chain of special moves, and repeat until victorious.

Edge is a pleasure to control on the battlefield.

And while there are a handful of boss battles that challenge you to plot out a strategy, even these high points are neutered by The Last Hope's lazy storytelling. The most successful role-playing games use story to charge climactic battles with meaning -- to make you feel like your fight matters.

The Last Hope does the opposite, invariably rendering your success meaningless by way of an insipid cut scene. My most exasperating moment with this game happened about 20 hours in, after a long battle in which I clawed my way through a half-dozen brutal waves of necrotized Earth soldiers. I was exhilarated to hear the victory song after that fight. And then the pre-rendered movie began to play. The waves of phantom soldiers rematerialized. "There's too many of them!" the heroes whimpered. Bullshit! I just killed them all! You were there!

Nope. My efforts didn't mean a lick. All I had done was trigger a cut scene in which yet another dude in yet another fancy spaceship saved us from the evil menace I had dispatched minutes ago. Every time your fighters get into a tight spot, there's a high-tech deus ex machina to get them out of it. This plot device is overused to such a comic degree that after a while, whenever Edge whined, "What are we going to do?" I masochistically rooted for a random bad-ass with super-lasers to appear from the blue. The Last Hope never let me down.

Given that it's sprawled across three discs, you might expect The Last Hope to be a deep, intricate epic. Most of the game's depth, though, comes from lifeless side-quests. Some poor sap in the town of Tatroi is still waiting for his daughter to come home because I didn't feel like tramping through all the nearby villages, hitting the A button in front of every female-looking person I met, in the hopes that I would stumble upon his missing girl. The same goes for countless other characters who wanted me to run their menial errands -- get this many pieces of food, bring trinket X to place Y -- in the name of completing "quests."

It's not what it looks like. I think.

The dirty secret of The Last Hope is that much of the space on those three discs is taken up by the game's leaden cut scenes, each of which accomplishes in 30 minutes what a freshman film student could achieve in two. The interludes give us a chance to better know our cast of cookie-cutter characters -- like Edge, the young hero filled with introspective angst, or Faize, the young hero filled with introspective angst.

Then there are the female characters, all drawn from the same perspective of teenaged misogyny. Female lead Reimi, who says, "I can't keep being a nuisance forever!" when she gains another level of experience, isn't as bad as Sarah, the winged moron who chirps, "Oh my, there's just so many things I've never seen before. Just trying to remember them all is enough to make me dizzy!" Cat-girl Meracle agrees ? "I'm kinda like Sarah, not too good with the hard stuff" -- and her outfit opens a disturbing new front in pubescent activewear. Look, I'm no prude. I'm all for a bit of T-and-A in my games. But I shouldn't be able to tell that a 16-year-old has a professional wax job.

I find it hard to imagine any mature adult enjoying the characters in this game that thinks so little of women. Indeed, Myuria, the one female character who isn't an utter naïf, is the exception that proves the rule: She's a triple-D strumpet who brags about her extensive "experience." Subtle.

The producer of The Last Hope, Yoshinori Yamagishi, recently said in an interview that he believes games can be a more powerful storytelling platform than any other visual medium. I agree, especially in the case of role-playing games. Ever since I played a free copy of Dragon Warrior that came with my Nintendo Power subscription, I've believed that console RPGs have vast potential to engage audiences in smart, complex stories.

Not even a futuristic RPG can resist throwing a medieval village into the mix.

But The Last Hope reflects none of Yamagishi's supposed optimism. It's a cynical, uninspired effort that "innovates" only along the edges and rests on its pedigree, self-assured that glittering graphics will be sufficient to sate the masses. While games like Fallout 3 and Square Enix's underrated The Last Remnant explore timely themes of nuclear proliferation and asymmetric warfare, The Last Hope makes no effort to be relevant, stuck in a stale 1990s "Hooray for technology!" rah-rah-ism.

For the sake of a videogame form that still has plenty of unexplored potential, my hope is that The Last Hope is not the future of role-playing games, and instead represents the final throes of a creative team that has run out of ideas.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.