{"id":944,"date":"2023-01-03T00:20:05","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T00:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=944"},"modified":"2023-01-03T00:20:05","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T00:20:05","slug":"star-ocean-the-last-hope-technical-review-and-options","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=944","title":{"rendered":"Star Ocean: The Last Hope Technical Review and Options"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

Oh, hey, a JRPG series I\u2019m not actually overly familiar with! As with most, I played Star Ocean: Till the End of Time<\/i> back on PS2 (which I\u2019m told is the best of the lot), but beyond that I\u2019m fairly clueless when it comes to the space-faring XP-and-cutscene-a-thon.<\/p>\n

If nothing else, it\u2019s nice to see \u2013 once again \u2013 more of these series engage their warp drives and head to PC. As far as I know, The Last Hope<\/i> is the first of the Star Ocean<\/i> games to get an official PC launch, and hopefully it won\u2019t be the last.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m running this on an i7-3820 with 16GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Unsurprisingly, this means that Star Ocean: The Last Hope<\/i> runs absurdly well; the only framerate hitches I\u2019ve noticed are in the first second or so of loading into a new area, which is entirely forgiveable.<\/p>\n

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how it all performs, let\u2019s have a look at the options, of which there are many:<\/p>\n

\"\" \"\" \"\" \"\"<\/p>\n

In terms of resolution options, you have: 1280\u00d7720, 1920\u00d71080, 2560\u00d71440, 3840\u00d72160; 1280\u00d7800, 1920\u00d71200, 2560\u00d71600, and 3840\u00d72400. So two aspect ratios, with four resolutions each, if I can count correctly.<\/p>\n

Japanese voices are a nice touch (especially considering that the English voices made me cringe so hard I got whiplash during one of the many, many opening cutscenes) and keyboard configuration is all there and supported. Mostly, anyway. The spacebar can\u2019t be bound to anything because it\u2019s the \u201caccept keybinding changes\u201d button, so you\u2019re limited there, at least. Still, the keyboard\/mouse controls are largely aimed at actual human beings, so that\u2019s a definite plus. The exception to this is the usual \u201cuse the arrow keys to control the camera\u201d but we\u2019ll get to that.<\/p>\n

In terms of visual settings, I\u2019m going to give another mild thumbs up, because I\u2019m always happy to see graphical options actually explain what the hell they do. There aren\u2019t many<\/i> of them, but having \u2013 for instance \u2013 Depth of Field explain that it emulates how a camera focuses, and when you have it turned on there\u2019s a blur effect outside of the focus area, is actually quite useful for anyone who\u2019s not sure what half of these options do. Also, I can turn of Depth of Field and Motion Blur, and that\u2019s always<\/em> a bonus.<\/p>\n

So, okay, some comparison screenshots, with a disclaimer: I\u2019m not 100% certain which are which. I\u2019m pretty<\/i> sure the ones with more shadows are the \u201ceverything is on maximum\u201d settings, but without playing in 4K, I can\u2019t see much visible difference between the Low and High texture settings. Which is perhaps unsurprising, if Low is basically \u201c720p\/1080p\u201d and High is 4K, although I\u2019m making an assumption there. Do note that Depth of Field and Motion Blur are disabled in both sets of screenshots, because seriously, no.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

High.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Low.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

High (probably).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Low (probably).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Not a direct comparison, but I\u2019m almost 100% certain this is on High.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I\u2019m pretty certain this is from when I left it on Low without realising.<\/p>\n

It looks fine, basically. Nice, even. There are some noticeably low-quality textures in places and some of the visual effects don\u2019t stand up to modern variants (smoke during a crash landing, for instance) but the general effect is that of a pretty \u2013 if slightly dated \u2013 game. I wouldn\u2019t say it stands out as being Xbox 360 era, certainly.<\/p>\n

It also flies along at 60FPS at 1440p, which is nice, if expected. The PS4 version reportedly has the occasional framerate hiccups when it\u2019s stressed out a bit (zooming out the view in an early area and trying to see as much as possible supposedly leads to framerate drops when panning) but I didn\u2019t encounter that at all, on PC. It\u2019s possible that more intensive areas will lead to framerate drops, but \u2013 on my machine, at least \u2013 that seems unlikely.<\/p>\n

So, uh, let\u2019s start talking problems, because there are two that drop this from \u201cgood port\u201d to \u201cport with some rather sizeable issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first is this: fullscreen mode makes the game match your monitor\u2019s refresh rate, and there are no in-game Vsync or frame-limiting options to deal with this. What this means is that, if you have a 144Hz monitor, then when you put Star Ocean: The Last Hope<\/i> into fullscreen it will begin running at 144FPS. Which is a problem, because the game is supposed to be running at 60FPS, and so it\u2019s suddenly going about 2.5x faster than it should be.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Which made doing the combat training very confusing. \u201cCrikey,\u201d I thought, \u201cthis is very<\/em> fast-paced combat.\u201d<\/p>\n

This can be solved via external workarounds (limiting your monitor\u2019s refresh rate would presumably do it, there are likely various Vsync-forcing tricks you can employ, and external means of making it run in a borderless window might also fix it) but this is a tremendous pain in the buttocks and a really weird oversight, and in the end I gave up and just played in a 1920\u00d71080 window.<\/p>\n

The second issue is the mouse. No, no; The Last Hope<\/i> actually knows the mouse exists, and supports it. You can\u2019t use a cursor to select things in the menus, but the mousewheel scrolls through things and the left and right buttons are properly mapped to do stuff in both combat and the overworld. And yes, it controls the camera.<\/p>\n

Eeeexcept that the mouse isn\u2019t actually locked to the game window, which means you can only rotate the camera until the mouse hits the edge of your screen, at which point\u2026 well, you can\u2019t rotate the camera in that direction anymore.<\/p>\n

There are other potential annoyances. Denuvo is in as a free bonus DRM, which will doubtless turn some people off, and the main character is called Edge Maverick. Edge Maverick<\/i>. That one\u2019s not a port thing, but it is tremendously silly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

No, that\u2019s the villain moustache. And possibly also a hold-over from this being an updated version of an Xbox 360 game.<\/p>\n

Anyway, these problems push Star Ocean: The Last Hope<\/i> from \u201csolid port\u201d down to \u201cmediocre port with some larger issues.\u201d It looks good. It runs fine. It controls okay if you have a gamepad (it feels a little imprecise, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a porting issue). It might<\/i> control okay if it locked the mouse to the window so you could freely rotate, and it would look an awful lot better if I could run it in fullscreen without the game running at double speed.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have high hopes for the mouse thing, but I\u2019m crossing my fingers that the fullscreen issue gets sorted in an incoming patch. Considering this is a remaster built on the promise of 4K, that\u2019s likely to be a show-stopper for anyone who actually wanted<\/i> to run it in 4K, and it\u2019s a jab in the aft nacelles for those of us who just like to run things in fullscreen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh, hey, a JRPG series I\u2019m not actually overly familiar with! As with most, I played Star Ocean: Till the End of Time back on PS2 (which I\u2019m told is the best of the lot), but beyond that I\u2019m fairly clueless when it comes to the space-faring XP-and-cutscene-a-thon. If nothing else, it\u2019s nice to see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":945,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1189],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}