Since the release of Star Ocean: The Last Hope is about two weeks away in Japan, and a little less than a month away here, I was hoping to see some more Videos displaying the game's battle system come out. Square Enix has seen to this by releasing 3 new videos showing off different aspects of their Battle system on the Japanese Star Ocean: The Last Hope website. Now, for some reason, my computer cannot run any videos off of this flash site without lagging all to hell, thankfully Gametrailers has captured and uploaded these videos into a compact size my computer can actually play.

Since the US Star Ocean 4 website is very slow in releasing any new info, I like to watch these videos and see what I can glean from watching them...well, that and the fact that I have nothing else to do at the moment. I can't wait for the weather to get better and work to pick up again... So, without Further ado, here's the first of three videos featured on Gametrailers.



This is the longest of the three videos on the SO4 site. Lets see what I can find:

- You can chain together encounters, sort of in the vein of Tales of Vesperia, just without lumping all the monsters into one big encounter. If you look at the results screen, it would seem that you also get bonuses to Experience, FOL, SP, and HP/MP restoration, though that could be from something else.

- Symbology seems to be sort of slow paced again, though it's always been that way.

- The Battle Theme in the background seems to be an Orchestrated remix of the original Star Ocean's battle theme.

- Linking your special attacks together gives you a Damage bonus, similar to Star Ocean 3.

- Bacchus D-79, the Green Cyborg fellow, seems to be an interesting fighter. I have a feeling that everytime I see him use his skill "Saint Blaster," which sounds like what he yelled when he used it, I'll be think of Iron Man's famous line in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2: "HERE'S MY SUNDAY BEST! PROTO---------N CANNON!" I wonder if he'll have a "War Destroyer"-esque ability...

Now for the next video, showing off SO 4's "Sight Out" feature:



Fairly straight forward video. Not sure who the Scythe wielding character is, but seems cool enough. The "Sight In/Sight Out" feature is a part of SO 4's BEAT system, which, according to this little Star Ocean Wiki, characters can customize their fighting style to be more offensive, more defensive, specialize in sneak attacks via "Sight Out," etc. The RUSH system seems to include the addition of being able to Jump in battle, allows players to switch out characters in combat with reserve characters mid-battle, and also lets the party chain together a huge combination attack.

Last One, shows off the RUSH combo system:



The RUSH combo system is basically like something I've seen before in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, I think. Basically it looks like a series of special attacks done in succession, one at a time, and the success or failure of chaining together attacks depends on doing certain timed button presses. I'm not sure how long you can chain these attacks together, nor if they lead up to some other huge attack at the end. Oh, I should also mention that all Special Attacks use MP again, meaning they probably got rid of the rather annoying system in Star Ocean: 'Till the End of Time in which physical Special Attacks used HP and Symbology used MP, and if you ran out of either HP or MP, you died.

Anywho, glad to see some more vids showing off the battle system. I'll do my best to make my next post about something other than a tri-Ace product. :x