While I always liked the idea of these games, my past with them have been a bit tumultuous. I bought this and First Voyage for the PSP at close to the same time and I played the original long ago. Simply put I loved it, even with the incredibly stupid/cheesy reason for the last boss. So when I bought a PS3, I already wanted Star Ocean: The Last Hope for it (Star Ocean 3 was going to be next to impossible to find, so I took what I could get). And when I played it, well… I was far from impressed with. But when the dice selected this as a possible game, it had my curiosity. After all, with the steep difference between what I played in the portable game vs it’s sever-iteration later sequel, I could only wonder if the game’s were good until then, or if it was a slope of sequels that got worse as they went on. After finishing this game, I believe it could well have been just Last Hope that was just that bad.
Also, please note, that by the time I played this game, my PSP had basically died. While it was in the process, but I could at least get the disc drive to work some of the time, so I hacked it and fought to get my small library to file. As such, I played this game via emulator with a 360 controller, so your experiences may vary some from my own.