Star Ocean: First Departure

"The first Star Ocean, made to play like its sequel."

This game is a remake of the SNES (well, Super Famicon technically) game which was never released outside Japan. While the original was made by tri-Ace, this one is made by TOSE. You'd expect a pretty hefty improvement for a game going from the SNES to the PSP, and there certainly is, but is it enough?

The most basic way to describe this game would be to say it's the SNES's Star Ocean 1 plot and world, using the PS1's Star Ocean 2 game engine. If you've never played the SNES game (and most people haven't), then you might not notice, but a lot of the design shows the game is surprisingly close to the SNES on, especially in regards to the plot progression and the dungeon and world design. Sure everything is much prettier, but the layouts of many locations and in how things progress plot-wise is pretty much the same as they were originally.


Character and plot design

The design of the characters is not particularly interesting. In general, the costumes work (unless you get annoyed when wondering how a boy in a backwater village manages to afford armour), but I found the facial features of some of the characters to be rather bland in general. Particularly the main character, who seems to have some strange, stunned expression on his face half the time due to the style. Although if I was in his position and meeting extra-terrestrials with things like spaceships, time travel and microwave dinners, I might be stunned too (and since I'm playing the game as him, I guess I am in that position).

On personalities, the characters vary, although there isn't very much character development. There are also a few things in the plot to which the characters seemingly under-react to, considering how important they would be. This is somewhat of a reflection that game (and Star Ocean 2) is less serious compared to the third, where the world building was more detailed and taken much more seriously. There's enough for the player to know what is going on and to make the setting work, and a little bit more, but that's about it.

The Private Actions (PA's, basically character dependent optional events) can be amusing and help to flesh out the characters a bit, mostly in displaying various personality quirks, but also in fulfilling some optional character development, which is needed given the lack of such during the main story. There is quite a few of these optional events, and some of them are quite humorous, which is a plus. This is important, because for several of the optional characters, this is all they have. And while I could forgive a character like Welch for her lack of story interaction, the fact that characters like T'nique and Pericci never do anything relevant to the main story is a bit disappointing. However, I can certainly understand how making a story including them to a large degree would be difficult (since there's no guarantee that you'll even meet them, depending on where you go), and there are actually more situations where your optional party members do affect the conversations during important story events beyond a single interchangeable line than I was expecting when I started playing. So in that respect I'm actually fairly happy with what they've done. Saying that, it could be notably better in some places, but it's far from being as bad as it could have been, with only four character do all the talking.

The story is fairly basic, shorter than average, and easy to understand. I won't go into it too much, but basically there is a futuristic science-fiction setting near the beginning, the main fantasy type setting in the middle, and another futuristic setting at the end. The middle is by far the largest, and includes some backtracking and fetch-questing.

There are a few choices in the game in regards to how the story progresses, mostly dependent on which characters you recruit, which helps introduce some non-linearity into it. In general, the nothing special happens in the plot, and the plot not particularly ambitious, unlike the third game, where the designers actually tried to do something interesting with it. I think an expansion of the last location (in terms of plot and things to do) would have been well appreciated. It is expanded on when compared to the pitifully-short SNES version of the same location, but still isn't very long.

There's no event skip option, which I think is disappointing. All RPG's should have them really. Especially in a game where replays are encouraged such as this one.

There are also a few story events that make no real sense, except to give an excuse as to why your characters are there. Oh, and since you might be expecting a space-based RPG, you should probably know that most of the time, you're travelling around using swords and magic rather than giant spaceships. Spaceships do exist, but they comprise a lot less of the game than you might expect from a name like ‘Star Ocean'.


Graphics and Sound

The game uses sprites for the characters and objects, which are placed on pre-rendered backgrounds in towns and dungeons, and polygon fields for the battles and overworld. These are fairly bright and easy to see, but the pre-rendered things also look very still (there's no ambient motion in things where you would expect, like in the water surrounding a port). There's a reasonably high level of attention to detail, but as I said, nothing that really makes you want to look at them.

The music is passable, but nothing special. It won't irritate, but I doubt you'll be enticed to travel to Japan and buy the soundtrack anytime soon. There's nothing particularly notable about the sound effects, and the quality of the voice acting is okay. Sometimes, battle quotes for moves are too drawn out considering that in battle, when you'd think they'd want to speak more quickly (and some move have rather long names to boot). There's also no option to turn them off, or volume controls for the music relative to the sound effects, so boo to that.


Gameplay

The designs of the towns are okay. The shops signs don't stand out very much, but you'll find your way around quickly enough, and the towns aren't overly spread out, so it never takes very long to get to where you want to. They aren't very interesting to look at in general however, and I think more effort could have been made into giving them unique atmospheres and cultures, the port town in particular all have the same general feel to them.

Travelling between towns is done on an overworld map. The walking speed here feels quite slow and can be annoying. There's also everyone's favourite (or not) random encounters to be had here. The game does have a fair bit of backtracking, so you're going to spend times encountering and fighting enemies that are far to weak and worthless to bother with (although the game is pretty easy normally anyway).

Dungeons are mostly fairly simple, I wouldn't expect anyone to get forever lost in them, but many parts of them do look the same, so you might temporarily forget if you've checked out every direction in the last tower, for example. Also, I found them fairly uninteresting to look at. Enemies are fought using random encounters here as well.

The battle system is one of the things that separate the Star Ocean series from its peers. They are performed in real-time in a 3D environment. You party consists of up to four characters, one of which you directly control, and the rest are manipulated by the AI (based on a variety of possible AI tactics you can give them). You can move around the field to avoid enemy attacks, and attacking will cause your character to run up to your foe. You also have special attacks that have a variety of uses such as crowd control and attacking from a distance, although the best strategy is simply to rapidly hit your opponent so they never get a chance to fight back. How difficult this is depends on how well you can stop yourself from getting surrounded, while at the same time trying to surround or repeatedly stun the enemy.

When most types of magic are cast, the gameplay stops as it displays the animations. Spell animation time isn't too bad, and much improved over the PS version of SO2, (from which they stole all the animations from but chopped useless parts of the animation off), but some of the spells could still be shortened further. As it is, using mages means watching the gameplay stop for 2 seconds while the spell does its thing. And since the battle system is the rest of the time meant to be fast, it's a bit off-putting. In terms of usefulness, attack magic is a bit weak towards the end of the game, since (with 1 exception) they only hit once, while many battle skills will hit multiple times. After playing Star Ocean 3, which has a much better battle system, I was a bit disappointed that they choose to make it a primarily re-dressed SO2-like battle engine, without using a system where the gameplay continues while magic takes effect.

The game is very easy overall. Even after beating the game, there is a bonus dungeon and other extra bosses to fight, which, while being harder than the rest of the game, are still not very hard. I personally found the fights there a bit more entertaining, since the enemies didn't drop over and die so quickly.

As you fight and gain experience (like in almost every JRPG there is), you get extra points to spend on skills. These skills are used to determine how good that character is at things like item creation, or extra combat effects and skills. Ideally, you'll want to spend each character's points in a way that suits them. This gives the player some feeling of control over how the characters develop, so that's good to have.

The game has a fairly extensive system for creating items, ranging from the useless (food) to the useful, and probably guide-use worthy (weapons). There is some randomness involved in the results, which I don't like, since it brings up the habit of simply loading the game and trying over until you get what you want (but at least you can load while playing the game instead of having to reset, so that saves a lot of time).


Replayability

While the game isn't very long for a single play-through (about 20 or 25 hours for the first time through would not be unreasonable), the replayability of the game is improved by the various party members you can acquire. You can't get all of them in one game, so you might want to play again to try everyone out. Also, the previously mentioned Private Actions affect how much each of the characters like the others. This influences some later optional events between character, the ending (although nowhere near as much as it did in Star Ocean 2), and the AI of the computer controlled characters in battle, but that last effect is rather subtle, so you might not notice it.

The game does have a few design choices that seem a bit strange. For example, one character is a dedicated attack mage. Yet he has no weapons that boost his magic attack power? Say what? It just makes him pointless compared to the other mages who can both heal and magic attack better since they get equipment to make them stronger. There's also a point of no return in the game, even though there wasn't in the original SNES game. Why'd they make the game like that? Who knows?


Conclusion

Unfortunately for this game, the sequel ‘Star Ocean: Second Evolution' is also being released on PSP. And while that game is more a port of the PS1 version unlike this which is a remake of the SNES game (and therefore is nowhere near as improved as this one is), it doesn't really change that fact that everything this game has, Second Evolution will have, but in a longer and better game.

Overall, it's very much an average RPG with a decent battle engine.

I give this game 7 out of 10. It's obviously much better than the SNES original in nearly every aspect, but I think it still tried to conform too closely to it in terms of plot design. I think the designers would have been better off if they had felt more free to make more changes compared to the SNES original. It's also hard to justify buying this game when you could buy Star Ocean: Second Evolution instead. But on its own merits, it's certainly a playable RPG. Perhaps this is one to consider when the price drops a bit rather than full price unless you really like Star Ocean.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/28/09

Game Release: Star Ocean: First Departure (EU, 10/24/08)