Background

A mysterious virus suddenly starts turning residents of the planet Roak into stone. Fortunately, humans from a technologically advanced planet, Earth, make first contact to attempt to cure the disease. When this proves impossible, Roddick and Millie of Roak and Ilia and Ronyx of Earth team up and go back in time to find the monstrous host of the virus in the Roak of 200 years ago.

Star Ocean: First Departure is a PSP remake of Star Ocean for the SNES. Developed by tri-Ace and published by Enix, the original Star Ocean was particularly notable for being tri-Ace’s first game. Sadly, Star Ocean never found its way to the West. People couldn’t play it in English until Aeon Genesis released a fan translation online many years later. Tose is the developer of Star Ocean: First Departure, with publishing handed off to tri-Ace. It’s the first official translation, so the names of its characters, locations, etc. are fairly different from the fan translation.

Other than its name changes, Star Ocean: First Departure features higher-quality graphics, including 3D backgrounds, and a new skill system reminiscent of Star Ocean 2. Surpassing even that, melee fighters receive a new combo system. Two additional party members can join the journey, as well. These higher production values also allowed for a fully voice-acted game.

I haven’t played much of the original Star Ocean, so I can’t comment on which version is better. After reading around, it seems that the general consensus is that the PSP remake is overall superior. Most complaints stem from what seem to be minor issues like a new translation and cheesy voice acting.

How to Play Star Ocean: First Departure

Star Ocean is a traditional RPG in all aspects other than its real-time action combat. The battle system is in many ways practically identical to Namco’s Tales of franchise. Any of the player’s four party members are controllable during battle, while the AI controls the remainder. As characters level up, they learn MP-consuming special moves. These more-powerful attacks are mappable to the L and R buttons.

In addition to sometimes learning new techniques, levels also gain a character Skill Points. Players can acquire special skills by spending these in the menu. Any character can learn any skill, and the effects of the skills vary greatly. Some give stat boosts with each skill level. Others give the character the ability to create items out of other objects. Still more bestow more unorthodox abilities, such as being able to play music to force an encounter with special enemies. The final skill category is passive abilities, which give boosts during battle at random. For example, you can get a random attack boost, with the odds being better the higher that skill’s level is.

The Good in Star Ocean: First Departure

Star Ocean: First Departure has definitely received the “Square Enix kiss.” That is, it had a good budget and everything looks and sounds fantastic. I really like the smooth, 3D-rendered backgrounds. I just wish you could interact more with them or other objects in the environment.

The voice acting is pretty decent. Characters generally deliver their lines right, enunciating the correct words in sentences. The sounds of the voices themselves are pretty lame though, and can be annoying. Ilia definitely has the worst voice acting. She delivers every single line with the same tone, no matter what the dialogue implies its supposed to be. She’s a regular Marge Simpson. Ilia also sounds too young for her age. Coincidentally, her partner Ronyx is nearly as bad as her, delivering every line like he just crawled out of bed.

The character sprites have vibrant animation and look great. My only complaint is that I wish they were in a higher definition because when the game zooms in during cutscenes the sprites get blurry. The cast of characters is also colorful. No color of the rainbow goes unrepresented.

Party Members, Combat, and Skills

A neat thing about Star Ocean is that it has a party maximum of eight, but there’s a total of fourteen playable characters! The four main characters are recruited automatically, and the ten others are optional and sometimes fairly hidden. Not all party combinations are possible, however: some characters can only be recruited with others or if you didn’t get an earlier character, and once you get 8 party members you can’t recruit any more.

Normally, having so many party members might detract from the story because the optional members generally end up being insignificant to the plot, but since Star Ocean doesn’t have much in the way of plot in the first place, having so many characters to choose from just makes the game more fun and adds replay value.

The skill system is fun to play with. There are so many to learn with beneficial effects that you really feel like you’re always becoming stronger with each level. It makes playing addicting because you want to keep leveling to see how strong your characters will get with all those skills learned.

Though the action battle system is very basic, it definitely beats out many of its SNES competitors’ turn-based battle systems that were devoid of any strategy. Though the game is a breeze in difficulty, you at least always have to stay somewhat affixed on what’s going on in battle to avoid enemy attacks and all that. And even in the easiest, most mindless battles, hitting X to personally go up and smash a monster in the face is inherently more satisfying than doing it through a menu.

Tough to Hate

Though I really don’t think anything about this game is exemplary (really it meets my mark for average perfectly), it’s one of the hardest to dislike RPGs I’ve played. It’s very painless with no real annoying low points or long dungeons, and the action battle system and skill point systems are instantly satisfying in a simple way that kept me going through the game’s blander aspects.

At 20 hours, it’s easy to digest and over before its weaknesses really start weighing down on it. Therefore, for people who just want a simple RPG adventure, Star Ocean must surely be one of the best choices to make. If you’re an RPG fan who needs more depth, you should spend those 20 hours getting started on something more fleshed out.

The Bad in Star Ocean: First Departure

As usual for the Star Ocean franchise, the name is a serious misnomer. You see outer space in this game once. Once. At the beginning of the game. Most of the game takes place in a medieval fantasy setting usual for RPGs. There are very few exceptions where you’re in a technologically advanced area. If you’re interested in getting this game because you want a sci-fi setting, you’ve been warned.

Being a remake of an old SNES game, the storyline is nothing special. The set-up itself is pretty original for its time with the sci-fi elements, but as mentioned above that connection is quickly cut off when you go back in time to a medieval world to fight with swords and sorcery. The characters are two-dimensional and don’t undergo any personality change through the course of the game and never have to do much thinking.

Most of the game is spent just going from point A to point B with little of interest happening between them. You’ll go through dungeons, maybe have to fight off some nameless pirates in a cave in order to use a boat, but it’s all very typical fare, and since Star Ocean‘s only two villains show up near the end of the game. The rest of your opposition are generic monsters and bandits with no plot relevance.

Combat Issues

The biggest complaint for this remake is the new combo system. The idea of a combo system is inherently a good one to bring more speed and action to fights, but here, your combos can stun the enemy repeatedly and prevent them from attacking, especially when all of your units gang up on them. This makes the remake significantly easier than the original game. Besides the combo system making the game easier, the enemy AI is dumb as rocks and will often simply walk back and forth instead of attacking anything.

Attack techniques are unbalanced among the melee fighters. Roddick gets too many even if he is the main character, and others learn much fewer. In addition, only being able to use two of the techniques you get in battle is pretty lame. Compared to the Tales games which allow you to map several techniques to different button combinations, this is a letdown. You also can’t switch techniques in battle.

Game Length and Replayability

The main game is only about 20 hours long like the SNES original. By today’s standards, this is considered short. There are only a few side quests but they’d only add another 5-8 hours, and even worse is that most of these side quests are optional dungeons that don’t give any more insight into the plot or characters. Also, you can’t get the vast majority of party members until the game is nearly over.

The music is fairly bland. I finished the game just before writing this and there’s no tunes I’ll ever want to hear again outside of the game. It’s just serviceable.

I don’t really like the art style. Many characters look like they don’t have a nose, and Roddick has this creepy, soulless gaze in his eyes (look at him in the status screen).

No New Game+? In 2007? What is with Square Enix and never having a New Game+?