Hey guys, Kyolux here.  Haven’t done any review in a while with school and stuff.  I’m starting to catch up now.

It’s always fun to go back to the roots of a favorite franchise. This is why I was happy to get my hands on Star Ocean First Departure, to revisit Claude’s parents adventure. The game is a remake of the original Star Ocean that was released on the Super Famicom at the end of its lifespan. This remake uses the Star Ocean The Second Story’s engine. I’m a bit lite on it since the game as been out for 2-3 months now, but hit the title for the full review.

First and foremost, some people might notice I don’t use the official names of the characters. This is because I am used to the ones the translation patch had given to them on the Super Famicom version, which overall, seemed to be the one used in the sequel, for the few characters that come back.

Graphics

The original game spawned beautiful 2D animations graphics for its time. And like I mentioned, this one uses The Second’s Story’s 3D graphics, which dates back to the PlayStation 1. The character sprites are still in 2D, but the whole environment as been reshaped in 3D, changing the area to area roaming of the original to a world map system, just like in TSS. This is in some way means that it shows its age in look, and I would have somehow preferred an updated 2D graphics look to the TSS engine, simply to stick to the original’s feel.

Story

Ratix (Roddick), Milly (Millie) and Dorne lives peacefully on their under-developed planet, defending their village from crooks from time to time. That is until the day people started turning to stone, including Dorne. On their way to find a flower who might cure Jonas from this strange disease on top of a mountain, Ratix and Milly witness something that changed their fate. Ronixis (Ronyx) and Iria (Ilia) are two Earthlings who teleported to Ratix’s planet to figure out a way to save its people from a third party’s biological attack on it. They happened to appear right next to Ratix and Milly, unexpectedly. The four of them will have to go on a quest to Ratix’s planet, 300 years in the past to find the cure to this petrification disease. Along the way, they meet different characters, some will join you and some will not, depending on your choices and actions.

I never finished the Super Famicom version. So I was glad to finally be able to see the full story. Frankly put, don’t expect anything really outstanding there, most of the stuff is found in a few other RPGs in the 90s. Except it takes the science fiction and the fantasy and mix them up together, while retaining mostly the fantasy part. The game is really short, story-wise too. You’ll be at the end and be surprised that you’re there already.
One last thing I should mention about the story, is that it is altered depending on who joins your party. Also of note is the private actions. Those have you enter a town by yourself and lets your party members do whatever they feel like inside it. You can then go see them, and sometimes you’ll assist to events that makes the bond between Ratix and that other character grow. It’ll also affect how characters acts in the ending sequence.

Gameplay

Like any of your old-school RPG, random battles is the deal here. But these aren’t your Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy turned-based battles. The fights are in real time, controlling one character and letting the others go by the AI you want them to use. If you’re familiar with the Tales series, you can have a bit of an idea how this works. You use X to launch a melee attack and you can chain those into a combo. The triangle will bring up a menu and stop time to choose spells, items or run away. I personally used only melee characters, so I haven’t really went and used much spells, other then have Milly heal my team. Back when I played through The Second Story, I had two characters using spells all the time, and it would get time consuming watching the animations over and over again. The game is fairly easy, so you don’t really have to feel obligated to choose one character over the other. Anyway back to the controls, square will let you switch between targets and circle between the characters to control. You can also set special arts (badass techniques) to the L and R shoulder buttons.

As you level up, you learn skill points. Skill points you put into learning skills that will boost your stats, let you do some different kind of crafting, different artistic abilities and some fighting techniques. I really enjoyed this system, but maybe not as much as it was in The Second Story.

Like I mentioned, the game is easy. Easier then it was on the Super Famicom. That’s in addition to the fact that it’s also fairly short. From the point you get to level 45-50, you can then find a way to get enough fols (the game’s currency) to buy a Silver Trumpet, then have one of the characters that has some specifics talents (those are statics to the characters, but can be learned by some that don’t have it from the get go, but must be pre-disposed to it) get to musical skills to level 8, then play (after composing it) the Devil’s Aria, and fight a monster you can fight over and over again and easily hit lvl 105-110 in the spawn of two hours. By then, you’re overpowered and ready to finish the game. Obviously, you don’t need to do this, like I said, the game is fairly easy, but that’s the amount of leveling I needed to do to be able to cradt some of the best weapons in the game. Which I wanted to do, review purpose of course.

So the game is fun, but a bit on the short side. At least half my play-time was in the bus grinding levels for the fun of it. So I took about 25 hours to beat the game, and I was fairly overpowered like mentioned.
For those liking distractions, there’s an arena where you can go solo as any of your party members and take on a suit of monsters on one on one matches. There’s even a character you can have joining you that you meet in one of those matches. It also gives you so decent armor that can last you to the end of the game if you want to go through all the ranks with one character. You can repeat it with any other too for the same result for any other party member.

Sound

Nothing major here, the BGM are good, nothing outstanding. The voice of the characters can get annoying during fights, but for the story voice-over, it’s nothing bad.

Final thought

While the game is good, I’d say if you can, simply rent it or get it used. I’m not a big fan of buying used, but in this case, that’s my suggestion. Best thing would be to wait and get The Second Story when it comes out. You’ll get much more content for your money. Especially if you’d have to choose between both of those. You won’t miss out much on the story. Two of the main characters in this one just happen to be the parents of one of the main characters in The Second Story.

The addition of 2 new characters, and one or two bonus dungeons is nice.  But really, the challenge of the overall game is so low, and you have plenty of characters to choose from, and can’t recruit all of them, so this is fluff you don’t really need.  Unless you’re the type to go through and through again the same game.

Screenshots

David A. Games, Review