Star Ocean First Departure R: A Middling Start to a Cult Series

During the June 2023 Nintendo Direct, Square Enix announced they would be releasing Star Ocean the Second Story R. A HD 2D remake of the classic PlayStation RPG of the same name, minus the R. And this was one of my favourite announcements at the Direct because I’ve been meaning to play Second Story for years.

I’ll go into the reasons why when I actually review it, but just know that I am very excited for it. But since that game is still a few months away at the time of this writing, I figured it would be a good idea to play through the original Star Ocean to get caught up. And wouldn’t you know it, in 2019 there was a remake of Star Ocean released on the Switch called Star Ocean First Departure R.

Well, I say a remake, it’s more a remaster of a remake. Let me explain. The original Star Ocean released on the Super Famicom in 1996. It was published by Enix and developed by tri-Ace, which was a development team comprised of former Wolf Team members. Wolf Team being the developers of Tales of Phantasia, the first of the Tales series.

Star Ocean is, therefore, very similar to Tales. Being an action RPG with a similar battle system. in fact Star Ocean was designed as the game the team wanted Phantasia to be, but couldn’t due to clashes with the development team and Namco.

The original Star Ocean was a technical marvel for the Super Famicom. Pushing the limit of what it could do graphically thanks to a special compression chip built into the cartridge. It even featured digitised voice work for both the intro and battle scenes, which was something you didn’t see often in 16-bit cartridge games.

Despite Star Ocean receiving great reviews for the time, it never released outside of Japan. Largely due to Enix shutting down its American branch in 1995 and it being an incredibly late release for the system. So late in fact that the next generation of consoles was already out, and most gamers had moved on. Thus, it remained a Japanese exclusive.

That is until 2008, where a remake of the original was released under the title Star Ocean First Departure on the PSP. A system whose library I swear was 90% JRPG’s, remakes and JRPG remakes. That version featured new artwork and animations from Production I.G, a revamped overworld and battle system, extensive voice work, and new story, characters and dungeons.

Then in 2019, that remake was remastered for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 as First Departure R. It is essentially the same game as the PSP version, but it features new character portraits and artwork, and a new Japanese voice track with the actors from the original Star Ocean.

And that’s the version we’ll be looking at today. I never played the original Star Ocean, I mean I couldn’t legitimately but even through emulation I haven’t touched it, so I won’t be able to say how faithful the remake is to it. So, for this review I’ll be looking at this as a standalone game. I’m simply going to review it based on its own merits. So, let’s dig in shall we.

Star Ocean takes place in the distant year of 346 S.D. It’s a time where humanity has developed interplanetary travel and has taken to exploring the vast cosmic sky. Or as they call it, the Star Ocean.

The game starts in the village of Kratus on the Planet Roak, a medieval like planet inhabited by a cat like race called the Fellpool. There lives the main character Roddick Farrance and his friends, Milly and Dorne. The three work as the towns defence force, protecting the town from bandit attacks.

One day, a town north of Kratus is infected with a strange illness that turns people to stone. Milly’s father knows healing magic and goes to cure the illness but discovers that even his advanced healing abilities are useless, contracting the virus himself. Sending a message to warn everyone to stay away, which ends up infecting Dorne after he touches the carrier pigeon who delivered the warning. Whoops.

Seeking a cure from an herb that grows on a nearby mountain, the trio encounter a pair of humans who beam down to the planet. They are Ronyx C. Kenny and Illia Silvestri, crew members of the starship Calnus that work for the Terran Alliance. A federation of planets dedicated to exploring space.

They reveal that the herb will do nothing as the virus is the result of a chemical weapon attack from a rival group, the Lezonians, in direct violation of the Underdeveloped Planet Protection Pact. Which forbids any developed civilisation from interfering with underdeveloped ones.

Making an exception to investigate the virus, they take Roddick and co up to their ship to examine Dorne. It’s there that they discover the virus mutates too rapidly to produce an effective vaccine, and the only way to cure it is by finding the original host.

It’s also discovered that Fellpool blood can cause things to become invisible to human senses and technology, and that the Lezonians are turning them to stone so they can abduct them more easily and harvest their blood to develop cloaking technology.

During negotiations with Lezonia though, they find out that Lezonia never wanted to fight the Alliance to begin with. As they are revealed to be under the influence of a shadowy third party. The Lezonians also cannot give them the original host as they are long dead. Said host being the demon king Asmodeus, who died on Roak 300 years ago.

With no possibilities for a cure, the Alliance is forced to quarantine Roak. Effectively cutting it out from any outside help, dooming the planet. Fortunately, Ronyx has one last hail Mary, time travel. Using a Time Gate on a distant planet, the plan is to use the gate to travel to Roak 300 years in the past and get a sample of Asmodeus’ DNA before he died.

Unfortunately, a minor fall causes Roddick and Illia to enter the gate later than the others and they end up getting separated. So now Roddick and Illia need to reunite with Milly and Ronyx, gather a group of allies along the way, and hopefully find Asmodeus to save the Fellpool race.

That was a lot of set-up to get through. And believe it or not I skimmed through a lot of it. The game goes into more detail into a lot of this stuff, such as why Fellpool blood turns things into stone. It’s one of the longest, most exposition heavy intros to an RPG I’ve ever seen.

Some of you may have also noticed that a lot of what I went over sounds very familiar. Let’s see, a future where humanity uses starships to explore space, an Alliance of planets, a code to protect underdeveloped planets, cloaking technology, now where have I heard all this before.

Yeah, Star Ocean isn’t exactly shy about hiding its influences. The game takes heavy inspiration from Star Trek, and it’s not just the larger concepts, there’s even direct references to it. Case in point, the whole time gate idea is almost ripped wholesale from the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”.

And believe it or not, but First Departure actually toned down a lot of the references. I did a little research on the original after finishing this game and it’s even more blatant with its Trek references. Trekrences if you like. That version had a holodeck, and the Alliance was named the Earth Federation. It’s so blatant that I wouldn’t be surprised if the remake toned it down just to avoid being sued.

But despite the heavy Trek influences, Star Ocean still follows a lot of JRPG story traditions. I mean the majority of the game involves hunting a demon lord, that’s as traditional as you can get. And it’s that weird combination that gives Star Ocean its own unique charm.

This isn’t like Mass Effect which also takes heavy influence from Star Trek but is more of a pure Sci-fi story. Star Ocean is more of a traditional JRPG plot with a spice of sci-fi added in. For example, the games magic system, Symbology, is hinted to have some basis in science rather than mysticism. Even the origin of the demon lord and demons themselves have a science fiction twist to them, but I’ll let you discover those for yourself.

It is interesting seeing a lot of these classic RPG tropes told with a sci-fi bent to them. The only other game I can think of that does so is Phantasy Star, and even that leaned more into sci-fi than fantasy. Star Ocean feels like it struck a better balance.

The story itself is also a lot of fun. Again, it follows a lot of similar narrative beats to other RPG’s but it does them well enough, and the characters are likable and develop well throughout the game. Speaking of characters, there’s two very interesting elements to the story and the game itself that makes it stand out.

The first is the party of playable characters. Star Ocean allows for a maximum party of eight characters. Four of those are mandatory, those being Roddick, Milly, Illia and Ronyx, but the rest are comprised of optional characters you’ll meet across the game.

There are 9 potential party members you can add to your team, and each has their own stories and connections to one another. This gives some replay value since you’re never going to be able to see all of the story in one playthrough.

While some characters joining are as easy as them asking to join and saying yes, others require different methods. Some won’t join if you have a certain character in your party, others will only join if you have a certain character in your party and others require you going a bit more out of the way to get them.

And in some cases, your choices can cause other characters to join the party earlier or later in the story. Milly can join as early as the second continent, or as late as the fourth depending on your choices.

This gives you a lot of potential combinations for the party, which ties into the other interesting thing the story has, Private Actions. The best way I can describe these are that they’re kind of like the skits from the Tales series. Though funnily enough this actually predates the skits by a year. I guess it’s funny the original creators of Tales would also prototype one of the series defining features.

The way they work is that whenever you visit a town you can press a button to separate the party. Allowing you to run around town and chat with them while they do their own thing. This can lead to some unique scenes between the characters that expand on their personalities and backstories.

Some of these are brief comedic moments, others are a little more serious, and some are longer and more involved having different parts. The Private Actions are one of the best parts of the game. It’s charming seeing the characters interact in a more casual setting, and some really give you a good insight into what the characters are like. If you want to get the most out of the story, you’ll want to try and see as many as you can.

I went for them purely for entertainment value. When one of the Private Action’s is just Illia reciting the story of Cinderella and it’s still engaging you know you’ve done something right.

And there are a lot of them too. Over 100 of them in fact. Now obviously you won’t be able to get all of them since many are dependent on different factors that can change in each playthrough, but regardless of how you play there should be plenty of them to see.

Some Private Actions will involve you making a choice, and depending on the choices made this can unlock new Private Actions and/or improve the relationships between the characters. Star Ocean has a hidden relationship value between the characters and depending on the relationship value, as well as the party composition, this can lead to one of several different endings for them.

All of this combined gives Star Ocean replay value I don’t see in a lot of RPGs. I felt tempted to go back and play it just to see all the things I missed. I probably won’t anytime soon because there’s a lot of games I still need to get to, but the fact that I wanted to is impressive given I don’t feel that way about most RPGs.

There are some flaws with this. Because of the emphasis on replayability, some characters story arcs cand end up feeling underdeveloped if you don’t have the right team. This is most notable with the character Mavelle who needs Ioshua in the party to get the most out of her story. Which in my playthrough, I did not.

There are also some characters that don’t have much of a defined arc. I had T’nique and Pericci in my party for my playthrough and while I liked both just fine, they feel more like comic relief characters and don’t get a lot of character development.

Then there’s the issue of the optional characters not mattering much to the overarching plot. Because Roddick, Milly, Illia and Ronyx are the only characters your required to have, they’re also the only ones that contribute anything to the main story.

At some point the other characters just fade into the background. Not saying or doing much of anything in the story. It really makes them feel less important which is something I don’t like. I know this is expected in RPGs with large casts, not everyone is going to be equally important to the narrative, but it shouldn’t be that way for half the cast.

The actual story itself also has some major problems that hold it back. The biggest one being the pacing. I already talked about the opening and how long and exposition heavy it was, but it isn’t the only scene like this. There are numerous scenes where the story grinds to a halt so the characters can give some exposition on what’s going on.

The entire middle section of the game also feels very meandering. Dragging on with not much going on in the plot. It gets pretty dull. One of the reasons I went for the Private Actions was largely due to them being more entertainment than what was happening in the main story at the time. The entire second act was a bit of a drag.

I also wasn’t a big fan of the last stretch of the game. It felt like it wasn’t built up properly. Remember that shadowy group I mentioned in the plot breakdown? Neither did the game. It just forgets about them until the very end of the game, and they have no presence in the story up to that point. When they showed up, I had completely forgotten about them.

And that’s another issue the game has, the absence of a compelling villain. That isn’t to say the villains are bad. They’re a bit stock but they aren’t terrible. The problem is they don’t have much of a presence throughout most of the game.

The best RPG villains are the ones that are a constant threat. Look at Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7 for example. The game establishes him as a threat early on, and the entire game is building up to the final confrontation with him. He’s constantly getting in the party’s way and even murders one of the games most iconic moments.

But the villains in Star Ocean don’t have the same presence. Asmodeus has it a bit better since he is mentioned a lot throughout the game, but he doesn’t do much in the story until you’re ready to confront him. And the main villain isn’t even named until the final stretch.

This lack of a strong antagonist makes the stakes feel really low. Which probably contributed to the middle part of the game being a drag since it doesn’t feel like anything important is happening.

I can’t exactly say the story is great because of these problems. That said, it is still a fun story. The mix of classic RPG fantasy tropes and Star Trek like Sci-fi was an interesting and charming combination.

The characters are all likable and the number of options and variable you have in regard to team make-up and relationships give the story a lot of replay value. It is still a fun and engaging story; it just isn’t as good as it could be.

One thing that does help the story stay entertaining is the voice acting. Now I played the game with the English dub since I don’t speak Japanese so I wouldn’t be able to tell if the acting for the Japanese cast would be good or not. And there are two Japanese voice tracks so I wouldn’t know which is better.

So I stuck to English for this and, honestly, the voice acting was pretty good for the most part. I say for the most part because a lot of the NPCs sounded weird. Like the actors weren’t even trying.

But the main cast are done very well owing to them having a lot of talented voice actors. including Yuri Lowenthal who you may know as the voice of Spider Man in the recent videogame series, also Sasuke Uchiha but we won’t hold that against him.

The whole cast does a great job and fit their characters very well. But if you don’t like the English voices for whatever reason, you can always swap to Japanese if you want. Hell, the game even gives you two options for that.

As for the rest of the presentation, it’s fine enough. The music definitely fares the best. The original games soundtrack was done Moto Sakuraba who also did the arrangements for the remake. Sakuraba is a great compaser having worked on the Golden Sun series, the Mario Golf and Tennis games and… Dark Souls? What the hell? Well he certainly has a varied back catalogue.

Given his pedigree, Star Ocean has some pretty good music. All the themes fit their locations perfectly and the battle music keeps things exciting without getting too repetitive.

Visually it’s not as impressive. Granted this is a port of a PSP game so I wasn’t expecting much, but the graphics are only just ok. The game uses sprites on pre-rendered or 3D backgrounds, and the sprites and pre-rendered stuff look pretty good. The sprites are animated well enough and have a lot of expressions that give them a lot of charm, and the pre-rendered backgrounds look fine if a little blurry at times.

The 3D though, that isn’t great. It’s got a very PS1 look to it only not as charming. It isn’t bad, it’s just very bland looking and the 3D overworld has a lot of fog which makes things look worse. But at least the game runs well. I never had any issues with slow down or flickering, so at least there’s that.

But there is one weird issue with the presentation and it’s with the new portraits. Though this requires some explanation. When First Departure first came out on the PSP it featured a new more anime like art style. This also involved redesigning a lot of the characters with new outfits.

But for First Departure R they added in brand new character portraits with designs more in line with the original games art. I actually like the new portraits and artwork a lot, the original First Departure art looks a bit too generic and flat for my liking.

But there’s a problem, they didn’t redesign the sprites. So, if you use the new portraits, there’s a discrepancy between how they look in the artwork compared how they look in the game. For most characters it’s minor, but for characters like Illia and Pericci who’s redesigns are radically different from the original the discrepancy is very distracting.

There’s also anime cutscenes that use the First Departure designs which only makes it worse. Though there aren’t that many of these anyway so it’s not too big a deal. It’s a shame because the animation isn’t that bad, I wish there were a few more of them.

It’s funny because they didn’t need to add the new portraits. I may not be a fan of New Departures original art but it’s not bad any means. But if they were going to redraw the portraits, why didn’t they draw them to match the new designs, or better yet redo the sprites.

You wouldn’t even need to do all of them. As I said most of them only have minor differences, there’s only 3 characters in the game that really need it so why not go all the way with it. It’s like they put in more effort than they need to and yet not enough effort at the same time.

So the presentation is ok. In terms of sound, it’s great, but visually it could have been better. But as far as Switch ports of PSP titles are concerned it’s serviceable.

In terms of gameplay, First Departure keeps things very traditional. It’s got a lot of what you would expect from a JRPG, random battles, a big overworld to explore, visiting towns, exploring dungeons, finding treasure, taking on big bosses etc.

It plays things very safe and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a tried and tested formula, why fix what isn’t broken after all, if done well it can lead to a very engaging experience. Does Star Ocean succeed in this? Well… I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s talk about what it does to stand out.

I already talked about the playable characters and Private Actions so I won’t repeat myself here. instead, why don’t we talk about one of its biggest defining features, the battle system.

Star Ocean is an action RPG. Though unlike something like Trials of Mana or Kingdom Hearts where all the action takes place in the world itself, Star Ocean instead has a separate screen for battles like most traditional JRPG’s. It’s similar to Tales which should surprise no one given all we’ve talked about.

It’s a simple system. You can have four characters in a battle though you only control one at a time, with the others controlled by an AI with pre-set strategies you can swap between. You can swap between characters if you want, though I usually stuck to one character and only swapped if I needed to revive them.

Every character has a basic attack combo and a set of special attacks they can perform. Though you can only equip two of these at a time as they’re locked to the L and R buttons, except for spell casters who can use all of their magic spells through the menu.

And that’s it for the battle system. No really, that’s really all there is to it. Star Ocean’s battle system is pretty simplistic even for its time. I mean there are a couple of other things like elemental resistances and using items but that’s standard stuff you’d expect and doesn’t add that much depth.

Now does this simplicity make it bad, not necessarily. It can be fun to string together special moves into combos, and you can unlock some pretty cool looking specials as you progress, but because you can only have two equipped at any given time, you’re limited in what you can do with the system.

That’s not the only problem though, the enemy variety is incredibly weak. You’ll fight most of the same enemies over and over again with many of the later ones simply being slightly stronger recolours with difference between them. Most enemies can be beaten with the same strategy of spamming special attacks. Even bosses can be killed using that strategy.

Which leads me to another problem, the games too damn easy. You can sleepwalk through 90% of the game. There are some difficulty spikes to contend with, but even when the game does provide a challenge, it never feels fair.

It only feels that way because of cheap attacks or enemies absorbing hits through elemental resistances. It never feels like a genuine test of skill or strategy. It sucks.

You know what else sucks, the magic. It’s big, flashy and hits every enemy but there’s almost no reason to use it. The damage output is pitiful. Most melee fighters can do the same damage spells can, quicker than they can and unlike magic they don’t interrupt the flow of combat. The only magic you’ll use is healing magic and even that suffers from interrupting combat so you’ll still end up hating it anyway.

I don’t know man this battle system just doesn’t cut it. It’s too simplistic and shallow for its own good. It is fun at first, but the lack of depth makes it lose its lustre fast. Fortunately, Star Ocean has a much deeper system to sink your teeth into. Let’s talk about the Skill System.

This is where the real depth of the game comes from. When it comes to the games customisation a lot of it is what you would expect. You can equip weapons, armour and accessories which give you different perks. Where things get interesting is with the Skills.

These can be obtained by buying them in skill shops scattered around the world. Once you’ve purchased them, you can then spend SP you gain by levelling up to learn and level up these various Skills. Some of these skills can help you in combat or help in learning the more powerful Special Moves, but most are used to learn Specialties.

See there are a lot of these skills and a lot of them on their own don’t do anything. Some may give a stats buff, but most are useless by themselves. However, by learning a combination of skills you can then unlock Specialties which can then be used outside of combat.

And these have a lot of different functions. One lets you lower or increase enemy encounter rates, one lets you lower your stats to gain more experience, there’s one that lets you send a bird out to gather items if your running low, all kinds of different things.

That’s not all, there’s a bunch of item creation methods like cooking food, compounding herbs, crafting accessories, or even making art or writing books. You can even write and compose music then play that music to give certain benefits.

There is a lot to do with the Skill System. So much that it can be a little overwhelming. But like any good RPG system, it’s only as deep as you want it to be. You can focus on the bare minimum and just learn a couple of skills, or you can try to min max everything. It’s up to you.

But if you’re unsure where to start, every character starts with a random selection of talents that can improve their success rate with certain skills. So you have a good idea of where to start when it comes to learning each skill.

But each character can also learn new talents if you use skills enough times. So, you can focus on what they have by default, or go deeper and try to learn as much as possible.

This is a great system. it has a ton of freedom to let you experiment and there’s a lot of fun things it lets you do. Like learning to pickpocket and stealing from everyone in town. Yeah, you can totally do that. There are even Super Specialities that require the entire party. Giving you even more stuff to uncover.

But for as fun as the system is, I do have some issues with it. For one thing there isn’t any kind of in game encyclopaedia to keep track of the stuff you can make. And keep in mind that you can make a lot of different stuff from a lot of different resources.

It can be hard to keep track of everything. Especially since different characters can make different things even with the same skill. I could just use a guide, which I did end up using to get the best weapons, but there should be something in game to help you keep track of everything.

Not that you’ll need to. If you’re like me and try to make as much as possible, you’ll have so many resources you won’t know what to do with them all. Even with a limit of 20 per item, I had so many healing items it made the already easy combat even easier.

And as a side note, this also causes the menu system to become very cluttered. It gets to a point where you’ll find yourself scrolling through pages of crap to find what you’re looking for. There is a sorting system to make things easier, and the game does categorise items to try and offset this, but the menu’s still end up feeling clunky to navigate.

Honestly, there’s so much stuff you can make with the Skill System. Perhaps too much. There were some Skills I barely used because I didn’t see a need for them. I appreciate the amount stuff here, but it feels unrefined.

It also takes a long time for the system to really open up. See just learning a Skill isn’t enough as there is a chance when using it that you’ll fail. In order to improve your chances of performing a Skill successfully, you need to level them up.

Every Skill has a maximum level of 10, and the higher the level the more successful using each skill will be. At earlier levels you’ll be lucky to get anything at all, but when maxed out you’ll be able to more reliably get powerful items or use overworld abilities with more success. There are also items you can find which improve your success rate even more.

But it takes a while to get to this point, and even then there’s a small percentage of failure. What kind of percentage I don’t know because the game doesn’t tell you. That’s another problem, it doesn’t convey much to the player. Some things are easy to figure out like what Talent’s work with which Skill, but when it comes to stuff like success rates, all that is hidden.

It can make it a guessing game in whether you’ll succeed or not. It’s especially annoying when using Customisation to try to make better weapons because making the best ones requires using more limited resources. You’ll be save summing a lot if you want to get these.

While I’m on the subject, I have a bone to pick with Customisation. I went out of my way to get the best weapons. Why not, it would make the last part easier right? Well, remember when I said certain enemies have elemental resistances. Well weapons all have elemental properties, and hitting enemies with the wrong weapon can cause you to heal them rather than damage them.

This is incredibly frustrating and can make otherwise easy fights impossible. I told you the difficulty wasn’t fair. So where am I going with this? Well, the last stretch of the game has enemies with elemental resistances, that match the elemental properties of some characters strongest weapon.

Meaning if you went out of your way to get them, they actually hinder you in the final parts of the game. Mavelle, who is easily the strongest character in the game, is unable to fight the final boss with her best weapon since it does zero damage. It’s like the game punishes you for getting the best stuff.

But even with its flaws, I do still enjoy the Skill System. I love RPGs with strong customisation mechanics and this is a pretty good one. There is a lot to experiment with, and given the best weapons and armour are only obtainable through it, it’s a rewarding system to experiment with.

Unfortunately, outside the Skill System, there isn’t a whole lot I like about the gameplay. Overworld exploration sucks. You move painfully slow, and the random encounter rate is obnoxiously high, even with the Scouting ability lowering it.

The world is also way too big with nothing to find in it. No hidden treasure, no secret areas, nothing. There are only two optional dungeons to find in the entire game and only one requires exploring the overworld to find. It’s a decently sized overworld but there’s nothing to do in it.

And you move so slow in it too. The size wouldn’t be a big issue if Roddick didn’t take a leisurely stroll everywhere he went. You don’t even unlock any vehicles or anything either, it’s just walking. Lots and lots of walking.

There is something you can get that makes overworld exploration a little more bearable, but the requirements are so strict. Not only do you need Pericci on the team, who you need to go out of your way for to begin with, but you also need to do a Private Action in just the right way or you won’t get it. Which I did not.

And I wish I had because you need to backtrack a lot in this game. Even early on there’s a section where you need to visit one town to pick up an item, then go back to the town you were in previously to deliver the item, and both times require going through a sub area on top of the overworld.

That isn’t the worst of it. In the middle of the game there’s a quest that requires to trave to all the major towns of the game, which requires you to back track through the entire map. Have I mentioned yet that this games middles section is a bigger drag than Ru Paul.

And that’s on top of the backtracking I did to get new party members and Personal Actions. Was a fast travel system too difficult to implement. The worst part was it wasn’t even worth backtracking outside of story related reasons. While the Private Actions are entertaining, they’re really the only side content the game has.

Outside of two optional dungeons, which if you’re at the right level are over in ten minutes, the only other side content is a battle arena where you battle a series of monsters in 1 on 1 bouts. Which, given the simplistic combat, is nowhere near as fun as it could have been.

There are no side quests at all. And while the campaign is a decent enough length and has good replay value, the lack of a New Game+ option makes replaying the game less enticing. Seriously, how could you make a game with replay value as one of its major selling points, and not have a New Game+ option?

I won’t lie and say Star Ocean First Departure R is a great game because it really isn’t. But I also can’t call it a bad game either. Nothing here is offensively awful, there are things that annoyed me but nothing in it pissed me off eiither. The gameplay is good enough, it’s serviceable, and there are things about it that are worth praising.

The Skill System is fun to experiment with, and the story, though poorly paced, is a fun romp with a unique mix of fantast and science fiction tropes. Even the combat isn’t bad, just overly simplistic. It can be fun in short bursts.

But the game just has too many niggling issues. Too many undercooked systems and ill-conceived design decisions to make me fully recommend it. it’s the perfect definition of mid, neither excelling nor failing at anything particularly hard.

As a result, I can only really recommend this to fans of Star Ocean looking to see how the series started without dealing with the clunkiness of the Super Famicom original. Those looking for a good action RPG, well you can do a lot worse, but you also do a lot better. If you really want to play it, then wait until you can get it on sale. Otherwise, I wouldn’t really bother.

That was disappointing, but hey, at least we’ve got Second Story R to look forward to. The sequel is widely considered the best game in the series and is a beloved classic to a lot of players. Will the remake live up to that legacy? I suppose only time will tell.