Welcome back to Save State, where we have our first departure. I’ve been a big fan of several games in the Star Ocean series, many of which are popping up on Steam these days, but I never actually played the first entry (called Star Ocean) in the franchise despite owning it on PSP (remade for PSP as Star Ocean First Departure) for many years. I never got to play it when it was released on the Super Nintendo because it was never translated before I got my grubby hands on a copy of Star Ocean: The Second Story and Till the End of Time. No time like the present to enjoy an adventure that spans both time and space, right?
Star Ocean was the first game of the newly founded studio tri-Ace, filled with developers who left Namco due to creative differences during the development of Tales of Phantasia. This was actually news to me because even though I love both Tales of and Star Ocean, I never actually knew that tri-Ace began due to troubles during development of the very first Tales of title! Star Ocean, by contrast, was intended to be a game with a more complex skill system with tons of depth and replayability. Tri-Ace largely succeeded in this capacity, and it’s one of my favorite things about the first Star Ocean that was improved upon by the second iteration of the series. Of course, there’s still plenty to enjoy in this first entry.
I personally played Star Ocean First Departure R, which is an enhanced port of the PSP version but with new character portraits drawn by Katsumi Enami, which I think looks very detailed and appealing. The sprites weren’t updated like the artwork so there are some outfit mismatches due to the PSP version of First Departure redesigning a few characters, but the new portraits look so good that it never bothered me. Visually, Star Ocean looks great, with crisp and clean visuals, though it didn’t receive nearly as much of a glow-up as its sequel received a few years later.
As you may have surmised, Star Ocean First Departure R is an action RPG. You run around the overworld to get from location to location and will be accosted by enemies in random battles, dispatching them in action combat. The actual combat system of Star Ocean First Departure R is pretty simple in that you can attack a few times and then quickly follow up with a special art to do more damage. You can’t actively guard or anything like that, so rushing in and stun-locking enemies was how I wound up beating almost every single enemy in this (including the final boss and the super boss you summon by playing music really, really well). You don’t need a ton of strategy if you break the game, though it is worth mentioning that controlling spellcasters controls a little differently from playing the brawling characters.
The arts your characters can learn in Star Ocean First Departure R can differ a little bit based on your skills, and as you use your skills and level up Secret Fighting Techniques (abbreviated to SFT in the game), you can learn newer, even more powerful arts that can help you stun lock anything miserable to be sitting across the battlefield from your party. SFTs are hidden all over the world and even come from specific character moments I’ll get into later, so it’s always a great idea to search the world high and low, participate in the arena challenges, and make sure that your characters talk to each other when possible.
When tri-Ace said they wanted to create complex skill systems, they went above and beyond with skills, skill points, and item creation in Star Ocean. Every level up you earn SP you can spend on skills, letting you get better at writing, composing, or performing music or in acquiring new abilities that are useful in battle. This actually makes the title very, very easy to break in half, if you look up information on Star Ocean First Departure R to figure out how to best spend your points. There are skills that reduce the SP cost for all other skills (which is integral, in my opinion), skills that combine for specialties that dramatically increase your experience and money gain from battle as well as SP gain on level up, and skills that let you make some of the best gear in the entire game.
The major caveat to this, however, is that I did need to spend some time looking at guides for how to get the most out of this system (Star Ocean 3 trained me to do this, basically) because a lot of the benefits of what you get from the skills system goes unexplained. I can forgive this, since this game is effectively a Switch port of a PSP remake of an SNES title, but most players will have no idea what the Orchestra Group Specialty does unless you look it up first. Which, Orchestra Group Specialty dramatically increases item creation success while it plays, making it integral in getting powerful items, weapons, and accessories among others.
Another really cool thing in the first Star Ocean is the Private Action system. Whenever you approach a town, you can press a button to have your party split up in town, giving you the chance to talk with your characters, learn more about them, or see new events that further flesh out your party interactions and their relationships with you. These function as little mini events where your party interacts with one another, doing a great job at giving you new perspectives of the characters you’ve met on your journey. One of the more humorous ones involved two characters getting into an argument over who would win in a fight, forcing the player to bet on one of them: You increase the affection of the one you bet to win, but you also stand a 50% chance at either losing your 5,000 buck wager or doubling your money.
Private Actions form an amazing little system that’s like a very early version of the Tales of skits, and my only complaint is that it’s far too opaque. Many Private Action triggers are time-gated by various story events, have nebulous requirements (like 5,000 in your wallet), are dependent on previous Private Actions, and more. It’s nice that it’s an optional system, but it’s far too easy to only see 10 or so out of the total 108 Private Actions, though it is worth mentioning that some are dependent on specific party composition too. Knowing what would become of this system in later entries, it makes complete sense that these fun character interactions are more plentiful in The Second Story.
Which, you’ll note that I mentioned some Private Actions require specific recruitable characters- each play of First Departure gives you four slots in which you can recruit new characters to join you, but there are eight total characters vying for the illustrious opportunity to stab monsters with you. This means that you will always be leaving some characters on the table every playthrough, but it does give an excellent reason to play through the game a second time. Some locations and quests in Star Ocean 1 are only available if you recruited specific characters too, and the general path you take to reach the end game can take you to completely different places depending on who you’ve recruited!
Honestly, the only real downside to Star Ocean First Departure R is that the final act is… something. You beat who you expected to be the final boss, who, of course, wasn’t going to be the final boss, but then the game just completely shifts to a completely different story’s plot while you’re introduced to a whole new planet, a group of resistance fighters, and a bad guy who is so scientifically advanced that the only thing that can beat him are the most primitive weapons wielded by teenagers from a backwater planet.
Star Ocean First Departure R is absolutely ambitious, but man, I felt like the final dungeon and story elements sure could have been wrapped up more elegantly; it definitely seemed like there were some budget constraints toward the end.
Which, whew, if there’s anything negative I have to say about Star Ocean First Departure R, it’s that the world map sucks. Other than the towns and dungeons you visit, the world maps are completely devoid of all interaction, and you move at a positively glacial pace. From what I understand, the original Star Ocean on SNES didn’t have a world map at all, so this was a PSP exclusive inclusion, and by 2007 I think developers knew better than to make a giant world map where you moved as quickly as a frozen snail. Couple this with the encounter rate being incredibly high and there being an absolute ton of backtracking throughout the course of the story events, all that combines to make this a game that can easily wear you down over time. So, while I still enjoyed it, I definitely think this entry has some obvious flaws that I’m glad the second and third Star Ocean titles improved upon.
That being said, I think it’s time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. I do have a copy of Star Ocean The Second Story R that’s just been sitting on my shelf for over two years, and it may finally be time to take that for a spin now that I’m in a more Star Ocean kind of mood, but only time (and space) will tell. See you in two weeks!