Star Ocean: First Departure (2007)

Beat PSP version. I started with the SNES version a year or 2 ago but it did not work properly on my PSP. I played it for a couple hours or so on PC but never stuck with it. It had been on my mind since then and I recently learned about the PSP remake. I have already mastered SO 2 and 3 back in the day so there was nothing new to me in this game. I knew that the time travel gimmick was not really time travel, and it was interesting to see where the series began. I struggled for a while upon reaching the past with no weapons or armor at all. I missed the part about Cyuss giving a sword and joining the team, so Rod and Ilia bare fisted their way to the next town only to not be allowed in. I wondered if I had to use crafting to make weapons to progress the story so I did mess around with that for a bit, only making some crappy jewelry. He did get a hefty skill point bonus for becoming nimble fingered. Eventually I found the proper cutscene to progress the story. This happened a couple other times as well; missing a story trigger and trying to progress in the next town to no avail.

I had to check a walkthrough at the purgatorium because I had no idea where the secret entrance was. It did not even occur to me to exit the dungeon and look around on the world map. Speaking of which, movement on the overworld was obnoxiously slow. I had Rod max out scouting and I set it to avoid enemies for the entire game. By the time I got Ioshua I was focusing on maxing determination and effort. I set Iosh to training mode as he was behind the other 3, and made him the character I controlled; reminded me of playing Rena in 2. I mostly hung back and let the AI fight while throwing out the occasional nuke or heal. I did find that I could fight much better than the AI as it seemed unable to do the basic 3 hit combo, nor move out of the way of attacks. It was good enough for most battles though. I got each character as far as I could in the arena, and then finally reunited with Millie and Rony. I did try them in the arena a bit, and I let Rony take a spot on the main team when Ilia died, but they were significantly under leveled and I was happy with my core team. Iosh had an excellent balance of nukes and heals, while the 3 warriors kicked ass. Millie had status cures and buffs but minimal offense. I could see her being better for some fights, like bosses and status causing enemies. Or just leave her in reserve with an emerald/faerie ring as a heal bot, like I did. Rony was straight up black mage with a decent bow attack, but why would I give up a healer?

I did the optional ice cave where Mavelle died. I never did try her out but she was the hottest girl by far. Oh well it was a cool scene. The boss there was tough and I had to switch control of the characters frequently to make sure Rod and Cyuss were on opposite sides, and move them away from the big attack. I left Ilia dead because it was difficult enough to manage the 3. Lots of back tracking, private actions, and arena fighting later and I found Pericci the cat girl, and the silly bunny mount that made overworld travel less tedious. Up until this point I had been ignoring the crafting system. I hate crafting. Just like in 2 and 3, it was way too complicated, wasted way too much time, and had way too much randomness. I did some writing of books to raise skill levels but that was a waste of time given how ridiculously easy it was to level up in the secret end game dungeon. Ilia did machinist and I got some useful tools from that. I experimented with making accessories as Rod and got some cool items; 3 rings of might that gave massive attack boost but weakness to magic, chains of might for more attack power, rings of shield for huge reduction in damage (too bad they broke but I used them to beat A rank arena), and a ring that healed all spell damage. Then I did blacksmithing for the best armor in the game, and customized some weapons; only Ilia got an upgrade. Iosh did too during the secret dungeon. I did music, compounding, and alchemy. I made enough philosopher's stones to become filthy rich, using group appraising and Cinderella glass to buy all instruments and 3 tri emblems. I could not kill the optional super boss though.

So I went past the point of no return and beat the final boss at around level 75. Everyone was using training mode after getting all that sweet gear. The final boss was not difficult but Cyuss and Ilia died a bunch of times from his nukes; being weak to magic was bad. Rod and Iosh were immune though. In retrospect I should have switched some gear around for light magic immunity. Then I did the secret dungeon. It was not difficult as long as everyone spammed their best attacks and I kept their mana up. They were gaining 2 to 3 level ups per battle! I got the ultimate weapons, strongest spell for Iosh, and a bunch of stuff I did not need before wrecking the boss. Then the very last thing I did was kill the optional super boss Gabrielle. It was a tough fight that took like a dozen resurrection items and only 3 people were standing at the end. By this time they were all level 126 with 9999 hp and more skill points than could be used. The 3 warriors maxed out their special arts and I had them each set up with a ranged attack (air slash, spirit blast, palm of destruction etc), and a heavy damage like omega double slash. Not sure what endings I got but it felt natural. There was a duel with Cyuss, Ilia acted like she wished she could be Millie and get Rod, Phia and Cyuss had a positive scene, Iosh had one by himself lamenting his sister and the cat was also by herself lamenting.

Rod: Aurora blade, reflecting plate (or sylvan mail for petrification immunity), mithril shield, dueling helm, mithril greaves, good luck charm, ring of might.

He started with originality, design sense and composition.

Cyuss: his special, reflecting plate (or sylvan mail), dueling helm, mithril greaves, ring of might, chain of might.

Listening and animal instinct

Ilia: Kaiser knuckles, dueling suit, dream crown, king fu shoes, ring of might, archangels bracelet.

Nimble fingers, design sense, composition, rhythm sense and listening

Iosh: mind healer, robe of deception, dream crown, elven slippers, faerie ring. And his stupid unequipable ring.

Nimble fingers and design sense.

Rony, Pericci and Phia were level 40, Millie only 34. They had no interesting talents other than taste for cooking, but I never needed that.

This game was very impressive for a SNES game. Not quite up there with Chrono Trigger, FF6 and Tales of Phantasia, and of course not as good as Star Ocean 2. The characters were great and the story was good; felt like it could have been a Star Trek movie. The battle system was more enjoyable than the standard turn based menu affair, and the different character options helped replayability. The main flaws were excessive complexity, mainly with the crafting and specialty systems, and exploration. The world map was too tedious to explore with the slow movement speed, and there was almost nothing to find anyway. Some of the dungeons bordered on requiring a map and had too many samey looking rooms. And I wish I could turn off the battle voices! I might be inclined to play again at some point to try out different characters.

8.8/10

I just beat the "boss" and started the epilogue. I remembered reading about character affinity and how there are like a dozen or so endings and tweaks, got very overwhelmed, and turned the game off. My OCD is like "get all the endingssss!!" And my rational brain is like, dude, who gives a shit, beat the game and watch them on YouTube. I'll probably see if I can trigger some of the interactions for Ronyx and Ilia to trigger their ending, and leave it at that. If I'm planning on playing through the game with other characters, that's way too much investment.

Too many games and too much game in the games. 😅

I'm 20 hours in and at level 50 so time for an update! I can see how folks are apathetic about this title, but I'm not having a bad time. Stupid difficulty jumps in a few places require grinding, which I don't mind, but come on, I shouldn't have an almost instant wipe in fights going to the next sequential destination. I'd much prefer a difficulty curve than huge difficulty stairs.

I'm not sure why this is a thing in these remakes - the sprite work and field maps could be better, but the towns and scenery are very nice. The short scene at the drawbridge going into Silvarant, with the mountains in the background, red-leaved trees, and subtle bird calls, is a super pretty moment.

Music is... there. Sakuraba is perfectly fine at writing perfectly fine music, though completely forgetable. He's had a few bangers over the years, but I still think his best work was Shining the Holy Ark. I'm curious to see how he'll do on Suikoden 6 Eiyuden Chronicle.

I have a couple issues I'd improve upon.

1. Travel feels really slow a lot of the time.
2. Difficulty jumps in battles, stupid AI in battles (teammates seem very eager to get themselves killed, but not do much in the way of accurately targeting enemies and avoiding them)
3. Bloated "extras." Super not good for my OCD. I want to be THE BEST and min max and all that jazz, and there's just too much to keep track of. I think I've grinded (ground?) enough of this for now that I have a good handle on it, but between dozens of consumables, craftable items, group skills, specialties, individual skills, levels for all of these, combinations of skills, it's a loooot to keep track of, and almost impossible to understand without a guide.

I didn't know this when I started, but to play with all the characters and see everything, you have to do at least 3 play-throughs. My current run has a convenient spot where I can splinter off into two parties in different saves. One will wind up with Phia and Welch, one will keep Mavelle and get Pericci. Then I'm going to do it one more time to get the others - so choosing Ashlay, getting Erys, and then picking T'nique. But as I typed this, I might have 7 people when I'm able to get T'nique which means I can't... which means I'd have to do a fourth play through. Probably not gonna do that.

Originally released exclusively on Super Famicom in 1996, later ported on PSP and released worldwide in 2008 and finally remastered on current Gen, this game satisfied my itch for Retro RPGs.

7/10 - Charming. Recommended if into the genre (Nintendo Switch Version)

Pros:

• Good Sci-Fi setting
• Original levelling up/party customization system
• Different endings
• Perfect game length (took me 26h)

Cons:

• A bit on the easy side, especially battle system
• Easy to get lost on World map
• Missed opportunity on intriguing crafting system

Snagged the platinum trophy, finally. Fun game, definitely lived up to Star Ocean: The Second Story which I originally played back in 2000 (sheesh!). If you take the game at face value, having originally been an SNES title and all, there's a lot to appreciate but there are still some things one can nitpick over.

Being unable to warp from one town to another makes for a LOT of boring backtracking. The same goes for caves/dungeons. Unless you're lucky enough to get a cutscene that warps you outside, you'll have to retrace your steps all the way back up. Granted, the game would be incredibly short without them but it makes the game feel monotonous and battles start to feel like a chore, simply because of the relatively high encounter rate (even after choosing to avoid battles) and the amount of time it takes to walk from point A to point B. Truly some archaic elements even by 1996 standards.

Battles are fun but don't require a lot of effort once you figure out which skills to spam ad nauseum. It's much too easy to have ridiculously overpowered equipment fairly early on thanks to the Customize, Alchemy, and Replication skills along with some good ol' fashioned save scumming.

I found the characters to be likable and they all have fun dialogue when checking out Private Actions in each town. The ending felt a bit rushed, like they had planned something more but had to meet a deadline. This made the last boss feel pretty anticlimactic but the multiple endings themselves were satisfying enough to make up for it. Now I just wish they'd localize Second Evolution on PS4, what the hell is the hold up?

[Played First Departure R on Switch]

Just finished at about 24 hours. I really can’t give this more than two stars. I didn't really enjoy it much, but I didn't totally hate it. I’m honestly just really glad to be done with it, and that makes me kind of sad. (Also, as this is the first game in the series, I tried to keep that in mind and overlook some flaws, but there are just...so many.)

For those who don’t know, the Tales series is my favorite. The Star Ocean team originally worked on Tales of Phantasia, so a lot of Tales elements have ended up in the SO series, like the battle system, the music (same composer), some character design styles, etc. That’s about where the similarities end, though, because the story-telling is just nowhere near as effective or powerful, at least in this installment. The only other SO I’ve played through is Last Hope International, and I liked that one quite a bit. This just fell incredibly flat for me.

My party setup: Other than the required characters (Roddick, Millie, Ilia, Ronyx), I went with Ashlay, Ioshua, Erys, and Pericci. I had a list of the characters that I wanted to use from a while back, so I just went with it without looking into it again. It was mostly that I wanted Ioshua and Erys, so I had to have Ashlay. I used Pericci for a little bit, but my main/final party was Roddick, Ilia, Ioshua, and Erys.

[Also, I'd like to share this character ranking that I happened across while looking something else up, around the time I got Mavelle. I heavily disagree with it, as Mavelle was hot garbage and died immediately in the first fight I used her in (and didn’t really improve until she was replaced with Erys), and Ioshua was taking names with rapid-fire spells. I also very much disagree with their opinion of the magic, as everything freezing when a full-party heal is happening is great. Spells go off pretty quickly, and the damage output was stellar. Erys also came with Raise Dead and has offensive spells as well as healing, so I'm not sure how Millie is in any way better. Erys and Ioshua in combination wrecked, so, opinions…]

The things that I liked:

-The music.

-Character designs.

-Some location designs.

-The overall style of fighting, but not much else about the battles.

-The party AI. Surprisingly effective--great at healing quickly, casting offensive spells, and attacking.

-The skill system...kind of.

The things that annoyed me most/cons:

-Targeting during battle is badddd on auto. Change that shit to semi-auto as fast as you can. There were multiple times where Roddick just ran in a circle around the enemies like 5 times before finally attacking because they were moving.

-Encounter rate is insanely high and annoying. Immediately change that shit when you can via the Scout skill. Three steps and then a fight when you move ridiculously slow on the overworld map is a hard no. There is a LOT of backtracking—like, it’s 75% of the game--and I got super frustrated before I looked up how to lower encounters.

-There's no guard button. I'm not much of a defensive player, so I didn't really miss it, except in cases like the following point…

-Enemies constantly mob around you in the battle circle, even early in the game. You can easily get stuck between two monsters, unable to attack, while they take turns hitting you. Moving around is always essential. You can get out of it by moving, but it’s still pretty ridiculous and means you can easily die in normal monster battles.

-The story was pretty bland. We’re given a setup in the beginning and start on our quest, but from there, the first 10 hours are basically just a recruitment quest for the rest of your party, and very little story. You go back and forth between towns 60,034,095,023 times, and all of it really starts to blend together because there’s no map item to reference as to which dot on the minimap is which town, and you spend an average of 5 minutes in any given town because all you do there is restock items and buy new weapons and armor and move on.

-Arts in battle are super limited, as you can only set one each to L and R. The little pop-up (like in Tales) for item/strategy/escape/symbology doesn’t even let you select an art to use one time during battle. The only character that I had in my party 100% of the time (other than Roddick) was Ilia, and I was in the final dungeon when I realized that she had NOT USED ONE ART THE ENTIRE TIME I’D BEEN PLAYING. You don’t have to set spells for your mages, but apparently you do have to set them for your other physical attackers and not just your controlled one. I had used Mavelle for a bit and set some on her just because I was looking at what she had and left them set, but I never noticed that Ilia wasn’t using anythiiiiinnngggg.

-Battles in the second half of the game just got insanely annoying. Normal monster battles could wreck you for no reason other than that monsters could kill you in two hits like it was nothing. It made no sense. It wasn’t that any of the battles were HARD (as you can actually cancel boss attacks just like they do to you, and spam them to death), but it was so easy to die that I got sick of healing and reviving constantly.

-Dungeons were repetitive and boring.

-Experience is kind of wonky. This isn't necessarily a con. Basically, anyone not in your battle party/in the reserves, gets NO XP. None. Not even a fraction like in some older RPGs. This means if you aren't changing up your party, you get to the end game with four characters in the 60s and four sitting between level 30 and 40. However, this is one way to level quickly in the early game, as you can move all but one or two characters to reserve and the ones who fight get more XP, I guess because it's more challenging. In one of the later dungeons, everyone but Roddick got blasted by something, so when I finished the fight, he got 54k xp instead of like 6k.

I barely did any of the PAs (private actions, which are interactions with your party members in towns, and give you affinity and sometimes other stuff). I would do them when leaving a town occasionally, but I definitely did not add any more backtracking to what I was having to do already. I just wasn't invested. I also did not do the secret dungeon because I never care about those and I definitely didn't for this game.

In short, I was really wanting to play through Tales of Zestiria and Berseria again, but made myself play something out of my backlog first. Gameplay-wise, SO has a lot of similarities to Tales, as I mentioned, so it seemed like a good option. I don't exactly regret playing this, as now I've got another game completed, but I won't be revisiting it, and I'm glad I only spent a day's worth of my time on it.

[Playing on Switch]

I'm kind of burnt out on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 right now. I dunno if picking up another JRPG is the right decision, butttt...

I have this on PSP, and I never completed it. I know I was using a guide but I somehow didn't get one of the characters that I was trying for, and I stopped playing. I really want to be replaying Tales of Zestiria and Berseria right now, but I told myself that if I'm taking a break from XC2, I need to play something in my backlog. SO games have a lot in common with Tales, so here we are.

I'm a few hours in and enjoying it so far.

Not a full review, but some thoughts I had along the way...

Very simplistic but fun battle system. It severely limits the number of moves available, and there's no blocking. I remember SO2 being a little more complicated but that could be nostalgia throwing me off base. Lots of mashing X and occasionally running behind enemies.

There's a little bit of aimless wandering syndrome, but it's a tiny game world so not a huge issue. There was one point in particular where I went one step ahead of where I should have been at (the story made it seem like I could go either place), but upon arriving at point B nothing happened. I had to trudge halfway across the world to point A, where nothing happened except someone telling me to head off to point B. Mrrgrrgrr!

The dialogue/writing was pretty good. Wish there was an option to turn down (or off) voice volume while keeping the music up. I usually play in bed sans headphones, and I'm usually pretty embarrassed by video game voice acting - so I ended up putting the volume really low in general and probably missed out on some good music.

The (lack of) difficulty was my main problem with the game. Do you ever watch Youtube videos and see people destroying super-bosses with 99999 hits and taking 0 damage in games you thought to be fairly challenging? They're always using some brilliantly obscure combination of skills or equipment or party synergy to attain game-breaking power that wouldn't even seem possible on a normal playthrough. Well, that's exactly how I felt playing this game, but I didn't think I was doing anything particularly clever (or grinding extraneously) to achieve those results. The last bosses went down with about a minute of X-pressing each.

Plot was very much standard town/dungeon/town/dungeon fare. Time travel was used but not in an overly compelling or interesting way. If I was making this game, I certainly wouldn't name it Star Ocean. I didn't get the planetary/sci-fi feel I do from a game like Infinite Space. The ending segment was totally out of left field - without spoiling much, a new villain appears from nowhere, and you have to tackle one last massive dungeon to get to him.

There are apparently many paths you can play through the game and there were some obvious decision points. Many characters are either-or (I only know this from perusing message boards after beating it) - I just always kept the characters that wanted to join and followed the most obvious plot path. As such I missed out on a bunch of characters and scenes, but I'm OK with that. Lots of replay here for people who would be interested in that (not me :) )

With all of that fairly negative critique, why did I like it? The leveling-up and item creation and skill systems are crazy addicting. You attribute points to 50+ categories, which affect battle and item creation and more. Tons of fun to play around with and experiment with all of the different options.

I loved Star Ocean 2 for PSX about 15 years ago (wow, that's depressing think about...). Tried SO3 for a little bit on the PS2, never got too far. SO4 is firmly untouched in the backlog. I'm working through my PSP library now, so it'll be a long time before I touch another Star Ocean!