Star Ocean: First Departure (2007)

[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.