Star Ocean: First Departure

  When people think of the JRPG genre, the first thing they associate it is with Final Fantasy, and if you’re someone hardcore, Dragon Quest. It’s a bit unfortunate that a lot of good JRPG’s get swamped in the cross fire and never get the praise they deserve. Enix’s Star Ocean was one of these games.

Originally released for the SNES in 1996, this was one of those late games that was never released outside of Japan, and most of the world never got to experience it. Years later many ambitious fan communities were able to re translate and hack the game into English, but playing a SNES game in 2005 didn’t quiet cut it for some fans.


The game’s art is absolutely breath taking

Thankfully, Square Enix realized that in order to progress the Star Ocean series further into the next generation, they’ll need to properly introduce the western gamers to the origins, hence a full remake of the first (and second) Star Ocean were announced for the PSP, and after nearly half a year of its Japanese release, the game has finally been released in the US and Europe and gamers are able to enjoy the game in English for the first time.

To put it bluntly Star Ocean : First Departure is a full remake of the original SNES title, ditching the sprite based graphics, the game now uses high resolution background art static images and all the on screen models are done via clean anime-like sprites. The game’s art style will be familiar to all fans of Square and their PS1 efforts, the only difference being they’re in much crisper quality here. That’s not to say that the graphics are the only thing about the game that were over hauled. The game has received a complete game play over haul which we’ll talk about in a little while. Going above and beyond Square Enix have also added full motion anime cut scenes and voice acting in all the cut scenes.

The game stars a generic JRPG hero type named Roddick, the title being Star Ocean you might have guessed that this is not just any JRPG, even though most of the game does take place in a generic fantasy style world like most JRPG’s do, a good portion of the game also revolves around full on Star Trek style science fiction. At the off-set you start off in a small village on a distant planet called Roark, some events later and you find out that your village and the neighboring towns are being infected by some unknown virus that turns all victims into stone. Now in most JRPG’s, this would be the time where your hero embarks on a journey to find the cure with his friends, but in this game just as your about to do it, lo and behold freaking space men come out of nowhere and abduct you, thus beginning the REAL story of the game.


A mosque in a JRPG ? .. that’s new

Its a big twist on the genre itself, but sadly enough it doesn’t last for long as you return to the generic planet in a short while and spend most of the game time there doing generic quests. But the last third of the game picks up on the more exciting sci fi stuff again and the game ends on a high note. The central part of the game drags on a bit as you have to do a lot of useless trekking across the world. In my opinion the game looses some of its charm here because it dupes the player into thinking that he’s about to start an epic space saga.

Now let’s look at the game play and battle mechanics, as stated above the game is a complete remake, hence the entire battle system of the game has also been revamped. The general game play involves you going from town to town, dungeon to dungeon via a massive over world similar to the PSOne era Final Fantasy games. The towns and dungeons themselves are made up of high resolution backgrounds.

The battles take place in a more modern 3D arena like environments. On the presentation front the game does a good job of keeping the player interested by implementing good pacing, non-existent loading times and just the right amount of random encounters so as not to drag the game or to make it overly simplified. Even for a hand held, the game does a great job of conveying the scope of the area’s by placing you in seemingly massive environments.


You know you suck when a rabbit kicks your ass

The battles take place in a large 3D environment and they’re completely real time, you can move your character freely around the environment and hit the enemies with your weapons or magic spells, you can have as many as 4 players in your active party at once, you will control the "leader" and the remaining three will be AI controlled. Its always good to have at least one healer in the party at all times because the enemies can often unleash massive attacks that will deplete your health immediately.

The game has a good amount of character customization options available, when you level up you gain skill points which you can appoint to your party members and make them specialize in any form of combat as you please. Besides the basic Job class system, the game also has a lot of sub-jobs which act as special characteristics that your party can bring into battle or general skills that might help you locate more treasure items in the environment or even evade the enemies for a longer period of time. There’s a lot of stat building stuff to manage in the game if your a fan of fine tuning your party to your heart’s content, but for general players the system is flexible enough to allow mistakes.

Presentation wise the game does a great job of keeping the player hooked, from beautiful looking environments to solid voice acting which shows how much effort has been put into this game. The story has a lot of cliché moments, but you have to forgive it because its a straight re-telling of a 12 year old story, you might even say this is one of the original cliché stories. The only real gripe that I have with the game is that the traveling across the world map can be agonizingly slow at times, and if you do not have the skills that make sure you run into lesser monsters, you will have random encounters every 6 steps. It can get a tad tedious, but it also makes sure that you never enter a dungeon under leveled. So in a sense it balances out the difficulty of the game.


Seriously, this is one good looking game

Clocking in at 20 hours, the game is a full length RPG crammed onto a portable. Featuring a host of extra’s, dozens of side quests and more hidden characters then your actual game party to unlock, this is one game that will keep you entertained for l long time. Just enough for the English release of the second Ocean game in 2009.

The final verdict is that its a good solid RPG, even though some elements can feel a bit dated at times, there’s still enough good qualities in the game to ignore the bad one’s. I personally recommend this game to every RPG lover who owns a PSP. This is also a great way to get ready for the next proper Star Ocean sequel, Star Ocean IV for the Xbox 360.

Note : Review was originally written before Star Ocean IV's release.