Part III: Subtle Little Nuances
Now we get technical: what's the game's real strong points and weak points as you play through? What will you find along the way that might make you want to keep going, and what might make you put it down and never touch the game again? Let's look at Star Ocean: First Departure a bit closer.
To start with, we'll discuss the load times, or more specifically, the near lack of them. Perhaps the fact that the SO2 engine itself was notoriously good about loading things quickly has something to do with it, but SO1 PSP has very few load times overall. The worst load times I experienced felt no more out of place than in SO2 on PS1, which is no small feat given SO2's excellent load times (fortunately, SO1 PSP lacks SO2 PS1's notorious crashing issues that said excellent load times are believed to have caused).
There is one fairly significant irritation with load times, however, and that is when you play music (part of the Item Creation system lets you play songs that enhance various attributes for your characters temporarily). The developers seemed to realize that there was an issue here, and the song you play will not actually take effect until the game is done loading the song and the rest of the menu steps. However, when going to do Item Creation after playing a song (a frequent action once you get the songs that up Item Creation success rates), the game occasionally lags, and unfortunately the songs don't stop temporarily or even slow down to account for it when this happens. Meaning you lose a few precious seconds of time being unable to act while the game loads.
Other than that, however, I cannot complain about the load times. And even the above issue is slightly less of an issue when you consider that Item Creation actions are pretty fast overall. A 20-second song clip can usually last through 5 to 6 Item Creation attempts, which is far better than SO2's Item Creation ever fares.
I mentioned before that you can easily break the game with Item Creation, and I wasn't kidding. Even early on, you can turn relatively inexpensive items into very valuable items and sell them for several times the cost of the ingredients. Ostensibly this problem is dealt with by having high item prices and initially low success rates, but thanks to saving and loading, a patient player can pretty easily build themselves a small fortune in no time. As well, it's ridiculously easy to get yourself top-notch accessories through crafting, including one that literally doubles your attack power when worn. And later, once you gain access to a large number of instruments, you can potentially destroy any semblance of challenge by building up an arsenal of insanely powerful weapons, easily leveling up well beyond what the game expects of you, and launching your cashflow into the millions.
All that said, it's entirely in your hands if you want to break the game like that. There's potential either way for fun or frustration, titilation or tedium, and it all comes down to what you enjoy more: a challenging experience or a cakewalk where all the damage numbers to your enemies are ludicrously huge. I personally enjoy breaking the game, and get immense satisfaction from seeing my party at levels approaching 200 (oh yeah, Star Ocean games have a level limit of 255; amusingly high when you never need to go higher than level 60 or so). But then, I have very odd tastes in RPGs, too, thanks to my extensive history with them.
So let's talk briefly about the music and visuals, as they do have at least some importance in an RPG. Musically, the game has taken a page from its sequel and had all of its tunes redone in slightly echo-happy orchestral style, which I personally think fits it well enough. There are actually a few incidental pieces that the game "borrows" from SO2 (read: liberally and shamelessly steals), such as the inn theme. Sound effects are also largely ripped wholesale from SO2, which is good for nostalgia and really doesn't hurt things too badly if you're not into nostalgia since they're not really bad sounds at all.
Graphically, again, the game takes a page out of Star Ocean 2's book and does up most of its environments in pre-rendered 2D goodness. Unlike SO2, however, this feels very forced and unnatural, mostly because the game was originally designed around tile-based environments (meaning that there are a huge number of screen transitions everywhere you go, and some of the dungeons suffer from very same-y appearance from screen to screen). Also, this is a bit of an oddity that the game developers somehow either missed or decided didn't matter: none of the water in any 2D rendered area is animated. This gets particularly amusing when the water is shown to be a raging torrent, complete with background flowing water sounds, yet it's clearly just a pre-rendered still image of water that's not doing anything. It doesn't really make the game worse, but it can hurt your immersion into the experience.
In terms of what 3D is present, the game is functional, and looks (you know what's coming) a lot like Star Ocean 2. Unfortunately, Star Ocean originally had no separate world map, meaning that it can get pretty hard at times to find some things when before you just had to take a side-path to locate them. There are areas you can enter on the world map that have no indicators on the map itself of their existence, a huge design flaw that can potentially kill your experience with the game midway through it if you don't know about it. This issue aside, however, I can't really complain as the 3D visuals do their job, even if the developers had some issues doing theirs in giving the game's world map a 3D makeover.
And now for some more brief summaries. The out-of-combat menu system is functional, if irritating at times (such as being unable to look at your full item list or really custom-sort things beyond alphabetical/order of obtaining options). The battle menu looks like it was taken straight from Secret of Mana, which in retrospect it just may have been (Star Ocean originally appeared on the Super Famicom, as did Secret of Mana, with the former coming out 4 years after the latter). Sometimes the plot feels like it's jumping about wildly with no cues, but this only happens a few times. And the voice acting, while not the best in the industry, is quite passable.
Lasting Impressions: Star Ocean holds up fairly well in my book, but I know it has some definite issues that can and probably will turn a few players off. I was willing to overlook those issues in favor of the parts of the game that I liked, however.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
