Star Ocean: First Departure
A Critical Review by Sky Render

System: PlayStation Portable
Developer: tri-Ace
Publisher: Square Enix
Release Date: 27 December 2007 (Japan), 21 October 2008 (US), 4 November 2008 (Europe)

After the (relatively) roaring success of my Wii Music review, I decided to apply the essentials of my new review style to something a bit more... well, traditional. This time, the episodic nature of this review will be much shorter in delay, with only 15 minutes between postings: long enough for early readers to get through it, while short enough to not make for large amounts of irritated anticipation.

All of these pieces were written at the same time, too (between about 23:00 PST 29 October 2008 and about 2:00 PST 30 October 2008). Since my Star Ocean experience (all 19 hours of it) spanned quite a bit more time than my Wii Music experience did, and because I didn't think to write this critical review of it until I was already 18 hours in, the review is thus a bit less "hands-on" and a bit more "careful retrospective". I consider this review to be highly experimental, for these and other reasons that will become clear shortly. So, that said, let's get cracking.

Part I: My Star Ocean Credentials

Here's where I admit just how biased I am towards the game. How biased am I, you ask? You'll just have to take a look-see.


Part II: The Game in a Nutshell

A summary of the main points of interest of the game. Here I look in detail at the battle engine, at the Item Creation system, and at the basic gameplay outside of those two.


Part III: Subtle Little Nuances

The meat of the review, naturally. This is where I get a bit more in-depth and take a look at what about the game works and what doesn't.


Part IV: Wrapping it Up

So, what's the short of it? Well, here's where to find that. As usual, if you just want the sound-bite breakdown, this is where to look. Just don't go looking for an "out of 10" score or anything, 'cause you won't find one.

NOTE: All images used in this review were originally found at RPGamer.

Let the review/experiment begin...

Part I: My Star Ocean Credentials

When it comes to RPGs, you could call me something of an "old hand". My first RPG experience was Dragon Warrior on NES, and though I had a lapse of RPG play for much of the 1990s, I most certainly was a very dedicated RPG player from 1998 onwards, starting with the PC version of the well-known first PS1 entry to the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy VII. As such, I am definitely both well-informed about RPGs and have a definite bias in their favor. I fully intend to keep this bias in check as best I can, however, for the sake of review integrity. Please call me on it if I make a particularly egregious slip-up.

As for Star Ocean, my experience with the series has centered largely around the PlayStation entry, Star Ocean: The Second Story. To say that I like said PlayStation entry is a bit like saying that outer space is really big, in that it's such a gross understatement that you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more ridiculously inadequte description for something in less than 5 minutes. Star Ocean 2 is my longest played PS1 game, hands down, with over 20 files played and well over 1,000 hours clocked across my many saves. My bias towards Star Ocean 2 borders on the fetishistic, as you may have gathered, which I knew was going to cause some problems in this review. Curbing my SO2 love will be no small task.

In terms of my RPG preferences, I've played just about every kind of RPG there is out there, and tend to favor free-movement 3D action RPGs (which Star Ocean games just happen to be). So again, I have an undeniable bias in favor of the game right there. So you're probably wondering, after all this, what the odds are that I can belt out a low-bias or even no-bias review of this game. That's what this little experiment is largely about. This review is as much for me as it is for you, my readers. If you find that my review becomes overly fanboyish or canonizing, I encourage, nay urge, you to call me on it immediately.

Overall, this review is a huge test of my ability to think critically, because it is far harder to be objective and critical of something you love than it is to be objective and critical of something you merely like, are indifferent to, dislike, or hate. The drive to sway too heavily in one direction or another in this kind of circumstance has scientifically been proven to be almost insurmountable. What I am undertaking here is nothing short of fighting the very nature of humans to not look fairly and justly upon something they hold dear. Wish me luck, I will need it.

Part II: The Game in a Nutshell

Unlike Wii Music, I'm not going to do a direct breakdown of my first few hours with the game, because 1.) that'd be really spoiler-ific, and 2.) RPGs don't really need to have their gameplay explained in that way anyway. So let's begin with the most frequently used part of almost any RPG, the combat system.

Star Ocean: First Departure is a remake of a Super Famicom (aka. Super Nintendo) game simply called "Star Ocean". It's an action RPG with random encounters (ie. in many areas the game arbitrarily throws you into a fight every X number of steps, where X is roughly how long it takes to cross the screen, give or take 20 steps) where combat takes place in real time on a 3D battlefield. You have full control over your movement on the usual planes, but can only actually attack laterally (ie. from the side). It's a style that's present in a number of other action RPGs (such as the Tales series, which was not coincidentally started by the same team as the Star Ocean series; and in 2D form in the Mana series such as Secret of Mana), so you can't particularly say the engine gets points for originality in concept. It can, however, score some points in other areas, as we'll see below.



As for how combat plays out most of the time, I found that for the most part, battles were fairly satisfying. There was a tendency for fights to become little more than "mash X 'til everything dies", though to be fair, a lot of that was my fault for overleveling (an RPG practice where you spend a lot of time making your character(s) stronger than necessary for where you are in a game; usually involves "grinding", or repeating the same few tasks a huge number of times). There's a fairly wide array of techniques you can use in battle, each with its own quirks, and a huge number of playable characters (of which you can recruit up to 8 in any given play-through). So the potential for varied battles is definitely there, though it's equally possible to just powerlevel your way through the game and never really test the battle engine's deeper features.



There are a few quirks to the engine. For example, your AI-controlled allies tend to be a little on the thick side, often running straight into enemy attacks, and in particularly ridiculous situations, even running into area-based attacks all in tight formation to assure that everybody gets hit. This seems to be how the ally AI works in a lot of action RPGs, which begs the question as to why nobody can code a decent AI, but I digress. There's also this infuriating little habit that enemies have of ganging up on one character and going Ides of March on them, leaving that character to inevitably die a horrible, painful death if you don't intervene and basically babysit them (at which point the enemies will usually go and target a different one of your allies for their beloved pincer attack of doom).

That isn't to say that the quirks kill the experience, though. Even with your allies sometimes behaving badly, and with enemies showing a surprising level of strategic thinking, the vast majority of fights won't really end up being all that bad. It can be a serious crapshoot if you'll exit a battle at full health or with your party in tatters in just about any RPG, but for the most part, you won't end up with the latter happening very often in Star Ocean (or the former, for that matter). If you're willing to let it be a part of the challenge factor instead of an irritation, it can actually make the experience fun. Though I admit, that is a hefty order, and not at all reasonable to ask of any player. But Star Ocean asks it of you just the same.



Beyond the combat, there is a mostly-unique system in Star Ocean games called Item Creation. Ostensibly, this lets you create new items from existing items, with a probability of success based off of various skill levels, characters' talents, and what skill-enhancing tools you have (if any). The system works great in theory, but in practice, it can easily break the game's difficulty and make it a walk down Easy Street. That said, you'd have to know how to make the various means of difficulty destruction, which the game is quite happy to not tell you (or indeed, even explain Item Creation's nuances at all for most of the game), so odds are good that you won't break the game on your first time through with obscenely powerful Item Creation options.

Actually, as I mentioned, Item Creation is practically not talked about in-game for Star Ocean, which is quite a heavy mark against the game. The system has a lot of potential to make the gameplay experience better, though the game does an admirable job of not punishing you too badly for ignoring it. Not a perfect job of it, mind you (you'll likely feel like the game hates you at a few points if you don't engage in Item Creation), but a noble effort just the same. I would say, on the whole, that Item Creation was a very ambitious idea with a lot of promise, but alas, poorly implemented and poorly explained. It's functional, but slightly crippled by a lack of exposure to the player and a lack of restraint in what it can do.



Outside of combat and Item Creation, Star Ocean tends to be a fairly bog-standard RPG experience. You wander from plot point to plot point, progressing the story and fighting random encounters, boss monsters (stronger-than-normal enemies that are usually plot-related, but that you fortunately only have to battle once each (usually)), and so forth, with the occasional side-quest and optional character recruitment mission to spice things up. About the only things I have to complain about here are that a few of the plot point triggers are extremely obtuse, and that the plot is so very standard-issue in progression that it feels a little bit formulaic. Though the story is not anything that's been done to death on its own, the progression does not have that benefit going for it. Patience is definitely a trait you'll want going into Star Ocean. Oh yes, and they added voice acting all over the place in the PSP version, which can certainly add to the immersion factor.

Impressions of Star Ocean so Far: The game is not without its issues, but also not without its charms. I personally enjoy the game a lot, but I also have a long history with both RPGs and the game's technical successor (which, incidentally, this PSP remake uses the engine of as its base). I can see the more glaring flaws in the game's engine, but I can also see past them to find a way to enjoy the game. Whether you can or not depends on your own tastes.

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.

Part IV: Wrapping it Up

How does Star Ocean: First Departure weigh in, then? What do I think of it? What do I think others might think of it? Is my bias in its favor giving me unrealistic expectations? The answers to all of these (except the last, as I can't possibly be a fair judge of that) are below.

Personally, I loved SO: First Departure. It was a return to a formula that I loved to bits with its technical sequel, and it gave me the ability to appreciate the origins of said technical sequel's plot points and character developments. Occasional irritations popped up, but I forgave them just because I have a love affair with the game's predecessor that borders on fetishistic (as mentioned before several times). And because the same issues also tend to plague SO2, of course.

But outside of my rose-tinted love affair, what will others think? That's harder to sum up. The issues I forgive are sometimes pretty egregious (such as the occasionally obtuse plot points; I know a gamer with less inherent patience for the game would have given up on the game at a few of them). And I know that the irritations which plague the game are near-constant. I recognize that Star Ocean is not for everyone. It's a game that requires a good deal of forgiveness, and a game that rewards you in strange ways, even for an RPG. Overall, I suspect that die-hard RPG fans will at least be willing to give it a try, but that those outide of the RPG fanbase will almost certainly find the game's flaws to be damning and make it highly (if not totally) inaccessible.

I don't think it's fair to give games some arbitrary score, so what follows is a brief sumamry of the game's strong and weak points in various categories; I leave it to you, the reader, to decide if those strong points are strong enough or weak points weak enough to justify your opinion of the game, whatever it may be. Plus, in the case of Star Ocean, I would be such an unfairly forgiving judge that the numbers would be horribly skewed in the game's favor.


Presentation: Star Ocean presents itself in the style of most RPGs. It's a style that involves a lot of traveling, a lot of combat, and a lot of story scenes, with a noticeable transition between all of these things.

Visuals: Usually the visuals are pretty sharp, though there are a few issues with environments being almost comically static at times. The 3D is right on par with most PS1 RPGs.

Audio: The music is all in orchestral style, with lots of dramatic instrumentation. The sound effects are, for lack of a better term, generically fitting for an RPG.

Learning Curve: For the most part, it's not too steep and not very long. Star Ocean is not a game that takes long to get the hang of.

Challenge: Pretty much up to you, though you might not even realize it. It can be very difficult if you rush through and/or ignore Item Creation, and a total cakewalk if you abuse Item Creation.

Replay Value: There is some in that there's a vast cast of recruitable characters (of which 4 are mandatory and you can only keep 8 total per playthrough), but the difficulty of not knowing how to recruit them without lots of exploration and/or a guide might hamper that lure a bit.

Fun Factor: Now this is just impossible for me to judge fairly. There's a lot of ways to play Star Ocean, and while I personally enjoy the style I play, I can't be sure that others will. Still, if you enjoy action RPGs to some degree, you should be able to find some fun in Star Ocean.


Overall: While not a game for those who dislike RPGs, and not likely to cause any sort of RPGaming epiphany, Star Ocean manages to be interesting pretty much however you approach it. Its flaws are many and often not too big (if very consistently present), so there is the potential there for the experience to drag down on you. But its features can also shine through for particularly determined players and turn it into a very fun experience indeed. It really boils down to whether you think it's worth it or not to put up with the game's shortcomings.

I knew this review wasn't going to generate a lot of responses. Still, I am glad I wrote it. It's unlikely to help many people decide on the game around here, I realize, but it helped me a lot in spite of that, specifically in making sure I had the right approach to critically thinking about more traditional games.

What to review next, though? Hm...