Star Ocean: First Departure（スターオーシャン1 ファースト ディパーチャー）

In my never ending quest to make room to buy more useless shit for my overflowing Closet of Shame™, I recently rummaged through my gargantuan PSP collection to see if there was anything I wanted to get rid of when I came across Star Ocean: First Departure.

Let's go clean and organize that game closet!!

Yeah, I'm a hoarder collector so I didn't even know I had this game. (Just kidding, I've been meaning to play this for quite a while now.) So is this a game worth keeping in my awesome, amazing collection of pure gems so hidden I can't even find em? We'll find out! Let's pop that UMD in and play some of that!

Whew! All nice and clean. (*disclaimer: not my closet)

The first thing that struck me about Star Ocean 1 was how similar the menus were to Tales of Phantasia, in other words, a confusing mess of options. Even some of the item names are identical. After exhaustive research (4 minute Google search), it turns out the original SFC version was made by the same team behind Phantasia. It's not quite as bad as Phantasia; at least there's actual menus now instead of hidden behind Rune Bottles but still, there's a lot of shit to digest. Fortunately, most of the stuff can be safely ignored as you mash your way through this "action" RPG.

That's a useful skill cause I ate blackberries like it was crack (sighs only us old folks will get the crackberry reference)

When it comes to skills, the only thing that really matters is to max out determination before anything else that costs more than one point. Since determination skill cuts the cost of other skills, you can max most everything else by the end anyway. Honestly, I didn't bother with most of that specialty or super specialty shit. I didn't write any books, compose music, perform an orchestra, or draw any paintings. I'm a gamer, goddamit, not an artist! All I used were the battle skills, identify for unknown items, and training+kaigan for some extra exp and skill points. There's also a skill that allows you to increase/decrease encounter rate, which makes this the earliest game with adjustable encounter rate I've seen so far.

Do I look like a renaissance man? Oh shit, Caleb's slipping! The Janus coin!

Really, the only part of the game that you might want to plan for is which optional characters you want to take along since you only have space for about half of the recruitable characters. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to assemble my usual harem waifu team due to the fact that some characters require other characters to join so I went with Ashlay (old dude), Perisie (cat girl), Joshua, and Eris (#bae). I had to give up on Marvel and Fear to get Eris but it was worth it as she's my fav character (so far).

Now all I need is for Joshua to get in an "accident"

There's quite a bit of content to enjoy based on which characters you recruit, especially since most of the dialogues are fully voiced in this remake. Given that this is made by the team behind Tales of Phantasia, of course you would expect the characters to interact in the form of skits. In this game, they're called Private Actions and just like Phantasia, they are fun skits where the characters interact and talk about stupid shit like which is better, cats or dogs? I enjoy these skits especially when they're fully voiced as I feel more invested in the characters and hence the game itself.

Not sure why they changed the names, Fear is totally cooler than Phia or whatever

I was quite impressed at the variety of PAs. I imagine your experience would be quite different depending on your combination of characters. For instance, there were a couple funny PAs that involve the cat girl trying to eat the bird man that requires you to have Joshua and Perisie. While I'm not so gung ho as to try replaying the game with every possible combination, I do intend to do another play-through later since I missed out on Fear, Welch, and the dude that looks like Ranma with glasses. Unfortunately, there is no new game+ option and actually finding the PAs is kind of a big pain in the ass and a big time sink.

This PA was actually quite funny as she's MK5 about the present you gave Iria

Unlike the Tales series where you can press a button at any time, you have to go to each individual town and enter it via private action and your party goes into the town separately to do their own shit. Then, you have to FIND your party members scattered at random places in the town to see any skits. If you see a skit, more often than not, you have to exit the town and re-enter it to see the NEXT skit. I probably wasted several hours running through each town looking for all 7 of my party members. Perisie especially was a pain in the ass to find when she's a fucking cat.

Besides the mess of menus and annoyance of finding PAs, the rest of the game is pretty good. I mean, sure, with auto targeting on, the combat is just mashing L+R to train your special moves but whatever. There's also a lot of waiting for long spell animations which don't seem to be skippable. It's all pretty easy to breeze through except of course, they had to add a difficulty spike for the last boss. So that was the only time I even cared about what accessories to use (the ones that halve light and dark damage) and even grinded out a bunch of levels. Fortunately, the ally AI is very good so I just made sure to keep giving my spell casters crack blackberries and they did all the rest.

Whoa, 3D battles! (proceeds to spam all of two buttons)

The part I really appreciated in the remake was the fine attention to details for the environments the likes of which I have not seen since Sora no kiseki. While I did not play the original SFC version, it's clear Square Enix went all out on interior decorating in the remake. I didn't much care for the character design (Ratix especially looks like he has the IQ of a squirrel) but got dayum, with the accent rugs, finely detailed stone stairs, and beautiful shelving carved from the wall, it's like a HGTV porn show.

You'd be surprised how expensive nice rugs are

Most lazy RPGs either reuse textures or even recycle entire shops but oh no, not THIS remake. Every single location is unique and modeled with exquisite detail. Even empty rooms that serve absolutely no purpose has detailed patterns on blankets and posh room dividers with intricate grating.

Who else stared for 2 straight minutes at the amazing stonework on the stairs? Anybody?

I love it when developers put tons of work and polish into little things that ordinary philistine gamers probably don't give two shits about. But hey, if the Japanese dude that worked on the background miraculously happens to read this, I hope he knows that I fully appreciated the effort.

Pfft, that shit is SO last season. I have standards.

Score: 3 hmm time to look into a new credenza out of 5 (30 hours to beat)

Overall, I think Star Ocean 1 is an average good time, at least the remake. Sure, it has some warts, and I didn't even talk about the plot because, well, I just didn't have much to say about it. I did find it ironic that the intro anime reminded me of Xenogears and the last part of the game felt super rushed just like Xenogears. However, to compare the plot would be an injustice as there's just not that much going on in this one. I'm not even sure if the game's intro has anything to do with the plot. I thought the problem was on the Mua continent, I don't remember an entire planet blowing up? Ah well, whatever.

I totally have never seen this before

Anyway, all I'm trying to say is I had fun with the game and that's good enough for me to keep the UMD especially since Nintendo fucking sunk the emuparadise UMD backup battleship. Reserving space in my limited closet space is probably the best endorsement you can get from me. It helped that the music near the end of the game was top notch. I especially liked the Star Wars homage with the John Williams theme that plays right around when you get the force sword. You know, cause Star Wars was still good back then. #troll

The Star Wars influence is strong in this one

The original voiced intro on the SFC version was also a very strong nod to Star Trek and technically I have to give props for adding voiced audio to a SFC game.

Typical misogynistic woman serving coffee. Score: -12 out of 10 (IGN)

Finally, for the obligatory Jhipster commentary, it was really annoying that they decided to change the cast member's names to lame shit like Phia or Mavelle instead of super hero type names such as Fear and Marvel. I bet they wouldn't do that shit today now that Marvel and DC are mainstream Hollywood franchises and not just for the nerds to be ridiculed back in the day (yeah, totally not bitter). ANYWAYS, as usual, the JP voice acting in this remake is way better than the typical anime dub English job so I wholeheartedly suggest playing the OG version. So yeah, Dick Smallberries Jr can just go suck it. Blackberries that is, they're delicious.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely