Star Ocean First Departure

Star Ocean is a curious little game with, alas, a fatal flaw that prohibits me from recommending it.

Review of Star Ocean First Departure
by X-34 minus 5R1-6X36



This is one of those combo game/anime deals, in which the cut scenes look as if they come straight out of a mid-grade anime series, and the gameplay bits are peopled with characters who bear a striking resemblance to the Little Twin Stars, if the Little Twin Stars had carried medieval weaponry instead of magical interstellar … cloud-bunnies, or whatever the hell they had. Your characters are cute and big-headed, and they often speak in word balloons that bear ellipses, exclamation points, or, puzzlingly, large drops of water (and not in “crying” scenes, either). They widemouthedly crack up at “jokes” that would, at best, summon a polite, obligatory titter from your aged, proper aunt; they get bizarrely nervous when, for instance, buying clothing for a member of the opposite sex. In other words, in the porting of Star Ocean from a Japanese milieu to an American/western milieu, a sufficient number of the details have been lost, mangled, inverted, or misunderstood in the translation as to make gameplay rather amusing at times – or, potentially, frustrating, if you’d prefer everything to make sense. Everything does not make sense in Star Ocean, however, and I’d suggest you just kind of go with it.

The story is the main thing that makes no sense. You’re shuttled around between so many places and times (see below), and given so many micro- and macro-scale objectives to accomplish, that it’s surpassingly hard to keep in mind which particular mission or goal you may be striving for at any given moment. I suppose this is neither good nor bad; it’s just the way things work in Star Ocean-land.

The game certainly does not lack for ambition. The story takes us through hundreds of years of time (by passing through a Time Gate, of course), a great number of fictional countries with semi-pronounceable names, and from planet to planet (most of which also have semi-pronounceable names) via a Star Trek¬-style beaming apparatus.

Not only that, but the game allows and encourages you to build up your character in a host of fairly complex ways: you can exchange acquired currency (“Fol”) for instantaneous lessons in such disciplines in combat, “knowledge,” and “technical,” all of which have ramifications for your character’s ability to maneuver through the game’s many battles. (I almost added “and challenges” to the end of that sentence, but challenging-ness is not one of Star Ocean’s strong suits.) You can even learn such skills as cooking and painting, all of which come in handy here and there. Or you can choose to use the money you’d spend on those lessons on armor, weaponry, or various provisions and remedies that restore, to different extents, the health points that are so eager to leave your possession. I swear that this game actually has you lose health points for resting, so quickly do they flee from the status bar. (You can also rename your characters – I called mine “Asspant” – even though the other characters will still refer to them by their game-given monikers. I found this disparity sort of amusing.)

As well, you can vary your posse’s attack strategy and distribute skills and devices amongst them in such a way as to reap the greatest benefit. This fairly supple, micro-level tweaking of the characters’ capacities is certainly one of Star Ocean’s strong points, as it makes for rich, customizable gameplay.

The missions are fairly standard: deliver this object to this village, find a boat that’ll take you to this far-off land, rescue your fallen comrade, and so forth. And most of this is interspersed pretty regularly with little battle scenes, in which you can literally wander off the beaten path and find more enemies to slay (if that’s your thing), thereby acquiring more Fol, more experience points, and so forth. My favorite enemies are the fluffy bunnies that, between hops, shoot weird, sharp orange-yellow arrows from their mouths. I don’t mean “arrows” as in the objects you fire from a bow; these are arrows like you find in the “special characters” menu of your word processing program. It’s odd. Star Ocean is an odd game.

Two things – which are interdependent – though, really, severely cripple Star Ocean. The first is the frickin’ interminable amount of uninteresting, rarely informative dialogue that, for some reason, intervenes between the scenes in which you are actually able to do things. Man, these are some chatty characters – and yet 97% of their dialogue is redundant with information you already know, or consists of “…” or “Hm.” And since you cannot skip this stuff altogether (at least, I couldn’t), you’ll find that a solid 30% of the time spent playing Star Ocean is spent gritting teeth during these expository scenes.

Far more troubling than this, though, is the game’s serious lack of save points – this is that fatal flaw I referred to above. No one likes to replay the same levels over and over, especially when the majority constituent of those levels is those godforsaken dialogue scenes. The severe dearth of save points means that you will be retrodding familiar territory again and again. To me, this is pretty unforgivably bad game design.

Compounding this rather serious problem is that, more than once in my playing of the game, I found myself rehashing familiar territory. For you, good readers, this was a punishment I endured bravely. But, then, once my character had reached the point to which I’d advanced earlier, he was slain instantly by the same type of enemy that had earlier been dispatched by a single sword-flick. At times, and for no reason whatsoever, the game just turns on you. These softie bad guys somehow develop Deadly Death Powers or whatever, and you are Twin Star Toast. Aaaaaand then you have to go back to the last save point, which was about 30 minutes of gameplay ago. The frustration at such events is colossal. Arbitrary game-toughening coupled with the lack of save points make Star Ocean a not-very-well-designed-at-all kind of game, even if some of the weirdness and micro-missions are diverting. No, thank you, I’ll be removing the game from the PSP right about now, having played probably less than 20% of it.