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Star Ocean: First Departure may be a remake, but the odds are good that it’s a remake of a game you’ve never played before. The original Star Ocean was developed in the waning days of the Super Nintendo, and nobody in America had the stomach to publish another huge, expensive RPG at the time. We’ve seen almost every other Star Ocean over here, but not the first one.

A few aspects of this game are still very 16-bit, and not in what most people would consider a good way. Still, it holds up pretty well for something originally conceived more than 10 years ago. This was the game that made fast-moving real-time combat one of its developer’s trademarks – tri-Ace went on to make Valkyrie Profile, among other favorites – and the PSP remake features gorgeous new pre-rendered 3D background graphics. In some ways, it’s actually better than Star Oceans made for vastly more powerful consoles. There’s something to be said for the onward march of technology, but hard drives and Cell processors and massive RAM chips won’t do everything for you.
   
Beam Me Up, Godfrey

First Departure begins much like any other slightly cheesy fantasy RPG. A few precocious kids wander across the bog-standard medieval countryside to find some herb in the nearby mountains that will save their village from a hideous plague. Halfway through that first quest, though, the cast of Star Trek teleports down and invites those kids to take a joyride on their spaceship.

The sudden jump from fantasy to science fiction works a little better than doing things the other way around. Star Ocean 3 started out on the spaceship before crash-landing down on the primitive medieval planet, and it was a little disappointing to go from death rays and warp drive to whacking at monsters with swords. This game manages to build a few entertaining moments around suddenly dropping its medieval heroes in the middle of the far future.

This is not to say that the storytelling doesn’t have its problems, though -- anyone who’s watched a lot of Star Trek, for instance, will find a couple of the game’s key plot devices hauntingly familiar. (The Prime Directive shows up here, albeit under a less snappy name, and so does a thinly made-over version of the Guardian of Forever.) Most of the characters are pretty typical RPG stereotypes, too, although the English voice actors breathe as much life as they can into their dialogue.

Experience Counts

While the prose isn’t incredibly inspired, the script is at least interesting on a structural level. There are a surprising number of forks in the road, and two players could experience two very different quests depending on which optional characters they met and which optional dungeons they explored. What makes Star Ocean fun to play, though is that it’s actually fun to get your hands on it and play. Combat is addictive, and the deep skill development system ties into nearly every other aspect of the game.

Each character begins the adventure with access to a couple of different skills, and you can gradually unlock more new ones in towns around the game world. Building up a given skill usually has an immediate benefit – it might boost one stat or another, or provide an advantage in battles – but different combinations of skills also unlock new “specialties,” which have lots of other uses. The Scouting specialty, for example, unlocked by perfecting the Danger Sense skill, lets you turn the frequency of random encounters up and down. Building up a broad collection of crafting skills, meanwhile, gradually reveals a massive item synthesis system. With enough skills, you can cook up almost any kind of useful item or equipment without having to buy it or hunt for it.

Combat, as mentioned before, takes place in real time. It plays like a simple fighter or 3D brawling game --you have to do all of your planning on the fly, but that’s more than outweighed by the fun of running around and dishing out explosive special attacks at will. The computer controls most of the party, and sometimes it’s difficult to keep aggressive AI characters from charging in and getting themselves killed. There are several options for tweaking the behavior of different party members, though, and some well-timed assistance from the one player-controlled character is usually enough to keep everyone alive.

Hitchhiker’s Guide

While the battle system moves at a mile a minute, most of the rest of the game takes its time. First Departure’s scenario doesn’t drag the player forward very often, which leaves a lot of opportunities to wander around the game world and just enjoy the scenery. Even ordinary towns are crammed with background detail, and every location has a bit of distinctive character to it – they all manage to be memorable in some way or another. The graphics aren’t the only part of the game to benefit from a facelift, too. Motoi Sakuraba’s soundtrack sounds great through post-16-bit hardware.

If the characters and the storyline were a little more involving, this would close in on all-time great status. Considering that it was the first solo production to come from its developer, though, you can only ask so much. (tri-Ace’s writers definitely sharpened up their chops in time for Valkyrie Profile.) Star Ocean: First Departure doesn’t get everything right, but it gets enough right to make it an addictive adventure, and one of the better RPGs on the PSP this fall.

Article Written By: D.F. Smith