This game is exactly what I would call a love hate relationship; there’s just so much that I enjoyed and about an equal amount that flopped or straight up demotivated me from continuing.

For starters, this remaster of the original Star Ocean (Super Famicom) does wonders to the presentation of the game adding a sort of PS1-esque visual sense reminiscent of Star Ocean the Second Story. The pixelated character sprites set against prerendered backgrounds was neat, but the real shining factor was how the combat looked aka my favorite aspect of the game.

The battle system is fast paced with easy controls and a fun ability to choose a single character to control manually while the other three party members could have tactics set, altering the way the AI controlled their abilities and movement. It’s sort of a precursor to how FFVIIR handles its battle system and overall I looked forward to the battles… sometimes. Unfortunately the random encounter rate is astronomically high and gets extremely annoying while trying to traverse dungeons, so there’s that.

The skill point system is pretty innovative, but can also curse you if you don’t upgrade certain skills wisely. It’s easy to abuse how this system works by upgrading, for example, your Determination skill for each character, that way every single other skill they can learn requires less skill points to obtain. I restarted my first save because I blew all of my skill points up to level 10 or so unknown to the fact that Determination existed, so that was really fun…

Later on in the game when you get to the Silvalant Continent, the difficulty spike in random encounter enemies is INSANE. I was breezing my way through 15-20ish hours of gameplay and the instant I set foot outside I was getting demolished by the enemies. Through hours of level grinding and careful skill point distribution, I managed to get ahold of my party and continued on with the game, but that brutal jump in difficulty seriously made me question finishing the game or not.

Just before the end game stretch to the Demon World, I spent a whole day delving into Star Ocean’s specialty and super specialty system, which I slept on heavily throughout most of my playthrough. This is where I started to enjoy the overall experience more, and where the fun really began. Level up your main party’s skills so that they learn the abilities to play and compose music so you get Orchestra. Then make sure you level up more skills so your characters are proficient in customizing weapons and crafting new armor/accessories. With this you can have Orchestra play in the background to greatly increase the success rate of performing your specialties and completely break the game by obtaining ridiculously overpowered pieces of equipment.

With that, the remainder of Star Ocean FDR was a walk in the park and the final bosses all perished to me in mere seconds :)

If you couldn’t already tell, the gameplay systems and their implementation in battle is by far the best this game has to offer. Story wise it’s extraordinarily bland. I liked all the characters the game had and the ability to recruit certain ones while being locked out of others adds to the replayability. The Private Action scenes too were enjoyable and gave me lots of laughs with the interactions between party members, but main story wise it’s nothing to write home about.

At the end of it all, I’m still super glad I gave this title a shot. I tackled the learning curve of Star Ocean’s ingenuity and gained not just understanding for the importance of its series defining gameplay systems, but also a thirst to explore what other titles come after First Departure.

Great JRPG with strong fundamentals

I bounced hard back and forth between loving and hating the combat system, I think it's awesome that you can basically buffer pause and micromanage your party members but some fights feel like they demand you to do that really well. Maybe I'm just bad at the game though lul
Very fun and doesn't overstay its welcome

They could have done a lot more with the story but it's decent for its time, also the backgrounds are so breathtakingly pretty that I didn't mind the lack of nuance in the plot

Basic JRPG that presents some neat ideas and mechanics but unfortunately doesn't live up to the ambitions of its title.
+ extensive skill system that enriches the leveling process with considerable customization possibilities
+ great replayability due to exclusive character recruitments and a reasonably short main story
+ beautifully distinct cities
+ entertaining albeit superficial cast helped by good voice acting
- trivial combat excluding a few arbitrarily strong enemies
- largely generic fantasy setting in spite of the sci-fi premise
- very straightforward narrative with jarring cuts and a questionable final arc
- weak magic with obnoxiously interruptive animations
- no explanation whatsoever for most gameplay systems
- insane amounts of backtracking and convoluted dungeons made worse by the high encounter rate

A lot of things about this game are almost good.

The story is almost an interesting biological warfare space story, until that plot becomes an afterthought.

The characters, both optional and mandatory, are almost good until you realize that even after doing all a character's PAs (read: extra character building scenes) and viewing their character ending scene, most of the characters remain incredibly undeveloped and shallow. Ilia and Millie fall prey to this same issue, but I ended the game liking those two characters well enough, so it's not all bad.

The gameplay is almost good until you realize there's no manual battle setting, so once you press the attack button your character will chase an enemy around the field until they finally line up directly in front of or behind said enemy. The difficulty also fluctuates wildly, and there are several ways to totally break game balance and become significantly overlevelled if you choose to do so.

And the last thing I'll talk about here, although there're plenty of other aspects that fit the almost good ticket, is the Specialty system. I really, really like the concept of this. Essentially there are like 10-15 specialty skills that range from everything to creating and performing music, to pickpocketing NPCs, etc etc. And it's almost so cool! Unfortunately only a few of these are useful and some shouldn't even be used as they'll decrease your party member's affection ratings, potentially ruining your endings without warning you you'll do so.

All these almost good things--combined with a few strictly bad ones like the constant backtracking which only gets worse if you want to see all the PAs--land Star Ocean First Departure R somewhere just on the border of not being worth playing.

If you're looking at this as your first Star Ocean game, I sincerely hope you'll start with a different title instead. First Departure might be worth playing once you're a fan who wants to be able to say they played/beat the whole series, but it won't win over anybody trying to get into the series for the first time.

First Star Ocean I played, it's very okay.
I would rate it lower if I hadn't used a guide because of how obtuse all the systems in this game are. 80% of the mechanics are things that you hear about from NPCs, but it doesn't get logged in any menu, so you can't double check unless you pull up a guide or traverse the world talking to every person until you find the guy that told you what playing the flute did.

The story and the soundtrack are cool, and I did have some fun after spending two hours flipping through a guide to learn what most of the menus did. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone though.

I suppose it’s an okay game. A lot of the plot is barebones and padded out but the Private Actions make up for it for fun character interactions. The combat is ultimately simple but there’s a surprising amount of depth with item crafting and creation skills. However, the severe lack of quality of life and bloated optional characters really prevents SO1 from being truly enjoyable.

First of all, I adore the overall graphics and looks. With First Departure using the SO2 engine with new portrait art from Katsumi Enami (who has done artwork for SO4 and the Trails series as examples) and new Japanese voice acting from the original cast back in 1996. The overall aesthetic for SO1 feels like an in-between from an upscaled PS1 game and a modern 2D indie game. Even if the new character portraits based on the original SNES game do not match with the First Departure sprites and anime cutscenes.

SO1 starts off very promising, the first hour or 2 features the four main characters, Roddick, Millie, Ronyx, and Illa traveling back in time 300 years to slay a demon lord. In order to obtain a cure for a spreading pandemic on the planet of Roak. Unfortunately, that main focus quickly begins to lose a lot of focus and will be at the backburner for a while in favor of introducing optional characters and the main characters resolving problems self-contained in the past. The last 15% of the game picks up a ton of momentum again with the plot. But sadly, everything else in between felt like padded filler that had little to do with the original goal and mainly revolved around the optional characters. Even if some of their stories were quite decent.

The Private Action talk mechanic is arguably the best part of the game and gave the character more personality and depth than anything the main plot could have managed to do. Every Time you’re in a town, you will be given the opportunity to let the party branch out and do their own thing. During this time, you can engage in conversations (if certain conditions are met) that reveal more information about the characters and the relationship will develop even further. The PAs are usually very fun and lighthearted and because of this. While I personally didn’t get too attached with anybody, ultimately every single character (from what I had) is very likable (Even if I feel like Welch only exists just to annoy the characters).

However, SO1 suffers a very “too many cooks in the kitchen” issue due to the number of optional characters you can recruit but the limited amount of space you have for recruitments. While this may be a pro to some, it’s unappealing to others due to the requirements of multiple playthroughs to recruit every character and see their lines. Not to mention, the optional characters barely exist in the main plot, even Millie hardly gets any lines during main plot events and she is supposed to be a main character. Optional characters can have a shining moment in the main plot depending on the character and their situation. But the majority of the time just features everyone in silence while Roynx, Roddick, and Illa do the majority of the talking. Creating an awkward feeling that everyone else is physically there but sits in silence. Personally, sometimes I wonder if the game would have better focus and interaction if optional characters just didn’t exist and instead have a predetermined party of the main four, Ashley, Ioshua, Mavelle, and Erys.

Combat overall functions fine as an action RPG with melee and symbology (the series’ magic system) spells. While it can get very button mashy with just only 2 buttons for special arts. It works with its simplicity. Although the escape mechanic leaves a lot to desire due to its slowness. However, the real shining gem in the gameplay is the skill and item creation. Every time you level up a character, they get skill points that can be spent on skills to improve combat. Such as reduced spell casting time or increased movement speed, or skills to improve stats and skills that can help form item creation abilities and specialties. With item creation skills such as crafting, customization, and alchemy, the possibilities for upgrading armor and weapons as well as creating different items opens up. The characters can also learn specialties for different gameplay functions such as getting more skill points, writing books to increase affection levels, and increasing enemy encounter rates.

While SO1 is at its best gameplay-wise with item creation, the game suffers a lot from the overall quality of life. I do understand this is a game from 1996 that was later remade in 2007, but I believe Square Enix could have done more to update First Departure in the remastered version. From constant enemy encounters every 15 seconds if you’re not at a town and ultimately becoming half of the game’s length, to the inability of saving the game at any time, to tons of backtracking all across the world map for the main plot and Private Actions events, to confusing and maze-like town and dungeon layouts with no maps. On top of SO1’s failure of explaining how any of how the game works or any clear indication on where you need to go next, it’s next to impossible to complete SO1 without a guide. Because of how poorly designed SO1 is, it ultimately became a chore to play through the game near the end because constant enemies just get in the way of what you want to do next. Half of these issues would be resolved if Square Enix put in more effort into the remastered version such as more detailed maps at all times, reduced enemy encounters, and an indicator telling the party where to go next to progress the story. Even if not everything could be resolved, unlike SO1 was completely remade once again.

Star Ocean First Departure could be a very solid game with likable, written-out characters, a focused story with a strong start and finish, and an in-depth item creation system. However, the game’s consistent need to be bloated and padded out with underdeveloped optional characters, filtered main plot events, and a lack of quality of life ultimately hurt the game a lot. If First Departure was just half of the length, not much would be left out at all considering you spent more time fighting over and over again than doing anything meaningful that added to the characters and plot. If you want to see how Star Ocean began as a series or want to play every game in the series, then I think a single playthrough might be okay. However, I honestly have a hard time recommending this game to anyone, let alone recommending to play it multiple times. First Departure just may be the most average game I have ever played in my life.

JRPGs are a genre that is divisive in part because it has some built in give and take. The often excessive length makes you care more for the characters, the world and the story being told. The simple mechanics provide a very low skill floor, but there's often room to display mastery.
First Departure R kinda turns all of that on its head.
The 20ish hour campaign has about 20 minutes total of character development and story combined. It's full of complex systems that don't get explained in the least, are extremely prone to failure(love that even a skill that you have leveled up to 10 on a character that has specific talents for it still fails like 30% of the time), and yet the gameplay never goes beyond mashing X and hoping the AI companions don't act too stupid.
Both the length/story problem is massively exacerbated by the fact at least a third of the game is backtracking, and yet you're expected to keep on leveling up as if you're climbing a progression curve. If you don't, you get stat checked into oblivion.
I eventually did a cheese quick level strat and the latter half of the game was mostly a breeze, despite continuing to be annoying(worth saying that the encounter rate is ridiculous, even with the Lv10 Scouting skill lowering encounters it's still like 3 a screen).
Another hilariously frustrating thing is how some enemies have movement skills that make them effectively impossible to hit, so there's a bunch of battles in which my option was to trigger the 10sec long escape function or take the gamble and spam X and watch as my entire party chases around the enemy and hope that turns out quicker. Since I'm a stubborn idiot I almost always did the latter... It almost never turned out quicker.
Overall... It's not a good experience. If it wasn't for the level strat I'd probably have dropped this, and it made me commit a major JRPG sin - knowingly skipping sidequests.

This game is very neat and has a lot of interesting ideas, but it has some problems. The gameplay shifts between braindead and annoying. All you really do is mash and grinding can solve any wall you hit.

The skill system is really unique, being able to train people to fulfil roles outside of combat. I do think there are tons of nitpicks you could get into with it. For example, if you get someone with the customization skill, they can only customise the weapon they use, which can be really annoying, especially when your party is mostly using different weapon types. Meaning, you would need to give multiple people the customization skill to get party-wide value out of it.

I love and also despise the limited party gimmick, I think it's a cool idea to personalise your experience and encourage replays. But it's the worst feeling when you see a new character that you think looks cool but you have a full party, so you're screwed. (BTW my party was Roddick, Milie, Ilia, Ronyx, Cyuss, Ioshua, Mavelle, and Pericci)

Private actions are, again, a cool idea that could have been executed better. The issue is that it is handled in a very inconvenient way. You can only view one of the unquie party interactions per activation of a private action, meaning that you have to repeatedly go in and out of the town repeatedly to see them all. Also, when you are in a private action, you cannot rest at an inn or leave a town via ship, nor can you regroup the party without leaving a town.

The story is fairly bare bones; you never feel the presence of an antagonist, and there are no recurring villains, which is disappointing. What carries the game is the characters you have in your party, because this game has limited party slots, which makes seeing party members interact interesting because you are seeing something you couldn't see if you made a different choice. I do wish there was more character development, as Ronyx and Ilia are the only ones I consider fully fleshed out, at least in my party.

I do wish this game had more sci-fi stuff because with a name like Star Ocean and the first couple hours, I expected more. But in truth, Star Ocean is almost pure fantasy for 90% of it.

2 is probably a bit harsh but man, all I can really think of in the end is negatives. The battle system is irritating button mashing, there is no sense of balance in the game, the arranged music is piss weak, the whole Private Actions system is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but is actually a pain, and the game, while short, feels both like it skips over a load of stuff while making you backtrack more than it should. Encounter rate's too high too, and the final dungeon was terrible.

Also I didn't need the credits twice.

I really like this game!

First off, this is an old-school JRPG. It's a really well done PS4 remaster of the PSP version from years ago, which itself was a remake of the SNES classic. This means there are a lot of things from old school JRPGs that will probably turn off newer players, such as random battles (lots of them!) and backtracking. Also, unlike most games with random battles, there's no good way to turn them off. There's one character you can get late who can turn them off in the world map, but you can only lower the rate in dungeons.

That said, this game is still great for anyone who grew up playing NES/SNES JRPGs. The redone pixel sprites look great, the voice acting is better than expected, and the story is surprisingly good, although you'll roll your eyes at some of the lines. I also really liked most of the characters.

The best part of this game, though, is the intricate crafting and skill system. It's really exciting when you unlock something new, and the game is pretty easy to break (in a fun way) if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) even breaking the game means you can still die pretty easily in the postgame dungeon if you aren't careful.

I really, really hope we get a localization of the second PSP game remaster!