It took me a few decades to finally play Star Ocean, while it was certainly not the scrappy underdog upset that Tri-Ace was hoping it would be after the founders left Namco when Tales of Phantasia was completed, what they did create was a great little JRPG that serves as a fun time provided you’re willing to embrace it mechanically.
Given this game was made by several former members of Namco’s wolf team (now known as tales studio), there will be comparisons to Tales of Phantasia throughout this review. Star Ocean has always been Tales main competitor and both series have taken influences from each other over the decades, so I’ll clarify the differences as I make them.
I’d like to get the story out of the way first because it will not be the reason anyone would want to play this, or replay it. While the game opens with a really cool scene on a star ship bridge introducing us to the main heroic faction, and has potential for a contrast in societal advancements with the sci-fi Earthlings and the medieval Roakians, both of those ideas are barely touched upon.
95% of the story takes place on Roak which has a traditional medieval fantasy setting, the earthlings that join you adopt clothing and weapons from Roak and I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting they are from a society over 1000 years more advanced, let alone that there was a third party at the start of the game manipulating the Earth Federation and Lezonia into fighting each other while they prepared an invasion force.
The latter is hilariously revealed in the first 45 minutes of the game, where the third party reveals its self during negotiations. It feels as if the developers really had no idea how to write this third party naturally into the story and forced this reveal way to early, so they would have an excuse to bring them back later. And that is exactly what happens, After finding your plot macguffin and curing the plague from the bio weapon that was dropped on Roak, it’s as if the writers suddenly realized “oh shit we should probably wrap up that staged war plot point that kicked off the adventure”.
When you meet the man who was responsible for setting the events in motion, his motives are as contrived as the reintroduction of the faction. He wants to destroy the Human race and the Federation because they never came to recover his people after being displaced by a teleportation accident, and outright lies about the Federation being authoritarian as justification. After the party simply tells him “No lol”, he’s killed, you say good bye to your party again, and the game just ends there.
This could have been a decent plot point if there was any indication of it happening over the course of the game, but there is zero hints that his people were displaced. Even when the party discovers the research outpost late game when tracking down patient zero, the recording the party finds only shows one tribe being displaced, with zero hints or indications at a hidden truth. It’s almost laughable at how contrived the last stretch of the plot is.
As for the plague, it’s only really discussed at the start when Ratix’s village is affected and his best friend is infected. And when the party heads back in the past to find patient zero, there is zero mention of the plague up until Ratix and Ilia reunite with Ronix and Milly, which is the 3/4s mark of the story. From then on then it’s only sparingly mentioned when the party has to track down shards of a device to open a door and finally brought back to forefront when they get to research station and find patient zero. The majority of the plot involves Ratix and Ilia meandering around the continents and solving everyday problems for the citizens, this kind of padding would be fine if the main point of the journey was addressed more frequently, but it isn’t and it comes off as lazy, hackneyed story telling. The spine of the plot is there, but the developers do the bare minimum and rely heavily on filler.
One area of the plot that does have some effort though is the digs at Tales of Phantasia. It’s clear that Tri-Ace wanted to vent some frustrations at namco and there’s some very funny subversions of that games characters and plot scattered throughout.
Dorne for example looks very similar to Phantasia’s MC Cress Albane, and him turning into stone and becoming permanently unplayable 20 minutes in comes off as a more than subtle fuck you which had me laughing. The subversion of one of Phantasia’s most powerful moments, escaping from the jail thanks to an old woman who’s heart gives out after she steals a key for you, had me dying. As in this game instead of an old woman it’s an 18 year old cat girl with massive breasts wearing a skin tight leotard, who you can later recruit as a party member if you wish.
These spiteful subversions do elevate the story a little more, but they don’t save the terribly lazy writing and tacked on climax.
You also have private actions, which are fun little diversion scenes that add ancillary character development that does help make the cast feel less flat, and can even change the bonus scenes after the ending. I recommend doing these if the main plot is boring you to sleep, it’s a band aid solution for lazy writing, but the mechanic and story potential is big and I can only hope it gets better in the sequels.
Aside from Ratix, Millie, Ronnix and Illia, all other party members are optional recruits. Though the only two worth getting are Phia and Joshua, as the other 6 are just weaker or slower melee fighters. Unless you really want to engage with private actions and get certain bonus scenes, I would only get the two I recommended.
What will motivate you to play the game is the excellent team building and skill system.
Star Ocean punishes players who try and just brute force their way through and avoid the rpg mechanics. One of the best rewards the game provides is that when you are at a high enough level, a mook’s physical attacks will cause no damage to you, this incentivizes you to grind, but not over grind and keeps the pacing of the game brisk.
Though once you learn the skill system, you may actually be willing to grind as much as you wish due to how well designed it is. By studying character talents, you can create secondary classes for great benefits during field exploration, like making one character a chef who can cook dishes to heal HP and MP, another an author that can write books to level up other skills for free up to rank 7, a bird keeper who can deliver items you’ve purchased, a scouting ability that not only lets you dash in the field and lower or raise the encounter rate, etc.
Many of these secondary professions also provide the biggest stat boosts, around 40% higher than just leveling up, so even if your character doesn’t have the correct talent to unlock the vocation, it’s still worth it for a melee fighter with no talent for cooking to level up the stat as it provides high ATK boosts. This reassures the player that no skill points ever feel wasted, and since they cap out at 999 (And you run up to this total quickly), you always be investing SP and reaping the benefits. I was incredibly impressed at how well designed this system was, it was genuinely one of the most fun team building experiences I’ve had in a game in quite a while. The insane power creep and being able to 7-12 shot bosses was incredibly empowering.
In regards to the battles themselves, they generally feel and play a bit better compared to how they were in Tales of Phantasia. In Star Ocean you are presented with a zoomed out view of the map that shows every enemy on screen. Unlike Phantasia however, your character will not reset their positions after selecting an action, and will stay at an enemies position until you select another one. You will have access to different techs depending on your distance. This greatly discourages mashing the attack command when under leveled and forces the player to weigh the risks of executing a powerful, but slower up close special, or a weaker ranged one that while less damaging, presses an enemy back. It’s a simple, brilliant way of adding depth while avoiding bloat.
Spells also feel and function much better visually this time. In Phantasia the camera had a bad habit of jerking back and forth to the caster, interrupting combat and giving it a greatly uneven feel at many points. This issue is not present here. The full view of the battlefield means all you’ll get is a brief darkening of the screen and then a quick cast, it’s great that Tri-Ace took the care to make sure that the gameplay you’ll be spending most of your time on looks and feels mostly great to engage with.
I say mostly because the combat does have some glaring flaws that hold it back from being potentially the best ARPG on the SNES. One of the biggest issues is that when switching from Ratix to another character, Ratix has no AI. This means there is zero reason to even bother switching, since not only do the skills and party AI mostly cover for this blunder, but Ratix will also be your best DPS anyway.
While party AI is generally great, there are some annoyances that you’ll have to mitigate. The biggest annoyance is that mages like Ronnix and Joshua have no way to discern if a spell is causing damage or healing an enemy. If a spell like earthquake for example, heals an enemy, your mage will think that big numbers will always indicate damage, and will continue to cast the same spell, prolonging fights. If it wasn’t for your melee fighters dishing out so much damage at a rate much faster than your mages can cast, this could be far more infuriating.
Thankfully, you can turn the offending spells off in the options, and while this oversight is infuriating, being able to lock it out temporarily helps immensely.
Your melee fighters are mostly very aggressive when fighting mobs, until there’s only one left, when that happens, 90% of the time they’ll just stand there and do nothing while Ratix cleans up. This feels like some blatant padding from Tri-Ace, as enemies have a lot of HP to balance out how fast your melee fighters dish out damage and killing one solo will take three times as long.
The last major issue is that due to how many enemies you’ll be fighting, you’ll be forced to have three melee fighters and one mage in order to divide and conquer, and protect your spell caster from being flanked. This means you’ll need to have Joshua as your mage since he has both white and black magic at his disposal, and his massive MP pool makes him invaluable as a sniper. You’ll also want Phia as one of your melee fighters, as her dual knives deal twice as much damage as other melee fighters (they balance this out by giving her much lower hp, lower Def, and longer startup for techs), giving you essentially five party members on the field instead of four.
When it comes to level design, Star ocean is mostly great. While towns are generally pretty meh, with most of the sea ports sharing the same layouts, this can’t be said for the cool over world and excellent dungeons.
Unlike other RPGs on the system, Star Oceans over world is more of a series of long hallway dungeons with several branching paths to find treasure. While getting lost is almost never an issue, due to the branches being very short, the chests you’ll find don’t yield very good rewards, mostly being berries you can buy at every shop. I appreciate that the effort for the branching is there however, mediocre rewards aside.
Star Ocean’s dungeons are excellent. Given they’re massive labyrinths that will wipe your party if you’ve been brute forcing, you’ll greatly appreciate the physical immunity from grinding here, and tanking through encounters while exploring feels very empowering. Each dungeon has an interesting gimmick, like using flint to light explosives, pressing switches in a certain pattern, or being lent end game equipment to clear out the place as fast as possible. This gives every one of them a unique identity and keeps of each of them feeling fresh.
For certain dungeons that the games story railroads you into, the devs through you a bone and provide healing statues and a save point in the first room, letting you safely grind and bring yourself up to speed if you need to, which is a fantastic failsafe for this type of error that someone is guaranteed to make, while not coming off as condescending.
Unfortunately you will have to backtrack constantly over the course of the game. And while the game does try and mitigate this with fast travel to port towns late game, you’ll still have to spend 15-20 minutes hoofing it across each continent to get the shards you need for the penultimate dungeon.
I saved talking about the crafting system till now because it’s generally pointless, While the equipment you get will be stronger than what you can find and buy naturally, end game equipment and stat boosts from skills make you more than strong enough to kill bosses in 7-12 hits, and it you’ll forget it’s even there unless you go out of your way to use it.
Graphically, Star Ocean is one of the best looking games on the Snes. Map tiles show incredible detail, like individual grooves in wood, elevated juts in rock faces, rusted metal in water etc. Dungeons have some gorgeous fog effects and transparency. Lighting has intricate details like shadows bending and refracting, and Tree leaves having great looking shadows. Even the UI is no slouch here, having a ton of style and personality, with a clean, metallic look and an embossed brush steel border.
Each characters attack animations have a significant weighty feel to them, with each hit producing just the right amount of hit stun and screen shake. Spells draw just the right amount of attention when casted, with gorgeous particle effects and details like glowing cracks in meteors, jagged shaved edges on ice crystals, etc.
The optimization is great 90% of the time, but the frame rate can take a massive dip to the high 20s when several spells are casted one after another. This becomes more frequent later in the game, when mobs are plastered with mages.
Star Oceans music became one of my favorite Motoi Sakuraba scores. For Achieve is a technical marvel from a production standpoint, with the use of woodwind instruments pushing the Snes audio chip to its limits. Dancing Sword’s horn synths give each boss fight a great sense of dread. New world is one the best over world themes he’s ever produced. With some high quality trumpets that the majority of Snes games could never dream of giving navigation an epic, immersive atmosphere.
The game also has some minimal voice acting, and while it only plays during battles, it’s impressive at just how many lines Tri-Ace was able to fit on the cart, with only minimal loss in quality. Many high profile voice actors also lend their talents to the game, like Nobuyuki Hiyama giving Josh a cool and collected personality befitting of a mage, Hiro Yuuki perfectly fitting Ratix as the Shonen hero etc.
If you’re willing to deal with a poorly underwritten story, and a lot of tedious backtracking, Star Ocean is well worth the time invested thanks to it’s fantastic team building, solid battle system, great dungeons, memorable ost, and fantastic visuals. While it does shoot its self in the foot with some major blunders, Tri-Ace’s first game is worth a look at in spite of them.
8/10.
Given this game was made by several former members of Namco’s wolf team (now known as tales studio), there will be comparisons to Tales of Phantasia throughout this review. Star Ocean has always been Tales main competitor and both series have taken influences from each other over the decades, so I’ll clarify the differences as I make them.
I’d like to get the story out of the way first because it will not be the reason anyone would want to play this, or replay it. While the game opens with a really cool scene on a star ship bridge introducing us to the main heroic faction, and has potential for a contrast in societal advancements with the sci-fi Earthlings and the medieval Roakians, both of those ideas are barely touched upon.
95% of the story takes place on Roak which has a traditional medieval fantasy setting, the earthlings that join you adopt clothing and weapons from Roak and I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting they are from a society over 1000 years more advanced, let alone that there was a third party at the start of the game manipulating the Earth Federation and Lezonia into fighting each other while they prepared an invasion force.
The latter is hilariously revealed in the first 45 minutes of the game, where the third party reveals its self during negotiations. It feels as if the developers really had no idea how to write this third party naturally into the story and forced this reveal way to early, so they would have an excuse to bring them back later. And that is exactly what happens, After finding your plot macguffin and curing the plague from the bio weapon that was dropped on Roak, it’s as if the writers suddenly realized “oh shit we should probably wrap up that staged war plot point that kicked off the adventure”.
When you meet the man who was responsible for setting the events in motion, his motives are as contrived as the reintroduction of the faction. He wants to destroy the Human race and the Federation because they never came to recover his people after being displaced by a teleportation accident, and outright lies about the Federation being authoritarian as justification. After the party simply tells him “No lol”, he’s killed, you say good bye to your party again, and the game just ends there.
This could have been a decent plot point if there was any indication of it happening over the course of the game, but there is zero hints that his people were displaced. Even when the party discovers the research outpost late game when tracking down patient zero, the recording the party finds only shows one tribe being displaced, with zero hints or indications at a hidden truth. It’s almost laughable at how contrived the last stretch of the plot is.
As for the plague, it’s only really discussed at the start when Ratix’s village is affected and his best friend is infected. And when the party heads back in the past to find patient zero, there is zero mention of the plague up until Ratix and Ilia reunite with Ronix and Milly, which is the 3/4s mark of the story. From then on then it’s only sparingly mentioned when the party has to track down shards of a device to open a door and finally brought back to forefront when they get to research station and find patient zero. The majority of the plot involves Ratix and Ilia meandering around the continents and solving everyday problems for the citizens, this kind of padding would be fine if the main point of the journey was addressed more frequently, but it isn’t and it comes off as lazy, hackneyed story telling. The spine of the plot is there, but the developers do the bare minimum and rely heavily on filler.
One area of the plot that does have some effort though is the digs at Tales of Phantasia. It’s clear that Tri-Ace wanted to vent some frustrations at namco and there’s some very funny subversions of that games characters and plot scattered throughout.
Dorne for example looks very similar to Phantasia’s MC Cress Albane, and him turning into stone and becoming permanently unplayable 20 minutes in comes off as a more than subtle fuck you which had me laughing. The subversion of one of Phantasia’s most powerful moments, escaping from the jail thanks to an old woman who’s heart gives out after she steals a key for you, had me dying. As in this game instead of an old woman it’s an 18 year old cat girl with massive breasts wearing a skin tight leotard, who you can later recruit as a party member if you wish.
These spiteful subversions do elevate the story a little more, but they don’t save the terribly lazy writing and tacked on climax.
You also have private actions, which are fun little diversion scenes that add ancillary character development that does help make the cast feel less flat, and can even change the bonus scenes after the ending. I recommend doing these if the main plot is boring you to sleep, it’s a band aid solution for lazy writing, but the mechanic and story potential is big and I can only hope it gets better in the sequels.
Aside from Ratix, Millie, Ronnix and Illia, all other party members are optional recruits. Though the only two worth getting are Phia and Joshua, as the other 6 are just weaker or slower melee fighters. Unless you really want to engage with private actions and get certain bonus scenes, I would only get the two I recommended.
What will motivate you to play the game is the excellent team building and skill system.
Star Ocean punishes players who try and just brute force their way through and avoid the rpg mechanics. One of the best rewards the game provides is that when you are at a high enough level, a mook’s physical attacks will cause no damage to you, this incentivizes you to grind, but not over grind and keeps the pacing of the game brisk.
Though once you learn the skill system, you may actually be willing to grind as much as you wish due to how well designed it is. By studying character talents, you can create secondary classes for great benefits during field exploration, like making one character a chef who can cook dishes to heal HP and MP, another an author that can write books to level up other skills for free up to rank 7, a bird keeper who can deliver items you’ve purchased, a scouting ability that not only lets you dash in the field and lower or raise the encounter rate, etc.
Many of these secondary professions also provide the biggest stat boosts, around 40% higher than just leveling up, so even if your character doesn’t have the correct talent to unlock the vocation, it’s still worth it for a melee fighter with no talent for cooking to level up the stat as it provides high ATK boosts. This reassures the player that no skill points ever feel wasted, and since they cap out at 999 (And you run up to this total quickly), you always be investing SP and reaping the benefits. I was incredibly impressed at how well designed this system was, it was genuinely one of the most fun team building experiences I’ve had in a game in quite a while. The insane power creep and being able to 7-12 shot bosses was incredibly empowering.
In regards to the battles themselves, they generally feel and play a bit better compared to how they were in Tales of Phantasia. In Star Ocean you are presented with a zoomed out view of the map that shows every enemy on screen. Unlike Phantasia however, your character will not reset their positions after selecting an action, and will stay at an enemies position until you select another one. You will have access to different techs depending on your distance. This greatly discourages mashing the attack command when under leveled and forces the player to weigh the risks of executing a powerful, but slower up close special, or a weaker ranged one that while less damaging, presses an enemy back. It’s a simple, brilliant way of adding depth while avoiding bloat.
Spells also feel and function much better visually this time. In Phantasia the camera had a bad habit of jerking back and forth to the caster, interrupting combat and giving it a greatly uneven feel at many points. This issue is not present here. The full view of the battlefield means all you’ll get is a brief darkening of the screen and then a quick cast, it’s great that Tri-Ace took the care to make sure that the gameplay you’ll be spending most of your time on looks and feels mostly great to engage with.
I say mostly because the combat does have some glaring flaws that hold it back from being potentially the best ARPG on the SNES. One of the biggest issues is that when switching from Ratix to another character, Ratix has no AI. This means there is zero reason to even bother switching, since not only do the skills and party AI mostly cover for this blunder, but Ratix will also be your best DPS anyway.
While party AI is generally great, there are some annoyances that you’ll have to mitigate. The biggest annoyance is that mages like Ronnix and Joshua have no way to discern if a spell is causing damage or healing an enemy. If a spell like earthquake for example, heals an enemy, your mage will think that big numbers will always indicate damage, and will continue to cast the same spell, prolonging fights. If it wasn’t for your melee fighters dishing out so much damage at a rate much faster than your mages can cast, this could be far more infuriating.
Thankfully, you can turn the offending spells off in the options, and while this oversight is infuriating, being able to lock it out temporarily helps immensely.
Your melee fighters are mostly very aggressive when fighting mobs, until there’s only one left, when that happens, 90% of the time they’ll just stand there and do nothing while Ratix cleans up. This feels like some blatant padding from Tri-Ace, as enemies have a lot of HP to balance out how fast your melee fighters dish out damage and killing one solo will take three times as long.
The last major issue is that due to how many enemies you’ll be fighting, you’ll be forced to have three melee fighters and one mage in order to divide and conquer, and protect your spell caster from being flanked. This means you’ll need to have Joshua as your mage since he has both white and black magic at his disposal, and his massive MP pool makes him invaluable as a sniper. You’ll also want Phia as one of your melee fighters, as her dual knives deal twice as much damage as other melee fighters (they balance this out by giving her much lower hp, lower Def, and longer startup for techs), giving you essentially five party members on the field instead of four.
When it comes to level design, Star ocean is mostly great. While towns are generally pretty meh, with most of the sea ports sharing the same layouts, this can’t be said for the cool over world and excellent dungeons.
Unlike other RPGs on the system, Star Oceans over world is more of a series of long hallway dungeons with several branching paths to find treasure. While getting lost is almost never an issue, due to the branches being very short, the chests you’ll find don’t yield very good rewards, mostly being berries you can buy at every shop. I appreciate that the effort for the branching is there however, mediocre rewards aside.
Star Ocean’s dungeons are excellent. Given they’re massive labyrinths that will wipe your party if you’ve been brute forcing, you’ll greatly appreciate the physical immunity from grinding here, and tanking through encounters while exploring feels very empowering. Each dungeon has an interesting gimmick, like using flint to light explosives, pressing switches in a certain pattern, or being lent end game equipment to clear out the place as fast as possible. This gives every one of them a unique identity and keeps of each of them feeling fresh.
For certain dungeons that the games story railroads you into, the devs through you a bone and provide healing statues and a save point in the first room, letting you safely grind and bring yourself up to speed if you need to, which is a fantastic failsafe for this type of error that someone is guaranteed to make, while not coming off as condescending.
Unfortunately you will have to backtrack constantly over the course of the game. And while the game does try and mitigate this with fast travel to port towns late game, you’ll still have to spend 15-20 minutes hoofing it across each continent to get the shards you need for the penultimate dungeon.
I saved talking about the crafting system till now because it’s generally pointless, While the equipment you get will be stronger than what you can find and buy naturally, end game equipment and stat boosts from skills make you more than strong enough to kill bosses in 7-12 hits, and it you’ll forget it’s even there unless you go out of your way to use it.
Graphically, Star Ocean is one of the best looking games on the Snes. Map tiles show incredible detail, like individual grooves in wood, elevated juts in rock faces, rusted metal in water etc. Dungeons have some gorgeous fog effects and transparency. Lighting has intricate details like shadows bending and refracting, and Tree leaves having great looking shadows. Even the UI is no slouch here, having a ton of style and personality, with a clean, metallic look and an embossed brush steel border.
Each characters attack animations have a significant weighty feel to them, with each hit producing just the right amount of hit stun and screen shake. Spells draw just the right amount of attention when casted, with gorgeous particle effects and details like glowing cracks in meteors, jagged shaved edges on ice crystals, etc.
The optimization is great 90% of the time, but the frame rate can take a massive dip to the high 20s when several spells are casted one after another. This becomes more frequent later in the game, when mobs are plastered with mages.
Star Oceans music became one of my favorite Motoi Sakuraba scores. For Achieve is a technical marvel from a production standpoint, with the use of woodwind instruments pushing the Snes audio chip to its limits. Dancing Sword’s horn synths give each boss fight a great sense of dread. New world is one the best over world themes he’s ever produced. With some high quality trumpets that the majority of Snes games could never dream of giving navigation an epic, immersive atmosphere.
The game also has some minimal voice acting, and while it only plays during battles, it’s impressive at just how many lines Tri-Ace was able to fit on the cart, with only minimal loss in quality. Many high profile voice actors also lend their talents to the game, like Nobuyuki Hiyama giving Josh a cool and collected personality befitting of a mage, Hiro Yuuki perfectly fitting Ratix as the Shonen hero etc.
If you’re willing to deal with a poorly underwritten story, and a lot of tedious backtracking, Star Ocean is well worth the time invested thanks to it’s fantastic team building, solid battle system, great dungeons, memorable ost, and fantastic visuals. While it does shoot its self in the foot with some major blunders, Tri-Ace’s first game is worth a look at in spite of them.
8/10.