All together, Star Ocean: The First Departure is a great remake of a title that we've never had released here, and it's a welcome addition to anyone's PSP RPG library.
Star Ocean: First Departure is not for everyone. Newcomers to the RPG genre should find their fix elsewhere first, though veterans will find themselves right at home with this tri-Ace title.
Fans of Squareenix is given another gift from the company as in the form of the Star Ocean series, the cult classic from the SNES era comes back fully remade with new remixes and a few new additions that were not seen in the original game. The audio improved, gameplay tuned and the graphics incredible for a 2D game, fans will surely be remembering this classic for years!
A well done remake of the first Star Ocean game. The battle system is great and it makes the game play fun. The story is pretty good and this game even has a multitude of optional characters making it fun to play several times. The only down side of the many optional characters is that it's hard to become emotionally attached to some of the characters. Overall Star Ocean: First Departure is a very enjoyable game.
Star Ocean: First Departure for the PSP is a classic role-playing game favorite and seeing it with a new splash of fresh paint makes this a great version to own even if you managed to play the game so long ago. For the majority of RPG fans that didn’t, however, playing this old-school classic is highly recommended.
Star Ocean: First Departure is a solid game that has made me want to check out the other installments in the series, but the battle system kept me from really falling in love with it.
I'm quite disappointed with the aspect of what Star Ocean could have been, and honestly it's a shame that it starts out with such a neat sci-fi premise only to sweep it all under the rug in favor of generic fantasy fulfillment. While there is still a bit of sci-fi involved in the end, for the most part Star Ocean's story is as generic as they come despite having an interesting beginning.Thankfully the more appealing aspects of the game isn't really it's story, but the many diverges that this game has along with it's character interactions. While most games give you solid cast of characters to watch develop and interact with, Star Ocean instead has different party members you can acquire pending on who you agree to let stay, parts you investigate, and even who is in your party at the time. This means that your experience with Star Ocean may in fact be different from mine, and with the amount of characters to interact with and gain/lose means that in order to fully experience this whole game, you have to play through it 3 times completely optimized. While I don't think you should be using a guide to fully grasp your experience, it's important to note just how permanent your choices are. It's a real shame too because the game never really gives proper reason to think you can lose party members or need to go looking for them, having a better indication of this would have been nice, but I can see how explaining that would ruin the flow of the narrative.Course Star Ocean is more than just party members, as the combat system is akin to most action RPGs with your ability to control any one character while the other party members end up doing generic commands you can send them unless you want to manually use them. While I don't recall any of my characters being useless throughout my playthrough, a lot of character growth does come from leveling up certain skills and passively gaining the boosts from said skills. Again, the importance of these skills and how it effects your character really isn't explain that well, but thankfully the majority of the game is fairly easy. For the most part, you can get by just by focusing on certain enemies, changing some small battle strategies, and leveling, but there is a notable difficulty spike at the end with the final boss.Star Ocean: First Departure is a nice remake of the SNES game, and did help with graphical changes as well as improved dialogue and voice acting. The only problem is that Star Ocean's base story is just so blatantly average that it kinda gets lost in the sea of JRPG story telling. Thankfully the more remember-able bits of figuring out what members I should get, as well as how I should build my team stay with me, and for that I wish the franchise more success in the future.
This is a very mediocre rpg with a boring story and **** skill system and the combat is the only good part of this game, rest is very average.I liked all the specialities and skills that you can use outside of battles and the PA system helps give atleast some personality to the characters .The world is beautiful but the cities and NPCs are so bland.There are way better RPGs in psp than this one.
the games game play is dated with no new refinements unlike its squeal its dated story and simple game play hasn't aged all that well. i would recommend getting its squeal at it is just this game but better .
SummarySpace Date 346: The crew of a Terran Federation ship arrives on the planet Roak. With the help of a stalwart band of local heroes, the crew must work together to unravel a mystery and halt a galactic war.