I played this game a few months ago. Now, I don’t want to say this game is forgettable, but I honestly don’t remember much from it… Let me refer to the notes that I had jotted down.

There was that Abandoned Mine dungeon near the start, and the game pretty much dares you to check it out. One minute later, game over.

Millie + Ronyx secret training, wonder what they got up to…

I laughed when that village got destroyed…….. maybe I’m evil.

Crimson Shield was O_O. Did I have to grind for a bit? I can’t remember.

This game needed a fast travel feature badly, the amount of backtracking was quite annoying.

The combat wasn’t too bad, but honestly I spammed Ronyx’s spells for the majority of the game.

Roddick was a pretty underwhelming protagonist, the guy barely did anything. Ilia was cool, and the relationship between Cyuss and Phia was an interesting one. In typical Star Ocean fashion, there’s no way to recruit every single character in a playthrough, which sucks. I got Welch towards the end as she was the only one available to me at that point. I used her in my party from that point onwards, even though her specials weren’t great, because her weapon is amusing:

The animated cutscenes were great, wish there were more of them, but I couldn’t even unlock the last one because I didn’t have the required characters to trigger the cutscene, SMH.

The voice acting wasn’t great, and gets pretty annoying during battles, but it’s also hilarious, I suppose. My favourite was Ilia dying words: “I can see the…STAR….OCEAN…blargfhhhjdv”. Definitely gives Talia al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises a run for her money. Ronyx’s posh voice was kind of memorable though.

The music was ok, typical Motoi Sakuraba affair.

Story was…I don’t even remember. I beat some guy who time travelled, but he wasn’t the main baddie, so I went to some other planet to beat the real main baddie.

There’s a bonus dungeon that you can unlock even if you haven’t beaten the final boss, you just needed to save at the right save point. Huh?

Star Ocean: First Departure was a remake of the first SO game, based on SO2’s modified engine, and it was on the PSP. Yup. It wasn’t terrible but wasn’t amazing either.