The battle system, while admittedly simplistic and dated, is relatively enjoyable. Instead of taking turns like in Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, First Departure sees you controlling one of your four characters as you hack-‘n-slash your way to victory. Special moves are assigned to the L and R buttons, and your cohorts run on autopilot as you attack with your chosen character (which can be switched in and out of battle at any time). Even though most random battles are a button-mashing extravaganza, a handful of boss encounters and tough battles challenge you to fight wisely by balancing special attacks, quick movements, and a bit of character juggling for the win.

As a person who rarely plays an RPG twice, I’m surprisingly drawn into this game. With multiple party members to recruit that can’t all be had in a single play through, and myriad ways to customize characters based on skills and abilities that can only be obtained by having certain characters in your party, this game just begs to be replayed. But unlike many other games with a similar emphasis, Star Ocean never feels punishing or leaves you feeling like you “played it wrong.” Levels (and skill points) flow as easily as your characters beads of sweat, allowing you to experiment with skills and abilities in a way most games are reluctant to. It’s a brisk game at around 20 hours, but rewarding nonetheless; and certainly a title that completionists are sure to enjoy much, much longer than they might expect to.

Of course, replayability doesn’t equal perfection, and indeed there are a handful of things keeping this game from being a total blockbuster. Most noticeably, the difficulty ranges from “easy” to “an utter joke” depending on whether you blaze through the game or choose to go on optional side quests and gain a few levels. Unfortunately this makes leveling up and utilizing skills towards the end of the main game futile, but thankfully the thoroughly challenging bonus areas will kick unprepared players asses in seconds who haven’t spent time sharpening their swords.

Additionally, the game’s lack of teleportation spells is puzzling (especially considering its quasi-futuristic setting), and leads to far more backtracking than should be allowed. Even though you rarely have to spend more than 20 minutes meandering from place to place, it just doesn’t make much sense to have you walking through hordes of weaklings just to deliver a message to some decrepit king ten towns over. Of course, those random battles wouldn’t be so bad if you could skip over the forced cutscenes for every spell in the game. Sure, the spells are extremely powerful for the majority of the game (and are generally time well spent), but would it have been too much to ask for a “skip” button?

In the end, Star Ocean: First Departure is a wonderful translation of a game Americans were robbed of so long ago. With superb voice acting, phenomenal replayability, and a great translation with new hybrid 2D/3D graphics, Square Enix’s remake team did a great job.

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