The last breath of a console in it's dying days, Star Ocean, although a good game, falls short in a few key elements.

User Rating: 7.3 | Star Ocean SNES
Released in 1996, only in Japan, Star Ocean was the last great RPG to grace the Super Famicom (or Super Nintendo Entertainment System, as it is more commonly known in the West). Due to being released in the dying days of the console, it was never deemed worthy of being ported to regions outside of Japan, so, it never achieved the greatness it could have. Despite that, due to the efforts of the emulation community, an unofficial translation was completed and made available to the general public.

As the name implies, Star Ocean is the first game in the Star Ocean saga. The tale brings together sci-fi themes, very similar to those of the Star Trek universe, with the usual medieval fantasy worlds of magic and monsters. The game has a good premise: A group of friends, from the village of Clatos on the world of Roak, find that a strange disease, that turns the infected people into stone, is spreading through neighbouring villages. In their effort to find a cure they meet up with a pair of humans from Earth, a space-fairing world at this point, which propels their quest through time and space. The game kicks off rather well, the story is engaging, and the mixture of themes does promise quite a bit of interesting content. As is usual with RPG storylines, nothing is always simple and straightforward, which means that the heroes have to go to great lengths to achieve their objective. Unfortunately, as the game progresses, it seems to somewhat lose its focus and the path to the conclusion seems rushed and poorly written. There is no sense of epic or grandeur, there is no clear objective or foe in the midst of the sub-plots and sub-quests up until the very end. When the source of "evil" is revealed, it is done so in a anti-climatic, overly simplistic, way that feels more as a gimmick to thrust the player into some more areas of typical dungeon crawling than anything else. The game doesn't bother to construct a clear and consistent story to support the actions the player undertakes as he controls the characters in their ordeals. In the end, the only motivation to proceed with it, is the prospect of the game's end and not a real wish to set things right for the characters. Even that, though, isn't quite well accomplished because, despite giving the sense of closure it should, the game's end is nothing special or memorable. The game itself is rather short, but given the weaknesses of the story, it is probably for the best.

The characters themselves are somewhat interesting. One run through the game won't allow you to meet them all, prompting some replay value, and their endings are also dynamic. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of Star Ocean is the Approval Ratings system which directly affects the game's end. In short, this is a system in which you can increase, or decrease, the way the main character (you) is seen in the eyes of each of the other individual characters. This is achieved through Private Actions. Private Actions are triggered by the player when arriving at each of the towns in the game. When the PR is triggered, the characters will split up and head into town to rest and spend time doing whatever they wish. During that time, the player (always in control of the main character) can interact with them in several ways, affecting his AR with them. It's a very good concept and it adds some depth to the character's interaction. Despite that, some of the individual storylines of the support characters could have used some polishing to avoid feeling so short and shallow, contributing to the rushed feeling of the game's tale.
When it comes to character customization Star Ocean is also innovative, boasting a full skill system which affects the character's stats and opens way to the game's item creation system. Each character, when she levels, wins a variable number of skill points. Those points can be spent in any number of individuals skills that are (quite literally) bought during the course of the game. Some of these are simply combat-oriented skills, but most are support skills for item creation. By spending skill points in a subset of skills, the player unlocks abilities that allow that character to create specific items (from smithing to cooking, alchemy to weapons customization, even painting, writing and playing music). Furthermore, each character has a set of talents, generated randomly when the game starts, that define their natural talent toward one or more tasks. Some might have a delicate sense of taste that allow them to be good cooks, while others can have an acute sense of rhythm that allow them to be good musicians. Some might even have a combination of both. There is some depth to this system and it's mildly interesting. Some of the more combat-oriented abilities are of extreme value (such as the one that allows you to control the random encounter rate or the one that increases the amount of experience gained from each battle) but the item creation itself is not essential, despite being useful. It can be a bit confusing in the beginning, but all in all, it's a good touch.
On a more active gameplay-wise sense, the game seems to play pretty much just like any other typical RPG from the 16-bit era, but the differences emerge once the characters enter a battle. Star Ocean's battle system is not turn based, as it would be somewhat expected, but real time, with heroes and foes fighting freely across the screen. The player is in direct control of the main character and, despite being able to direct them to attack certain foe or cast a specific spell, the other characters are mainly controlled by the game's AI. In general the AI does its job well, specially when it comes to healing, though it also has its faults, like the occasional tendency to stand around doing nothing while the main character gets pummeled to near death. Further customization of the AI's strategies allows for some greater control and tuning, which is a bonus, except for the fact that this is available to all characters minus the main one. The main character has no strategies, no AI at all in fact, which means that switching control from the main character to another one during battle results in the first one to be left just standing there doing absolutely nothing at all. This literally forces you to play only with that character throughout the game, stopping only for brief moments to perform adjustments to some other character, which is unfortunate and completely unnecessary in a party-based game.

Where Star Ocean shines, though, is in the way it looks. The game pushed the console to its limits, with rich and varied environments, detailed characters and smooth animation. When one stops to consider the machine that was meant to run this game, one realizes the awesome technical feat that was achieved. Star Ocean truly is a wonderful game to behold and it certainly helps the whole experience. The sound is also another area in which the game distinguishes itself. Featuring true voice work from all the characters, much in the way that its distant relative Tales of Phantasia (made by roughly the same team of people) did, the sound in Star Ocean is good and clear. Though, of course, such quality comes at a price. In this case, the lacking number of individual tracks, prompts the reuse of the same songs all throughout the game, which gets somewhat tiresome in the late parts of the game. Regardless, much like the voice work, those songs are of above average quality.

As said before, one run through the game won't allow you to see every character and individual endings (the main storyline ending is always the same), which gives the game some replay value. On top of that, once beat, the game unlocks a new dungeon for those witty enough to find it. This dungeon is a 30 level dungeon crawl that will test the best players but adds nothing at all to the overall story. Personally, i believe that this combined with the weak storyline without truly memorable moments doesn't encourage much in the ways of replayability, but as always, it is a matter of taste, so, your mileage may vary.

Overall, Star Ocean is a good game. The SNES was a landmark in console history and there are games on that system that still are, today, a lot of fun to play. Star Ocean, despite its flaws, honors such trend and its status as the last great RPG to grace that fine console earns it, at least, the right of being played at least once by every classic RPG fan.