ABOUT THE GAME
HISTORY
Star Ocean: Fantastic Space Odyssey is an SNES RPG by Tri-Ace, released in Japan in 1996. Enix was the publisher. At a whopping 48 megs, Star Ocean is the largest SNES game! If Enix America hadn't closed, Star Ocean would've most likely seen an official release. Nintendo Power even had a whole 2-page article about it (found in the Pictures section). On December 31, 2003, the great DeJap Translations released their 90% complete Star Ocean English translation. This translation is playable from beginning to end, only a few bugs and untranslated strings of text remain. Sadly, this was DeJap's last project, for the group had since dissolved. A remaining member promised to release a 100% complete Star Ocean translation, but that was stated long ago and there hasn't been any word on it.
box front
box back
manual & cart
Star Ocean carries the features of Namco's Tales of Phantasia; the characters call out their attacks, battles are a hybrid of traditional RPG/action, backgrounds have an immense amount of detail, etc. But how can they be so familiar? Did Tri-Ace COPY Tales of Phantasia? Technically, no. You see, the group who worked on Tales of Phantasia got pissed at Namco near the end of completing it. They left with a “talk to the hand” gesture and formed Tri-Ace. With Star Ocean, Tri-Ace wanted to push Tales of Phantasia's features to the next level. They expanded the skills system to allow you to develop your characters like real humans. They can develop such skills as cooking, crafting, music, alchemy, scouting, forging, effort, patience, psychology, biology, originality, love of animals, and much more. Some skills benefit you in battle, some are required to discover secrets and some are completely useless. As for graphics and animation, Enix psychically went to the next level there, pushing the SNES to its absolute limit by adding a graphics enhancement chip, the SDD-1. This allowed Star Ocean to have incredibly detailed backgrounds and enhanced special effects.
The emulation of Star Ocean has a history as well. Due to the special SDD-1 chip, for quite a long time Star Ocean remained completely incompatible with SNES emulators. I believe it was 2002 when DeJap Translations released special 'graphics packs' files that finally made the game playable. In 2004, ZSNES and Snes9X offered full support for the SDD-1 chip, allowing Star Ocean to work without the aid of DeJap's graphics packs. Even then, both emulators still had some trouble emulating Star Ocean properly, most particularly with battle speeds and sound/music emulation. At around mid-2005 they seemed to have resolved all the emulation inaccuracies.
STORYLINE
For once I'm going to be lazy and use someone else's description of the story. This is from Wikipedia's Star Ocean article:
“Star Ocean: Fantastic Space Odyssey tells the story of Ratix Farrence, a young Fellpool living in the town of Clatos on the underdeveloped planet of Roak. He is part of a group called the Clatos Brigade, a small organization of fighters who defend the town from thieves and robbers. Ratix himself is a swordsman, as is his friend Dorn Marto -- who is also a member of the Brigade. One day, a strange disease that spreads by touch begins turning people in the northern city of Cool to stone. The town healer and father of Milly Kiliet -- one of Ratix's best friends who also secretly loves him -- goes to Cool to try and use his Crest Magic (Heraldry/Symbology) to defeat the disease but ends up becoming infected himself. When this news comes to Milly, Ratix, and Dorn, they set off for Mt. Metox north of Cool to recover the Metox herb, a legendary herb said to cure any ailment. With this, they hope to cure the disease and save Milly's father. When they reach the summit where the herb grows, mysterious light bursts from the ground, and two people wearing odd clothes appear before them; a man with blue hair and a woman with blonde hair. The man introduces himself as Ronixis J. Kenni, captain of the Earth Federation starship Calnus. From there they learn that the disease was sent to the planet by the Resonians, a civilization that the Earth Federation has been at war with. However, it is a mystery as to why Resonia would even launch such a biological attack on an underdeveloped world. What could be gained by it?
It was soon revealed though that Roakian blood could block out the visible light spectrum of the human eye and that Resonia had used their blood to process a special, invisible material. The sort of material that would give them a massive advantage in the war! However, instead of fighting with it they send emissaries to the Federation HQ and reveal that they were being forced into war by a shadowy, powerful third party with disgust for the Federation. A third party called "Fargett".
The group then discovers that the virus originates from a monster on Roak itself -- Asmodeus, the King of the Demon World [Daemonium]. Asmodeus however died 300 years before the spreading of the disease. Despite the possible court martial that could be dealt to them, Ronixis decides to go to the Planet Stream (Planet Styx) to use the mysterious Time Gate to travel back in time and recover a sample of blood from Asmodeus. Upon getting there, the Gate accepts them and they enter into the opened time warp. However, Iria Silvestoli -- the blonde woman from the Calnus -- trips before getting into the Gate and Ratix helps her back up.
After the trip through time, Ratix and Iria find themselves on an entirely different continent to the one Ronixis and Milly wound up on...”
GAMEPLAY
Like Tales of Phantasia, battles take place in a separate sequence, with the genre of gameplay jumping to action/RPG instead of traditional turn-based RPG. Your playable character's special attacks are split up into 2 categories: long-range and short-range. When he's far away from the target, press B to initiate one special attack and press Up + B to initiate the other. When he's close to the enemy, then those same button sequences will initiate his short-range attacks. You can choose which attacks the offensive-based characters will use. You can choose which spells the magic-using characters will use. You can pause battles to use items or choose to have a magic-user cast a specific spell. So yeah, this is nothing new to you if you've played Tales of Phantasia. But what makes Star Ocean's battles critically different? Ah, that would be the fact that its battles are in a 3/4 view, you can run in any direction.
Then there's the complex skill system. It includes knowledge skills, sense skills, technique skills, combat skills, school skills, and secret skills. You obtain points through each battle that can be applied to any skill. It's up to you to decide how many points should go to each skill. You learn new abilities once a certain combo of skills exceeds a certain amount of points. Some skills benefit you in battle, some are required to discover secrets and some are completely useless.
Lastly, there's the Private Action feature. Before you enter a town, you can elect to have your party split up, and they'll do stuff in the town on their own. Mainly, the purpose of this feature is so you can experience the personalities of your characters. Sometimes you have to do this to progress into the game, and sometimes this is needed to uncover secrets.
MY OPINION
Well, it's not as positive as I had anticipated it to be. Star Ocean is a beautiful game with an interesting story and a great soundtrack. However, I don't know, it just didn't hold my interest. This shrine took me forever to make due to my lack of interest. I can appreciate the detail Enix put into the innovative skills system, but I didn't feel like bothering with it. The battle system was still awkward for me even after getting accustomed to it after several hours of gameplay. As for its soundtrack, as I stated I think it's great, but there aren't any songs that I would casually listen to. I was hoping I would enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Tales of Phantasia's soundtrack; I still casually listen to many of its songs. But don't take my opinion too seriously, I've only played 5 or so hours into Star Ocean so far. So would I recommend the game? Most definitely! Every fan of the SNES should experience the famed RPG that pushed the system to its limit.