Virtual 100 #45: Star Ocean First Departure R

Well, I certainly didn’t expect Star Ocean: First Departure R to be the next game on the list. I just kinda fell into it.

To be honest, I have been on a bit of an RPG kick lately, and with the upcoming release of Dragon Quest 1&2 HD-2D Remake (they really need to find better names for these) it really had me yearning for a good retro JRPG. There’s something about the setup for these games that really scratch an itch. I’m not sure if it’s just the retro vibe that brings back the nostalgia, or if it’s the grindy nature that— for better or worse— allows for that mindless stat-building experience.

I think what I’ve always liked about JRPG’s are their relatively linear structure. The games are always nudging you in a direction. You see that town over there? Yeah, you can go there, but not right now. Not until the story lets you go there. Or you can try to go there, but you’re gonna get absolutely wrecked by every slime, troll, and bunny along the way. There was always that soft barrier, or sometimes very deliberate barrier, that told us we just weren’t ready for that yet. And I appreciate that, because sometimes I just don’t want to wander aimlessly. I just want to be told where to go and how to get there.

Which is why Star Ocean First Departure R, hereby referred to as FDR, drove me absolutely fucking nuts.

Now, I will have to keep my opinions tethered to the reality that this is essentially a 17-year old game, just with a little spit polish to make it run on modern consoles and PC. I did not know this when I began playing. I thought this was a retro-style remake, much in the way that Star Ocean: Second Story R (which I have also not yet played) uses the HD-2D remake graphics that the Dragon Quest series is currently using, along other games like Triangle Strategy and Octopath Traveler.

But no, this is essentially an up-scaled version of the PSP remake from 2008. Therefore, there are some drawbacks and some design decisions that are a sign of the times. In other words, there’s some annoying shit in this game that thankfully are a thing of the past. Because they were annoying.

One such example is that the game tells you absolutely fucking nothing. The reason for that is, back when this game was originally created, games had instruction booklets. It’s quite possible that this game had a pretty hefty booklet that explained each character’s special skills and talents, and perhaps a little bit of a hint on what they do, and why you should improve them. This game doesn’t tell you fuck-all, and having played through the majority of the game without understanding these things, or in some cases not even knowing they exist, I can’t help but feel like I was robbed of a certain experience.

There is a whole slew of skills and abilities with absolutely no explanation of how they work and what they’re for. The main character, Roddick (named in my playthrough as DICKBUT) can write music. Why? I had no earthly clue, but digging into 17-year old GameFAQs posts informed me that they can provide a wealth of stat buffs and changes to game behavior, like decreasing enemy encounters. Which would have been wonderful to have known before I almost beat the game.

Another “minor” feature, and thankfully I caught this one early enough, is that the Customization ability can be used to make better weapons. Which is absolutely essential because the weapons found or purchased in the game world suck, and once you reach the “final” town and realize they just don’t get much better, you’re fucked if you don’t know about this skill. Which the game doesn’t tell you about. Specific characters have specific innate abilities, which are not only buried several layers deep in menus, but some of which are “hidden” until you discover the proper combination of skills, and then use specific skills to make things, which could unlock hidden talents. Fun times.

By the time I knew this, I was 80-percent of the way through the game, had wasted my points on skills that didn’t really help me all that much.

There are also multiple characters that may or may not join the party based on certain criteria. This criteria may be specific dialog choices, or actions taken in the game world, but might also consist of how many available slots there are in your party. One person might not join unless there are TWO available slots. Without the ability to release someone from your party, if you want that character, you’re SOL. This personally bothered me, because I would have released Cyrus’s lame, useless ass in exchange for Phia any day of the week, but the game didn’t allow me to do that. So instead, I got to watch Phia walk away, and I was stuck watching Cyrus get KIA’d in practically every fight. And that’s WITH the best gear I could find slapped onto him. Fuck Cyrus. I mean that. He got benched as soon as I had a fifth member with which to replace him.

I actually wish I could get into the intricacies of the game’s mechanics, because it’s a lot deeper than I expected for a game this old. But with the lack of any explanation whatsoever, I feel like I only had a surface-level understanding of what any of that shit actually did. I even ended up downloading an old BradyGames strategy guide, and I can’t help but feel the developers made it intentionally obtuse for the sake of selling those game guides. Certainly there were royalties involved.

I will admit, for as much as I enjoy retro RPG’s, one thing I do not miss are the vague and “mysterious” elements of these games, that they intentionally made vague and mysterious, for the simple sake of being vague and mysterious. Or, like I said, to sell them damn game guides. I actually kind of appreciate the hand-holding sometimes. I don’t need a game to tell me everything, but hell, at least explain what the shit in your game is for. Imagine, every time you drove a car, that the pedals and knobs and steering wheel were all in a different place, looked different, and operated differently, and nobody told you what was what. How fun that would be! Of course, I’m being hyperbolic, but standards exist for a reason, and I actually appreciate that nowadays there seems to be a set template for these types of games, and for every feature that may deviate from that template, there are enough in-game resources for the developers to say “hey, this is how this works and why you want to use it.” If I skip that tutorial and screw myself, that’s on me.

But that is a long, long tangent I just went on, to simply say this game is a product of its time. The thing is, the game is fun for the most part. I had no problem with the moment-to-moment gameplay, the characters are… fine… and the story I would bet was pretty awesome for the time. The mix of sci-fi and fantasy might be pretty common now, but back then I bet it was a fresh concept. Throw in time travel and you got a banger.

It has some balancing issues, for sure. There are difficulty spikes that just don’t make any sense. Your party can be absolutely wrecking shit one moment, then enter a cave or go from one continent to the next and get brutally demolished. As of the time of this writing, I am probably about 70-percent of the way through the game. I just entered the Purgatorium’s inner sanctum, which turned out to be far more advanced in technology than the character’s ever imagined. The enemies, as it turns out, are far more advanced than my characters as well. Once again, after grinding to get my party up to fighting snuff in the previous section of the game, I am getting absolutely wiped by virtually everything. There are even some enemies that are weak to dark attacks, but light attacks actually heal them. I had no idea until now, but apparently ALL of my characters do light damage, because I do nothing but heal the enemies in the fight. And I die. Fast.

I don’t know how my characters all do this elemental damage. I don’t remember ever allocating a certain element to my weapons. I don’t even think the weapons say they have these elemental attributes. Not even the status screens of my characters have any indication. (Update: They do, it’s buried in the Equipment screen). But I am getting absolutely annihilated, and I have no idea what to do about it, except run away (if I can). It’s really beginning to try my patience. I am going to have to push pause on this article until I make further progress.

—————

Well, it’s about two days later, and I’m at the final boss. And I got one-shotted. My entire party, dead. Didn’t even get a hit on the guy. So once again, after grinding my way through a final tower— which was tedious as fuck, by the way, I get to the final boss with my characters all in the 70’s and 80’s. And I’m ready to end it. I’m like, hell yeah let’s go! And then I get wiped.

So now I’m sitting here, and I’m pretty much at a loss. I know my party could probably have better gear. I don’t know for sure, because the game doesn’t tell you what gear is out there, or what you have to do to get it. But I’ve been using Roderick as my main since day one so he’s pretty jacked at this point… or so I thought. He is currently level 83. He has all Mithril armor, and he’s currently using the Souleater sword, which heals him every time he does damage. He has an accessory or two that bump up his attack and defense even more. He’s nigh-on untouchable in a regular battle. But he got reamed by the final boss within seconds.

So, what the hell then? Why is my character who has been grinding along since the very first minute of the game getting so easily whipped by the final boss? I can understand if I had a fighting chance, and I failed. But I didn’t even get to react.

The only viable option, since getting better weapons and gear is already off the table, is just grind more. And at this point, I’ve already been grinding plenty. Frankly, I’m pretty damn tired of it.

I even consulted the internet (I had already downloaded a pdf of the old BradyGames strategy guide) to see if I was imagining things, and no. No I am not. It seems that the difficulty spikes are not my imagination, and the frustration I am feeling was felt by many when this game first came out… 17 years ago.

Apparently when they “remastered” the game, they didn’t touch the wonky difficulty spikes. Nor did they add in the ability to change the overall difficulty of the game (cuz I would’ve put that shit on Easy by now). They just added some extra characters and called it a day.

So for now, I’m going to finish my coffee, go to work, and I will revisit this write-up yet again when it’s all said and done— however long that might take. At this point, I’m just kinda hate-fucking my way through it.

—————

Okay. The game is done. I finally beat both forms of that piece of shit. What was really giving me a hard time was that, right off the bat, as soon as the battle starts, he goes into a spell animation. This spell hits everyone in the party, and it does a ton of damage. At first it was the thing that was one-shotting me, or practically one-shotting, as Roddick was really the only character left standing afterwards, and he would be taken care of pretty quick. I would need to make a decision to either heal him or resurrect another team member, and it wasn’t going very well for me either way.

Then, after I grinded out a few more levels, I was beginning to survive the initial blast, but only barely. All of my characters would be in the red, and I was still on the defensive right off the bat. I would survive for a little longer, but eventually fall as I just couldn’t keep up with the healing.

My initial party looked like this: Roddick, Ilia, Mavelle, and Ioshua. That’s mainly because I met Ioshua while Millie was away from the party, and he was just kind of my healer. I tried out Mavelle when she joined the party and liked her because she was a magic user that actually wasn’t a pushover defensively.

I would throw the others into a fight occasionally, but for the most part they were significantly lower levels. Once I met Welch, I started using her in the party as well, because she came in at the party leader’s current level. So she was already leveled up and I didn’t have to grind with her.

Eventually my party settled into Roddick, Ilia, Welch, and Ioshua.

I did not realize Ioshua’s healer skills had a cap; his repertoire did not consist of a stronger Heal All, nor did he have the ability to resurrect fallen party members or cure them of ailments— pretty important in the last tower where getting turned to stone happened every thirty seconds. And while I guess I should’ve realized he was a hybrid “black magic - white magic” dealer, it slipped my mind because I always had him focus on healing and he never actually used his attack magic.

So Millie was way under-leveled when I got to the final boss. And that was the key. I actually started leveling up Millie so that she could play support to Iosha and I could have two healers at once, but the nano-second she learned a cure spell that Ioshua did not have, despite him being 25 levels higher, I knew where I fucked up.

I started grinding in the area right before the final boss. There was a save point there, which is pretty rare in this game, so I would use the path between that save point, and the save point in the Cave of the Seven Stars to grind. The save point in the cave had a merchant, so I could buy supplies as needed. Even then, with Millie and Welch set to Train, it was a slow process.

Until I wandered into the first level of the Cave of the Seven Stars.

That cave is tough. Like, impossibly tough. But… at some point I got just strong enough to defeat a certain group of enemies. It was a group of about six enemies, four female magic users and two male magic users. And for whatever reason, their “big destructive spell” that they would cast on the entire party ACTUALLY HEALED THEM. Well, all except Roddick, who would take a pretty big hit, but survive. Winning this fight would get my party over 100,000 XP. Millie and Welch would go up at least two levels per battle.

I would save after each fight, because the save point was just the next screen up. If I encountered something other than that group, I would essentially get annihilated, but no matter. I had saved, so I would just reload and try again.

It only took me about 30 minutes to get Millie up about 15 levels, from the low 60’s to the mid-to-high 70’s.

Then, I took what I had back to Jie Revorse and beat the shit out of him. And that was that.

But here’s the thing, and it’s kind of the reason I don’t like it when jrpg’s force you to grind like this. Once I beat it, I didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything. It wasn’t a battle of skill. I was getting whupped, I went off and spent probably two hours or so doing extra, mindless wandering, just to get stronger. There was a room with a teleporter where I literally just ran around in circles. I don’t know. I get that that is what these games are all about, but I just prefer it when a game rewards exploration and side quests by providing you with the items or weapons, or the extra XP, to organically get you to a point where the final boss is manageable.

And there was so much in here that the game just does not tell you. So much of your success in Star Ocean First Departure R relies in knowledge that the player doesn’t know. And as I mentioned previously, it’s not must me; there were many posts on reddit and Steam forums with people voicing the same frustrations as I.

And let’s be fair; this is a game of its time, and while I think the developers tweaked the formula, for the worse, according to those who played the original First Departure, it’s still a game that lacks the quality of life features we’ve grown accustomed to over the years. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m spoiled.

Secondly, let’s not only be fair, but honest; the Star Ocean series is… fine. But it’s rarely in the list of the best RPG series of all time. It’s a good JRPG that has persisted over the years, but it seems the older ones are more fondly remembered and the subsequent releases are average at best.

I DO own Second Story R, and I am debating on starting that one up right away. I hear really, really good things about it, and from what I understand, it lacks a lot of the frustrations from the first. Plus, it was actually made fairly recently, so all those little things that improve the QoL shoudl be there. Like in-game tutorials that might explain what everything does (though I might already know… NOW.)

This one came out of nowhere. I started playing it out of curiosity, and the gameplay at first was pretty addicting. It has that same frantic hack n slash quality that the Tales series is known for. I really dig the Tales series, and this felt similar. After that, it was just pure basic determination. Now I can jot it down as number 45 on the Virtual 100.