3/5 ★ – ElementaryGaming's review of Star Ocean: First Departure R.

I have mixed feelings about this one. There are a lot of good ideas, with a lot of poor execution. To begin with the positives, this game looks beautiful, especially if you appreciate great pixel art and pre-rendered backgrounds. It's a complete remake of the first Star Ocean from the ground up, with tons of effort put into the visual detail of the world. It's an awesome reimagining. Likewise, the music sounds great. While there aren't any tracks that will stick with you when you're done playing, it nonetheless has a nice orchestral-yet-retro feel that fits perfectly. The plot has a very strong start. It opens up with fantasy and sci-fi worlds colliding in an interesting way in order to find a cure for a mysterious disease. But unfortunately after this first hour, the turns into the world's most generic fantasy RPG plotline, seemingly forgetting all about this sci-fi element. It picks up again towards the end, but feels sudden and it's hard to get invested in, given that the core plotline was put on "pause" for most of the game. There is an odd pace to the story overall- scenes begin and end suddenly. The "private action" system is a very cool way to have unique conversations with your party members, but it's implemented in a bad way. If you miss any of these opportunities to speak with someone, you essentially lock yourself out of future private actions. Also, whenever you want to do this, the character is hidden in a random spot in a given town, and you have to scour every nook and cranny in order to find them. It felt like a hassle to even initiate these. A silver lining is that your character's movement speed is quite fast, so you can run around areas with ease. The battles are button-mashy, but they can be weirdly satisfying with its mix of action and RPG elements. Sadly, they're just isn't much depth in terms of the actual things you can do. Battles are extremely dependent on the equipment you are wearing. I found that it was essentially impossible to progress in the late game without taking advantage of the crafting system. What you do outside the battles in terms of assembling your equipment and abilities matters far more than the actual battles themselves, which lack depth. There are also difficulty spikes that pop up multiple times throughout the experience that really hurt the pace. Hours of grinding in order to build up skills felt absolutely necessary. The skill system is surprisingly deep, but it is barely explained at all in-game. I was heavily reliant on scouring the internet in order to understand exactly how it worked. The system itself is very cool with the numerous options that it gives the player for gaining new abilities and items, but it would have seriously benefited from a visual, such as a skill tree, in order to communicate how it actually works. Instead the skill system consists of a bunch of words and numbers, which unlock more words and numbers. But with that said, there was definitely a satisfying feeling to upgrading the characters, and there was a real sense that they were improving in their abilities. I really didn't like the final boss. I had specifically upgraded special equipment for my party leader, and it turned out that this weapon healed the boss. This made my strongest character essentially irrelevant in this fight. It was stressful, and not fun at all. All of the hard work that I had put into developing my party didn't really pay off, even though I had maximized my skills and utilize the crafting system to make some of the best equipment in the game. The final boss should have rewarded this, but it didn't. There are so many great ideas in First Departure, but most of them are not implemented well. To the developer's credit, they remade this SNES game while keeping its core gameplay and plot intact- flaws and all. It's fun to see where this series began and to take in the gorgeous pixel art, but it's hard to fully recommend it unless you're willing to deal with a lot of old-school jank and a seriously underdeveloped story.