Star Ocean

1996 · Action RPG · SNES

Overview

Star Ocean (1996) is tri-Ace's Super Famicom RPG with real-time battles and voice clips packed onto the cartridge with the S-DD1 compression chip. It stayed in Japan until a 2008 remake.

Deep Dive

Roddick, Millie and Dorne look for a cure for a disease that turns people to stone, and learn it comes from Asmodeus, a demon king who died 300 years earlier. With Ronyx and Ilia of the Earth Federation starship Calnus, they travel back in time to find him. Battles run in real time, with the player controlling one character and the AI the others. "Private Actions" build relationships between characters that shape the endings, eight of ten possible recruits can join, and item creation can make gear better than anything in the shops.

Developer Story

Joe Asanuma directed the game at tri-Ace, with Motoi Sakuraba composing, and Enix released it in Japan on 19 July 1996. The cartridge used the S-DD1 compression chip to hold about 48 megabits of data. It sold about 235,000 copies, and the PSP remake First Departure brought it to the West in 2008.

Did You Know?

Its voice clips during battle were rare on the Super Famicom.
Enix America had stopped publishing by the end of 1995, so the game never officially left Japan; fans made an English patch.