Star Ocean

This game is one of the hidden gems on the SNES that most of America doesn't even know about because the game never got an official release over here. It had to be translated years later by a fan and now is available almost exclusively through ROMs across the interwebs. It's a shame since this is such a good game and the graphics in the game are way ahead of their time. This is also the very first Star Ocean ever

Star Ocean has an active combat system, one where you're expected to do more than just stand there and "think". You'll have control of your characters movement and their actions fully. This is both good and annoying. On longer fights I found your companions stop attacking and stand there waiting for a manual command to be sent to them which can often get very very tedious.

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The important part of all RPGs though is the story, which Star Ocean has a pretty darn good one. It starts out extremely story intensive and paints a very vivid picture of what is going on. The first couple hours playing the game is going to be very little fighting and a whole lot of reading! That may sound unappealing but I assure you, the story of this game is quite compelling. It starts to slack off in the end and it gets a bit rushed and twisted I feel but the start of the game really is phenomenal.

Unlike most newer RPGs Star Ocean has a lot of different paths you can take. Almost every other character aside from your main 4 are completely optional and that's both really cool and really annoying. I was stuck with 3 characters for about 50% of the game (not even a full party) all because of the choices I made. When I finally got a full party the 4th character was so under leveled I had to stop for a few hours to raise her level to where it needed to be. This honestly was the only unappealing part of the game for me.

This could be a major selling point for some though. Star Ocean had the really old RPG style and feel to it where your choices mattered a lot and you can very easily miss extremely important things within the game simply just by not searching enough. A good example of this is I got stuck at Parj Temple for about a day or two all because I chose a different answer in a conversation than I was supposed to and I wasn't even supposed to be at Parj Temple at that time because of my choice. It frustrated me a lot and honestly that part of the game is why I didn't give this a higher score.

Ultimately though, if you're looking for a fantastic RPG to play on the Super Nintendo I can't recommend Star Ocean enough to you.

I give the game a 3.5/5