What is the first Star Ocean game?

A medieval village, a starship, and a trip three hundred years into the past to cure a plague.

Star Ocean was released for the Super Famicom on July 19, 1996, developed by the newly founded tri-Ace and published by Enix. It opens in S.D. 346 on Roak, an underdeveloped planet, where the young swordsman Roddick and his friends Millie and Dorne watch a petrification disease consume their neighbours. Their search for a cure collides with the starship Calnus and its captain, Ronyx J. Kenny, whose Federation is at war, and the only route to the cure runs through a Time Gate to Roak’s own past.

Almost everything the series is known for starts here: real-time battles where you control one fighter directly, Private Actions in towns that reshape relationships and endings, deep item creation, and a party you cannot fully collect in one playthrough, ten recruitable characters of whom eight can join. It was directed by Joe Asanuma, produced for Enix by Yoshinori Yamagishi, with character art by Meimu and music by Motoi Sakuraba.

THE GAME

Roak, S.D. 346

The story shape

A plague that turns people to stone is a weapon in a galactic war, and its source is a demon king dead for three hundred years. The party’s answer is time travel: go back and take the cure from the source. Science fiction supplies the frame; the journey itself is classic fantasy.

Battles in real time

Where Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest took turns, Star Ocean fights live: you steer one character around the field while the others follow the tactics you set. That single decision, inherited from the team’s work on Tales of Phantasia, defines the series to this day.

Private Actions begin here

In towns the party splits up, and Roddick can find each member for small scenes that raise or lower their affinity. Affection between characters quietly decides which ending scenes play, a system the sequel would expand into its famous 86 endings.

Eight of ten

Ten characters can join across the game, but the party caps at eight and several recruits exclude others, so no single playthrough sees the whole cast. The remake later added two more faces, Erys and the time-travelling Welch, retroactively stitched into the series.

THE SECOND LIFE

First Departure and R

First Departure, 2007

The remake, developed by Tose for the PSP, reached Japan in December 2007 and the West in October 2008, the first time the original game was ever officially sold in English. It rebuilt the game on the sequel’s engine and added full voice acting.

First Departure R, 2019

A remaster of the remake for PlayStation 4 and Switch followed worldwide on December 5, 2019, letting players switch between the PSP remake’s voice cast and newly recorded performances, and sharpening the presentation again.

The 48-Megabit Cartridge Star Ocean in English

What is the first Star Ocean game?

THE GAME

THE SECOND LIFE

THE FIRST WORD