Star Ocean

Star Ocean is a sci-fi JRPG that marked the debut of studio tri-Ace and combined fantasy and space themes into a single story set on the border between a medieval fantasy world and an advanced interstellar civilization. The player takes on young Ratix Silver, whose home planet is struck by a strange plague, which drags him and his friends into an adventure spanning from medieval kingdoms to alien technology, spaceships, and encounters with advanced civilizations that suddenly intrude into their seemingly ordinary world.

The combat system follows a more action-oriented approach similar to the Tales series, with movement along an axis and the ability to freely combine characters, attacks, and spells in real time, while the player can switch between controlled characters at any moment. The game also offered a branching system of relationships between characters, so-called private actions outside the main story, and crafting skills allowing the player to make their own equipment, all of which together influenced the development of relationships as well as one of several possible endings to the story. The graphical presentation was among the most ambitious the SNES offered in the late phase of its life, and the music was again composed by Motoi Sakuraba.

Star Ocean was released only in Japan, where it was received as a showcase of the console's technical possibilities at the twilight of its life and as the foundation for what is today an extensive series of sequels on later platforms. In the West, players only got to it through later remakes and fan translations, yet it remains the starting title through which tri-Ace built its reputation as a studio with a feel for ambitious sci-fi JRPGs and elaborate combat systems. The elements that Star Ocean introduced on the SNES — freely handled action combat, private scenes between characters, and story branching based on their relationships — became the hallmark of the entire series and influenced other Japanese RPGs looking for an alternative to purely turn-based combat.

Why play: Fans of sci-fi JRPGs with a feel for character relationships will find Star Ocean rewarding as the starting point of the whole series — its free-flowing combat and story branching based on character relationships were unconventional for their time.