Star Ocean: Blue Sphere

released on Jun 28, 2001

Star Ocean: Blue Sphere is a Role-Playing game, developed by Tri-Ace and published by Enix Corporation, which was released in Japan in 2001. It is the direct sequel to Star Ocean: The Second Story.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More


Game Review - by Gideon Zhi

It's Star Ocean! It's for the gameboy color! It plays kinda like Tales of Phantasia crossed with Zelda, with Star Ocean's item creation systems and stuff. Or something.

(editor's note: lol at the whole story of a translation patch for this game coming from a repro company commissioning someone for a translation and then trying to get it taken down when people reupload it, buddy, the patch is not legally yours if you don't own the rights to the game!)

This is probably the most frustrating game I've ever forced myself to slog through. It made me white-knuckle angry. On the surface, its a technical marvel. They really did cram a whole SO game into a GBC. it's like 45mb, which is fucking HUGE for a GBC game. its fucking wild and you've got to respect the hustle from tri-ace for sure. The astmosphere is really good, the art direction is beautiful, the music never gets old, but...
The progression system boils down to "pour all of your skill points into one person." The Star Ocean games have generally been easy enough that the crafting system felt tacked on, and this is the worst example of it. I was overpowered for any given encounter, I couldn't imagine making it any easier. And yet, despite it being that easy, the combat, which is condensed into only the horizontal plane, feels extremely one-sided. Either you kill any given thing in three hits, or you find yourself going back and forth landing a hit with miniscule damage because the attack gets canceled in favor of the enemy's attack, and then taking miniscule damage from said attack. And then out of nowhere there will be some attacks that are near unavoidable and nearly wipe the entire party in one go. It feels like any given fight really boils down to whether you land that pre-fight stunning hit, and then a healthy amount of RNG to go with it. The gauntlet of Milleniums in the final dungeon made me take a damn smoke break.
And then the dungeon design itself had be nearly tearing my hair out. every single dungeon it was some puzzle you'd have to have a galaxy brain to intuitively figure out instead of following a walkthrough or stumbling across the right answer by blind luck. There's a dungeon that on your SECOND visit, makes you visit every floor multiple times each, and my characters were nearly maxed by the end of it, because I was there for a quarter of my playtime. I bet the strategy guides for this one were going like hot cakes back in 2001.
What I will say about this game is that it doesn't have a dumbed down story for the benefit of the platform its played on. Despite it being incredibly frustrating, it does still FEEL like a Star Ocean game at heart. The ending was actually very nice.

to me this is the ultimate “hidden gem”; it absolutely floored me when I booted it up. the artwork is shocking: the spritework looks like something from a lauded 2020s indie darling. Each of the party members are lovingly and naturalistically animated; points of pixelated colors bleed across the black-line character outlines. These aren’t the static chibi characters of Pokémon and the hoard of Game Boy RPGs in its wake, all of the art and animation feels high-end and bespoke. The first thing I ever saw of this game was a screenshot of the first boss, which looked like something I never thought you could do on a Game Boy Color.

Beyond the incredible look and feel of the game (also, I’ve never played a Star Ocean game before and I love that this is a gaiden/side story. just a bunch of friends that already know each other getting into a new adventure, no huge intro/setup. the ideal RPG beginning) this game is insanely deep and complex, with layers and layers of systems. each party member has manageable skills, abilities, stats, and equipment, with all characters sharing one xp pool. some characters have environmental-specific abilities that you need to access new areas. some characters have unique upgrade systems that involve complex minigames. some characters are op, some are very strange, all of them have customizable movesets that play out in fluid and fast paced Tales-style fights. I am still just scratching the surface of everything this game has to offer (all the gamefaqs we’re written 2001-2003 before there was an English patch, which is excellent btw) but I am so excited I found it. One of the best Game Boy Color games for sure, and such a feeling of wonder. Can’t recommend it enough.

i played this before an eng patch was out so im excited to revisit it