A lot of things about this game are almost good.
The story is almost an interesting biological warfare space story, until that plot becomes an afterthought.
The characters, both optional and mandatory, are almost good until you realize that even after doing all a character's PAs (read: extra character building scenes) and viewing their character ending scene, most of the characters remain incredibly undeveloped and shallow. Ilia and Millie fall prey to this same issue, but I ended the game liking those two characters well enough, so it's not all bad.
The gameplay is almost good until you realize there's no manual battle setting, so once you press the attack button your character will chase an enemy around the field until they finally line up directly in front of or behind said enemy. The difficulty also fluctuates wildly, and there are several ways to totally break game balance and become significantly overlevelled if you choose to do so.
And the last thing I'll talk about here, although there're plenty of other aspects that fit the almost good ticket, is the Specialty system. I really, really like the concept of this. Essentially there are like 10-15 specialty skills that range from everything to creating and performing music, to pickpocketing NPCs, etc etc. And it's almost so cool! Unfortunately only a few of these are useful and some shouldn't even be used as they'll decrease your party member's affection ratings, potentially ruining your endings without warning you you'll do so.
All these almost good things--combined with a few strictly bad ones like the constant backtracking which only gets worse if you want to see all the PAs--land Star Ocean First Departure R somewhere just on the border of not being worth playing.
If you're looking at this as your first Star Ocean game, I sincerely hope you'll start with a different title instead. First Departure might be worth playing once you're a fan who wants to be able to say they played/beat the whole series, but it won't win over anybody trying to get into the series for the first time.
The story is almost an interesting biological warfare space story, until that plot becomes an afterthought.
The characters, both optional and mandatory, are almost good until you realize that even after doing all a character's PAs (read: extra character building scenes) and viewing their character ending scene, most of the characters remain incredibly undeveloped and shallow. Ilia and Millie fall prey to this same issue, but I ended the game liking those two characters well enough, so it's not all bad.
The gameplay is almost good until you realize there's no manual battle setting, so once you press the attack button your character will chase an enemy around the field until they finally line up directly in front of or behind said enemy. The difficulty also fluctuates wildly, and there are several ways to totally break game balance and become significantly overlevelled if you choose to do so.
And the last thing I'll talk about here, although there're plenty of other aspects that fit the almost good ticket, is the Specialty system. I really, really like the concept of this. Essentially there are like 10-15 specialty skills that range from everything to creating and performing music, to pickpocketing NPCs, etc etc. And it's almost so cool! Unfortunately only a few of these are useful and some shouldn't even be used as they'll decrease your party member's affection ratings, potentially ruining your endings without warning you you'll do so.
All these almost good things--combined with a few strictly bad ones like the constant backtracking which only gets worse if you want to see all the PAs--land Star Ocean First Departure R somewhere just on the border of not being worth playing.
If you're looking at this as your first Star Ocean game, I sincerely hope you'll start with a different title instead. First Departure might be worth playing once you're a fan who wants to be able to say they played/beat the whole series, but it won't win over anybody trying to get into the series for the first time.