Star ocean: first departure R is like a budget Star Ocean 2, and as a result it might be « objectively » worse but this makes me like it more
After the first hour you’re thrown into the past and just have to travel from town to town for a while with almost no real plot happening at all; this feels less intentional and more of a result of the original game being rushed, but it rules. All I want to do is visit these beautiful pre-rendered cities, fight monsters in a simplistic action RPG battle system, dwelve into item creation, with as few cutscenes as possible
The unnecessary maximalist bloat in this game is truly something to behold
It feels like the devs made half of a standard ARPG, then someone on the team played Earthbound and everyone agreed that ordering pizzas mid-dungeons and putting condiments on your food items to make them better/worse was the best part, so they spent all of their remaining resources towards expanding upon these ideas, without changing anything about the rest of the game to account for it
And in this remake, they added even more unnecessary items and skills from Star Ocean 2
You can:
- Cook items
There are 160 meals you can cook. All of them are useless because stores sell affordable, good healing items
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Pickpocket NPCs. Every non-store NPC has an item you can steal. So far I pickpocketed every NPC from two cities and got mostly worthless items from it, idk, I like it though
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Get random advice from the gods
- Send a pet bird to a store in a dungeon or on the world map so he can fetch items for you
You get a cooler bird at a higher specialty level
- Compose a song for your instrument and play your music. I think there are about 10-15 instruments and 2 songs / instrument. Each song = one unique track on the soundtrack
Canonically your team is carrying a pipe organ around for this purpose
You can eventually start a band and have multiple party members play?
- Copy items with a magic 3D printing camera. Probably extremely powerful if you know what you’re doing, but all I can manage to do with it right now is taking blurry photos
- Make some art
Your characters can draw self-portraits. Using a portrait will let you see the character’s in-game character art… that you could also see by going to the status screen. You lose the portrait after using it. I don’t get it
You can also paint cards that give various battle bonuses, or sculpt clay…
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Lower or raise the encounter rate. This often fails and will have the opposite effect but there are no tells
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Write some mysterious books
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Print and sell forged bills. I am serious
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And a dozen of other skills like alchemy and machinery, and again none of them are needed or even useful, you can get by so easily without touching any of that stuff and the game is super short for a JRPG