I kept pushing it off for a while since I wasn't very far into the game. Now I got the feeling I'm reaching in far enough to make it worth talking about.
As a little bit of background, this game was first released on the Super Nintendo, but sadly never reached US. ROM wise, it was also an oddity that required a special chip to be added that contained the graphical data, as apparently the game itself exceed the capacity that the SNES carts were able to hold data-wise. If SNES games were 4MB at most, this game reached 6MB due to that special data, which required some special patches from emulators just for this unique game.
It was also one of the few games that worked in any amount of voice acting on the SNES, although it wasn't that much either. A good part of the opening cutscenes had some voices in it, in English despite being a Japanese game (Star Trek influence?). Yet the SNES audio quality and the harsh compression imposed made the sound clips a bit hard to understand, but it was a step in that direction.
For the PSP, thanks to the capacities of this little machine, there are alot more than the opening that are voiced, and I must say the voice acting is pretty good too. I've played Star Ocean : Second Story, and many of the lines felt right off forced or out of line. Well, that was limited to battles only, but even if you limit yourself to battles in Star Ocean : First Departure, you'll notice that there was some polishing to the lines used, they feel tons more natural.
As for music, I can't remember if the songs are that much different than the original on the SNES, but they meet up with what I expected to hear from Second Story (PS1), so they are very good sounding. They are adequate for the cutscenes, upbeat for dungeons and fights, just the way I expect them to be.
Thanks to a better hardware, it also beneficiated from a graphic overhaul, bringing it on par with the Second Story. The overworld is a rotating 3D map with decent details. In towns and villages, one thing that I remember from Second Story was the detail put to lighting. Normally you'd expect a character to either be fully lighted or shaded. In this game, half-stepping into a shadow did make your character half-shaded too, a very intricate detail considering the amout of shadowy areas you may cross in a village.
From what I can see, this version also received that kind of attention, which is pleasing to see. Despite being sprites over pre-rendered backgrounds for villages and dungeons, the amount of frames of animations used for something as simple as walking is impressive, and you see the same amount of detail in fights as well.
The battles are also taken off from Second Story style, with a large area to roam. The original SNES was a little cramped due to the hardware limitations, but the following games retained the idea of having a real-time battle with positioning and chasing targets with better power at their disposal.
All in all, I found everything I liked of this series, better looking, better sounding. Even though I haven't played the SNES version more than an hour, I still have seen enough to compare and see that this was a great remake/port (whatever you want to call it all considered), and I'm happy of having it in my collection. If you have a PSP and like RPGs, this is a must have.
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