Is it true that the first Star Ocean game was actually unfinished?

I have played this game for the SNES several times, and I have always had this feeling that it was rushed;
there are several details that indicate this, for example the huge absence of characters in several Private Actions, and the incredibly fast plot development a few hours into the game.
The final dungeon also seems to appear very randomly, and the voice acting during battles is curiously lacking (Ratix is the ONLY one who ever thanks Milly for healing the party, for example).
The game is also extremely similar to Tales of Phantasia, both in looks and game content.

It is certainly a good game, and could probably rival both ToP and SO2 if tri-Ace gave it some more time, but the way it is like now makes it feel a little too "empty", and thus I can't rate it any higher than 8/10.

I think it has more to do with the fact that they had to cut it down to make it distributable.

The developers for this game pushed the SNES to it's limit as well as the cartridge capacity; even after compressing the hell out of everything they still had more data than a single cartridge could hold; the final retail version of the game stands at 48 megabits, which is the max an SNES cartridge can hold.

Star Ocean actually has a really interesting development history. It was actually developed by the same team who developed Tales of Phantasia and then promptly ditched Namco for tri-Ace due to creative disputes with Namco, which would account for the similarities between the two games as well.

Oh wow, I didn't know that. I knew they had a problem fitting it to one cartridge, though. The same thing happened when making Seiken Densetsu for Famicom. They couldn't fit it to one cartridge so they scrapped it, but remade it later on the GB as Final Fantasy Adventure.

Somehow I always thought that FFA was actually an unrelated project that just used the name they'd already registered. :O

There is a remake of the game called Star Ocean: First Departure for the Sony PSP that incorporates additional story elements and private actions into the game. The pacing of the game is still poor, though, implying that the original story was much bigger than what is seen in the game. I know that there were several scenarios that were taken out of the game involving the character Marvel, or Mavelle, in the original version that they were able to add for the enhanced remake.

>>> Unlock all the playable characters in this game is a real pain, you gotta play and beat the game like 3 or 4 times, not to mention you have to read a character recruitment guide to not screw everything in the process. ( I played the PSP one).:luca: