NOTE: This page is from 2002/2003 and is here just for nostalgia now. The game has been translated for years now.

Title: Star Ocean
Genre: RPG
By: Tri-Ace & Enix
System: SNES
Year: 1996

Group: DeJap

Possibly one of the best games on the Super Famicom. If not, it's most likely the most advanced game it ever had. This is an awesome RPG with excellent graphics, battle system, sound, music, voices, etc. It boggles the mind how they got this to all work on the SFC. It's almost PSX quality in many ways.

I assume most of the people interested in this game are interested in it because they've played the sequel, which was released on the Playstation. SO2 is one of the coolest games ever. However, it lacked a good translation. Actually, the translation part of it was very well done, it was the script editing that they obviously skimped on; having played both the Japanese and English versions, I felt that the English script was more or less an unedited version. So let this be a lesson to you people who always complain about stuff being changed in translations - direct translations almost always sound weird and suck.

The script's pretty big, in the 550 - 600 KB area. It didn't take too long to get it done though, since I did it during a short break I had during the summer. There will probably be one or two script revisions before the final patch release, though, which will take A LOT of time.

Besides the script problems of SO2, there was also the problem of bad voice translation. They basically directly translated (well, as closely as possible) what people said during battle. The resulting English was pretty awkward. SO1 also has this feature, and I'm trying my hardest not to keep the characters saying stupid-sounding stuff.

Star Ocean 1 is much like its sequel, which should make sense. It has all the familiar stuff - skill points, private actions, special attacks, an arena, several secret caves (one is the equivalent of the Cave of Trials of SO2), item creation, battle voices, and more. A lot of the enemies from SO2 appear in SO1, as you can see from one of these images. Even the font is similar to the sequel, although unfortunately we can't use the English SO2 font as it's too big. I wanna use a slightly modified version to make it fit, but it doesn't look like that'll happen :/

SO1 is an excellent game, with lots of replay value, but it does have it's bad parts. The constant running back and forth between towns, the lack of a real story (SO2 didn't have one either, did it), and the many bugs. I've come across so many weird bugs it's scary. And one is an EVIL DEATH BUG (C). So many bugs in this game.

(You can download the finished translation here)

Here are some cool SO-related sites to check out: