Star Ocean's Skill system is weird and wonderful
Have you ever conducted an orchestra in order to cook your dinner better?
In an effort to combat my ever growing backlog of games I recently returned to Star Ocean First Departure R. When I first played this remaster of the first Star Ocean game I bounced off it quite quickly. It really does not leave a good first impression. Weirdly difficult, a lot of seemingly pointless back tracking, I got lost easily despite its relative linearity and I really did not gel with the combat all that much.
But this time round, doing the ignoble thing of following a guide to minimize my grief, I’ve discovered the true value of this game and the surprisingly interesting things it does with its systems.
To cut a long story short, Star Ocean First Departure R has a bizarre skill system. As you level up you unlock combat abilities but you also gain skill points which at first you can’t use for anything. It’s only once you get into the game proper that you have access to the books that unlock this feature, and even then? Well…god bless you if you want to wade in blind and try to make sense of this on your own?
While most skills have a definitive ‘raises [STAT] by [X]’ descriptor, what they actually unlock is often vague. So vague in fact that in order to make sense of them you have to just dive straight in and explore. It’s kind of wonderful in a way, a sort of exciting unknown frontier in which noodling around with the shape of things grants you these little bursts of excitement as you identify certain effects and the symbiotic relationship some have with others.
This relationship manifests in how enough points in certain skills unlocks abilities beyond what the skill descriptor alone offers. Enough points in a range of specific skills unlocks new abilities, and enough skill symbiosis between party members unlocks group abilities that can greatly benefit your journey through a vast and often incredibly hostile realm. Eventually some of these abilities will break the whole game open, allowing you to game systems to give you a huge advantage over not only the combat challenges but also the game’s economy.
Some choice examples for you:
Group Appraising, unlocked by levelling up Appraising and Crafting, allows you to raise and lower the prices of everything in the world, effectively allowing you to buy low and sell high like some kind of ultracapitalist scumbag
Enlightenment, unlocked by levelling up Train and Survival, essentially doubles the amount of skillpoints you earn on a level up for a basically negligable stat deduction
Contraband, unlocked by levelling up Pickpocketing and Replication, gives you the super cool and sexy ability to make forgeries
Orchestra, unlocked by levelling up Music and Art, allows you to bang out the tunes giving you the spirit power to craft better things, increasing the success of all these other ventures.
The theatric esoterica of this system is part of the charm, of course, and with a few initial pointers I’ve been having a great time exploring what the game has to offer. I think this is something more role playing games should do: bring the joy of exploration outside of just the world, make at least a part of its systems not quite a puzzle, but an alchemy set.