Star Ocean - What Should Be

Channel:

Pixel Tunes

Subscribers:

267

Published on April 7, 2023 4:30:06 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlDlyoEpJtc

Game:

Star Ocean (1996)

Duration: 2:40

30 views

4

Star Ocean (スターオーシャン, Sutā Oshan) is an RPG developed by tri-Ace and published by Enix for the Super Famicom that was released in Japan on July 19, 1996.

In 1994, game developer Wolf Team signed a deal with publisher Namco to release a title called Tales of Phantasia. However, the development cycle for Tales of Phantasia was plagued with creative disputes between the developers and publisher, leading to much of the development team leaving to form a new company, which would become tri-Ace.

Both Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean stretched the power of the Super Famicom to its limits, with a total of 48 megabits of data. Additionally, Star Ocean was also one of two games that used a special S-DD1 chip to aid in compression of almost all graphics and map data, meaning that it effectively stored even more data than Tales of Phantasia, though the compression led to a lower audio quality.

The game also featured special technology called a "Flexible Voice Driver" that allowed for the compression of sound, allowing for voice clips for characters when in battles, another trait that was both very rare for a Super Famicom game, and shared with Tales of Phantasia.

Despite appearing in North American video game magazine Nintendo Power in 1996, the Super Famicom version was never officially released anywhere outside Japan. Enix America ceased to publish games in North America by the end of 1995 due to poor sales, and Nintendo had already passed on publishing Tales of Phantasia a year prior, instead choosing to focus on the then-upcoming Nintendo 64 video game console, leaving the title stuck in Japan until the re-release on the PSP.

The games soundtrack was composed by Motoi Sakuraba.