Originally Posted by
Aussie2B
Star Ocean is actually the first text-heavy import I ever bought and played through, and at the time I couldn't read any Japanese whatsoever, not even katakana. Other than a few tiny insignificant things, there isn't any English in the game per se, but if you learn katakana, which is easy and I did as I played through the game, there is a lot of "hidden" English. Katakana is a set of characters that the Japanese use to express foreign words most of the time, and most of the time that occurs, English is the foreign language. So basically it's like learning a new alphabet, sounding out the words, and very quickly it becomes easy to recognize the English words the characters are trying to represent.
Anyway, since I had an experience similar to what you propose, I can tell you that the game is pretty straightforward and doesn't have many puzzles, so it's fairly easy to play without knowing any Japanese as long as you have the patience for a little bit of trial and error. There's also Ian Kelley, who wrote some excellent FAQs on the game, and through his work, I was able to do every last little thing in the game. Although I do have to admit that I played through Star Ocean 2 prior to the original, which I imagine helped a fair amount. Experience with SO3 would too, I'm sure, but maybe not nearly as much.
As for the quality of the game itself, I like the soundtrack better than SO3's. Sakuraba started going more orchestral with SO3, but I prefer his older more prog rock style. The story in the original is kinda thin, as in most tri-Ace games, but I thought the plot and personalities of SO3 were mostly a mess anyway. I prefer those in the first Star Ocean. I'd agree that you should pick up SO2 sometime as well, but I disagree that the PSP remake of the first Star Ocean is better than the Super Famicom version. First Departure certainly isn't bad, but it's kind of a cheap, hack job throwing SO1 in a SO2 shell, losing all the impact of how technically impressive Star Ocean was for the Super Famicom. Plus there are a lot of elements of the gameplay that got lost in the transition of shoehorning it into SO2's framework.