Star Ocean 1's Time Travel

You know what’s pointless about Star Ocean 1?

...Besides just Star Ocean 1, as a whole, that is.

What’s pointless about Star Ocean 1 is its inclusion of time travel into its narrative.  What purpose does it serve?  What does it accomplish?  What is it about involving time travel in SO1 that improves or deepens the course of its events, opens new opportunities for storytelling, adjusts it in some way that has a positive or at least significant effect?  Why is it there?

I mean, SO1 already is about a Star Trek Federation-esque away mission on an RPG fantasy planet.  There is thus already a substantial technological difference between the space-faring futuristic Earth that Captain Ronyx and his first officer Ilia are from, and the standard RPG magic-using fantasy world that they find themselves involved with here.  This isn’t like their mission was on some advanced sci-fi planet and suddenly they find themselves in its distant, medieval-ish past--the main setting for the game is already centuries and centuries behind Ronyx and Ilia’s cultural standard, so in terms of the star-faring science fiction basis that Star Ocean 1 shamelessly lies about possessing, the time travel angle is redundant; the time period gap between future Earth and fantasy world Roak already exists in as great a capacity as it can without dialing things back to Stone Age settings.

Nor is the second most obvious possible use for the time travel accomplished: focusing on the gap between standard, present-day Roak, and its past.  What I mean by this is, well, if you take the science fiction angle out altogether (which Star Ocean 1 almost does on its own anyway), then the most obvious use for the characters traveling to Roak’s past is to set up a contrast between Present Roak and Past Roak, and/or to make use of elements of Roak’s past in a way the story needs, and/or to make a plot point of the changes to Present Roak caused by altering Past Roak. But none of this is accomplished successfully, either.

See, the problem is, so much of Star Ocean 1 takes place on Roak’s past, that it completely nullifies the ability of the time travel to have any meaning.  Not only does there not really seem to be much noticeable difference to the audience between the settings of Present Roak and Past Roak--much like in Tales of Phantasia, the standards of civilization between time periods seem almost interchangeable--but, more importantly, we don’t get enough exposure to Present Roak to form the expertise or attachment to know or care about the differences.  Star Ocean 1 spends almost as little time on planet Roak during the present as it does on anything related to the science fiction premise that it and its sequel falsely promise--at least 95% of this game is spent in Past Roak.  We don’t know enough about present-day Roak for the fact that we’re now in its past to matter to us, particularly not when its past is not especially different in appearance from what tiny snippet we saw of its present anyway.

And that gets in the way of the other 2 potential uses of the time travel in relation to Roak, too.  First of all, making use of the elements of the planet’s past can’t be done in a way that has any meaning to us, the audience, because from our perspective, the time period we spend all but 5% of the game in IS the standard time period.  Like...imagine you were an alien who knew nothing of Earth’s history.  Now imagine you land on Earth during the Renaissance, but only spend 5 minutes there before going back in time to the heyday of the Roman Empire, and then you spent a month traveling all about the city and through its territories.  Would you encounter all kinds of monumental figures, groups, landmarks, and objects of tremendous cultural significance to the people and culture of Earth that you initially encountered (the Renaissance)?  Yes, of course.  But would you have any capacity to recognize this, to realize the importance of these figures and icons of a culture that would be such a founding part of the modern day (Renaissance) life on Earth?  No!  Because you were only on Earth during the Renaissance for 5 minutes, so what importance any of this Roman Empire time period stuff has on the Earth that you initially made contact with is totally lost on you.  Star Ocean 1 doesn’t give you the time in Roak’s present to give you enough context for the major figures of its past to matter to you as you encounter them; you’d react exactly the same to it all as you would have if you’d just started in that time period to begin with.  Likewise, the lack of familiarity with the state of Present Roak means that any concern about altering the present by messing with the past isn’t going to enter your mind; you wouldn’t know the difference between 1 version of Present Roak and any other, anyway.

Time travel serves no emotional, character-specific use in the game, either.  If it’s not used for a major, sweeping function like we’ve talked about so far, time travel can be useful as a way of connecting to/expanding/resolving characters’ stories, instead.  The event in which Cornet travels to the past of Kururu’s memories and witnesses her mother’s fate in Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, or the time loop of Avril in Wild Arms 5, are examples of time travel utilized in a personal, character-oriented way.  But none of Star Ocean 1’s present characters have any greater personal connection to the past they travel to than any other given resident of Roak might.  Nothing about their journey to yesterday has more significance to Roddick’s and Millie’s personal development than a standard RPG quest would.

The time travel certainly has no practical purpose as an actional story device, either.  You look at Chrono Trigger, Radiant Historia, The Magic of Scheherazade, AeternoBlade 1 and 2, and various other RPGs that use time travel, and it’s a regular, functioning device.  It’s frequent, because it’s a recurring aspect of the story.  Going to different time periods as they search for ways to save their planet’s future--going to different time periods to even find out that the future needs to be saved--keeps time travel a constant function of Chrono Trigger.  Jumping back and forth between timelines in Radiant Historia, utilizing the tools of causality and gathering the best possible allies regardless of when they lived in The Magic of Scheherazade, rewinding and looping time as a form of power to accomplish Freya’s objectives in the AeternoBlade games, these all mean regular use of time travel, regular justification of its presence in these games.

But Star Ocean 1?  You travel to the past near the beginning of the game, and then you travel back near the game’s end.  That’s it.  It’s not an active storytelling device that’s doing something.  It’s not even as active an element of the game as it is in Tales of Phantasia, and this rant I’m writing originated from a stray thought about how pointless and barely present time travel was in that title.  Namco’s flagship RPG only escaped being the subject of scrutiny today by my remembrance that its Enix-spawned brother failed even worse in this same arena, at around the same time.

So I ask: why bother involving time travel in Star Ocean 1 at all?  What was the point?  If the game’s setting already created exactly the same contrast between the sci-fi premise and the fantasy reality that’s consistently Star Ocean’s blunder, and if the present of the planet isn’t unique enough from its past to draw attention, and we aren’t given enough time in the present to have the context to make the elements of its past noteworthy, and if the time travel itself isn’t a living element of the storytelling...why is the time travel there at all?  Had Ronyx and Ilia landed on Past Roak to begin with, and Roddick and Millie just happened to live in that time period instead, not a single, solitary part of the game’s events, cast, themes, ideas, or substance would have changed in even the slightest way.*  And while I’ve never prescribed too strongly to the infallibility of Chekhov’s Gun--I find the notion rather obnoxious, in fact--I do think that time travel is a major, loaded enough narrative device that if you’re going to use it, you need to be doing so for a reason.













* The same, now that I think about it, can largely be said for the science fiction element of the game, too.  Not quite as much a non-element as the time travel, but still, nixing the faux-Federation altogether would have required very, very little change to be made to the game.  Really, Star Ocean 1 is only a basic, uninspired fantasy RPG adventure, and it just seems like someone clumsily tacked a couple extra things onto to try to sell it as something entirely different.