Never played Valkyrie Profile, right? Sure, a few of you out there did, but the game's developer tri-Ace didn't hit it big till years later - with Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. That PS2 RPG captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of gamers. But it was hardly the first epic adventure tri-Ace had taken on. No, the company's roots reach much further back.
The original Star Ocean debuted on the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo. Arriving almost comically late - July 1996, almost two years after the PlayStation debuted in Japan - it never journeyed to the US. But in 1998, its PlayStation sequel, Star Ocean: The Second Story, did. Sony themselves brought this RPG to the west; it picked up some fans but was hardly what you'd call a massive hit. Blame the scattershot gameplay or the terrible voice acting, but somehow... it failed to really find an audience.
