One particular little joy for me is the B-movie. I love a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster or a well-oiled auteur-driven masterpiece as much as the next person – but I have a particular respect for and interest in the smaller, sillier, and generally less-successful projects. The same is true for my taste in games.
That’s why I’ll always be a stan for games like the criminally underrated, gloriously stupid 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. It’s why I love the voice acting of The House of the Dead, the campy vibe of pre-EA Command & Conquer real-time cutscenes. It’s why I play Earth Defense Force, endless Musou games, and stuff like Deadly Premonition. And it’s why I love Star Ocean.
Star Ocean, which turns 26 years old this week, wasn’t exactly envisioned as a B-tier series when it broke onto the scene with its Japan-only Super Nintendo debut. It was just another RPG released onto the SNES in what was a golden-age for the Japanese made variant of the genre, developed as the flagship game of then-new development house tri-Ace and published by Enix, the folks behind Dragon Quest. But over the years, that’s what it became.
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