Star Ocean: Blue Sphere Mobile (lost inaccessible mobile remake of Game Boy Color role-playing game; 2009)

Game's logo

Status: Lost

Star Ocean: Blue Sphere Mobile (aka スターオーシャンブルースフィアモバイル Sutā Ōshan Burū Sufia Mobairu) was a remake of the original Game Boy Color game released in 2009 by Tri Ace for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service. It featured new graphics, new artwork, new music, and a reworked battle system. Like it's original version on the GBC, the game was never translated or released outside of Japan. The game was shut down in 2018 due to Square Enix cutting off support for their mobile distribution servers.

Gameplay

The game follows the traditional formala of the previous Star Ocean games. Unlike most JRPGs from the time, the combat system is not turn-based, instead it plays similar to a one-on-one fighting game with some RPG elements thrown in. At the start of a battle, the player must choose one out of the three party characters to play as, and can switch between them at any given moment. As mentioned before, this remake completely reworked the battle system, namely with combo attacks.

Availability

The game was released on June 8th, 2009 on the I-Mode mobile service for 600 points for that service (which equaled about 630 yen).^[1] It was released later on the Yahoo! Mobile and EZweb services in December of that year.^[2] On November 1st 2017, Square Enix announced it's shutdown of it's mobile services for Final Fantasy Mobile on March 31st 2018, which also meant Star Ocean Blue Sphere along with others would become unavailable as well.^[3] Despite there being many screenshots and gameplay footage, there apparently hadn't been any attempts to archive it. Those who still have the game on their devices will most likely not be able to play it as it required connection to the server.