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

The 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 2001 Game Boy Color game Star Ocean: Blue Sphere that released in 2009 by tri-Ace for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service. It featured new graphics, new artwork, new music (done by Motoi Sakuraba), 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.

Note: The development of this mobile remake was actually outsourced by tri-Ace to a game company named Sonic Powered. Sonic Powered is known for porting console games made by other companies to mobile such as Wonder Project J2 and Super Star Soldier.^[1]

Gameplay

The game follows the traditional formula 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).^[2] It was released later on the Yahoo! Mobile and EZweb services in December of that year.^[3] On November 1st, 2017, Square Enix announced its shutdown of its 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.^[4] 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.

It's very possible that either Sonic Powered or tri-Ace still has some sort of backups for the game. tri-Ace is known for keeping concept art and assets they made for games that date all the way back to the mid 90s.

Further Research

Square Enix's official website for Blue Sphere Mobile actually had flash powered showcases of the game's story, characters, world, etc.

We can actually download the SWF files that do work from the Wayback Machine website archives and decompile them to rip assets from them.

https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler

As well, we can also use the original Nicovideo gameplay uploads and analyze them in order to extract audio snippets and perhaps make a few full audio recreations of the updated music tracks that Motoi Sakuraba made for the mobile port.