Star Ocean: The Second Story

"The second installment of Star Ocean is a success!"

May 31, 1999- Star Ocean: The Second Story sees a North American release. While the game certainly has drawn a following, it was one of the more obscure PlayStation titles at the time. The Second Story (referred to as SO2 from now) was developed by tri-Ace and published by Enix, the RPG giant of Japan, rivaling SquareSoft with its popular Dragon Quest series. SO2 is the second installment in the Star Ocean franchise. Although not a sequel, SO2 follows the story of Rena Lanford and Claude Kenni, the son of Ronixis who is briefly mentioned in the first installment.

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Story 7/10
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The game follows the story Claude Kenni and Rena Lanford. An interesting is the player's ability to choose which story they'd like to play at the beginning. While it had much potential, what you get is two very similar stories with three to four minor differences and one different character in each story. Anyways, Claude Kenni is the son of Ronixis, the head of the Earth Federation. He has just been promoted to the rank of ensign and is assigned an exploration on the uninhabited planet Milocinia. When he encounter strange machinery left behind, he disobeys orders and gets too close and as a result is blasted away to the far away planet of Expel.

Rena Lanford is just your average teenage girl living in your average village. She was discovered in the forest by and taken in. She has the powers of healing and is saved from a monster by Claude. As a result, she believes him to be the "Hero of Light" from ancient tales who will be the people's savior in time of crisis. Together, Claude and Rena begin a quest to investigate the sorcery globe, a mysterious object that fell to Expel has been causing mysterious occurences and the violent behavior of monsters. From this, we get a massive journey to save the world; no, the universe. Unfortunately, it's as it seems: dull and cliched at times and nothing is really done to cover this up. While the story takes a laid back approach, there are certain points of interest throughout the story all connected by many dungeons in between. Especially near the end of the game, it seems like dungeon after dungeon is throw at you.

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Gameplay 10/10
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Quite possibly the best part of the game, and the best gameplay of any PlayStation game- the gameplay. Battles take place in real-time, although the extent of this can be decided by the player at the beginning of the game. The only part of the battles that isn't in real-time is spells, which have some pretty lengthy animations and pause the battle whenever they're used. Aside from that, the battles offer a lot of fun and don't get boring. If you've ever played Tales of Phantasia, the battle system is similar to that except they take place on a 3D field. The battles are random and take place on the world map and in dungeons.

The tremendous amount of replayability comes from the customizing features of the game. If you bothered to read the back of the jewel case, Enix boasts "over 80 different endings." However, each of these is very similar to the others to the point where you really only need or want to see two of them. Each character has skills in which they can invest skill points (SP) into. SP is gained upon level up. Each player also has a special talent, such as Dexterity and Sense of Rhythm. These combined with skills ultimately grant your character certain specialties, such as Pickpocketing.

SO2 also allows you to create items from pre-existing ones. In fact, one of Claude's best weapons can only be obtained through item creation. It's not like it's one of those options that you never use either. I found myself constantly backtracking just so I could make some new items. Taking it one step further, player's can also customize new weapons if they have the right materials. Combining a weapon and a mineral creates a new weapon. However, skills and talents determine the success of this and you could end up with a dud.

In towns, the Private Action is available. Basically, every character goes off on his or her own and you can talk to them to raise or decrease affection levels. Special Private Actions are available depending on what you did (or didn't do) throughout the game, and really add interest to the somewhat dull storyline.

Now the difficulty... there are three levels of difficulty: Normal, galaxy, and Universe with Universe being the most difficult. I found myself routinely dying at least once to most of the bosses. Most of them require you know what you're doing and not just mashing buttons the entire time. Upon replaying it I found it easier although the optional bosses and certain storyline bossed still proved quite difficult.

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Sound 6/10
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The background music generally went well with the location and situation. The music wasn't the highest quality though and one of the weaker points of the game. While there was no voice acting in the story dialogue, the battle voices were just plain awful. They were barely audible and just hearing Celine's "Thunderbolt!" is enough to remind anyone of Tales of Phantasia's introduction.

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Graphics 8/10
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The character sprites and backgrounds looked blotchy at times but were vibrant and colorful. The cutscenes, while there being only one or two, were well done with respect to when this game was made. Under each character's status is a drawing of them, which were well done. They look anime-like. In fact, a Star Ocean anime and manga was created in Japan but both stopped about halfway through.

Replayability: The level of replayability is SO2 is astounding. Not for the endings (which certainly compliment the already enormous gameplay), but for the customizing and creation. Definitely a game you can play over and over again and one of those games that's just plain fun to take out from time to time to remind yourself of its greatness.

Buy or Rent?: Today, the game is somewhat hard to find. Buying a used copy is good enough as you'll certainly want to spend a lot of time with this game to get the full experience.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/20/07