Star Ocean: The Second Story

"A really big game!"

After Kartia (an okay game)I decided to try out Star Ocean: The Second Story since it was the only RPG left in the store. The game took me quite a while to complete, and I have mixed feelings about it. Here are the scores:
GRAPHICS: 7/10
The game said they were spectacular, but to put in bluntly, they're anything but. The characters all look pretty ugly, and some looked like they just got out of the shower, their hair was so bad (and I don't even notice hard all that often!) The spell effects looks okay, but it got tedious watching Explosion carry itself out, taking up the next 15 seconds of the game.
The towns look okay, and the backgrounds as well. The NPC characters tend to have about 6 different templates, except for a few ''unique'' ones, and everyone belongs to one of these families. The two castles in the game are also almost exactly alike.
SOUND/MUSIC: 8/10
To start out with, the voice acting in this game sucks worse than... I don't need to go into detail, but let's just say it's worse than any other game you can ever hope to play. The enemies are strangely mute as well, only flinching a little bit when wounded by something. The sounds are okay, but tend to get repetitive.
The music is a little better. The normal battle theme gets wearisome fast, but you don't really notice it after a while. The boss theme is good, as are the emotional moments between the two main characters (more on this later.)
STORY: 9/10
Well, you don't know what you're doing at first, except for to check out a meteorite. After messing around in the tower guarding it, you discover a whole bunch of psycho maniacs who want to destroy the universe with it. Not the best, but certainly not the worst either.
GAMEPLAY: 8/10
Hoo boy, this is gonna take a while. To start out with, you can begin the game as either Claude (an army guy) or Rena (a... well, I don't exactly what she is.) At any rate, the story begins with Claude somehow being teleported down to a totally unknown planet... how convenient that this new planet has inhabitants that are human, speak the same language, and are friendly! Not very realistic, but hey what can you do. You then proceed to run around, collecting items, slaying enemies, and finding out more about the plot. This repeats until you get to the final dungeon, Fienal Tower, in which case you slay the psycho dudes and save the world.
You start out with any of the two, but can get many more, including Celine, the supposedly beautiful but in my opinion weird sorceress who sticks metal rings through her chest and forehead. There's Ashton, whose abysmal luck gets him attached to two dragons, who apparently don't have any useful function. And then we come to Dias, the tall and emotionless swordsmen who has the only cool voice in the game. And there's a whole bunch more where they came from.
Now, completing the dungeons would be hard, except for that you can make an ENORMOUS variety of items, ranging from Dull Sword to 1-up Pudding, to Demonslayer Rings... the selection is insane. You don't know quite what you'll get, upon randomly combining that Long Sword with a Meteorite in hope that you get something. This is good, but soon gets annoying, as the success rate is rather low, even at the final level of proficiency. Fortunately, you can carry as many items as you want, otherwise you'd tear your hair out by the roots. You can sell stuff, pickpocket people, call giant bunnies to ride on... this game is huge. There's about 16 dungeons to complete as well, plus a Secret Dungeon which contains harder monsters, more bosses, and powerful items!
Enough about the good side now we come to the flaws of this game. There are many bugs in this game, almost as many as in Icewind Dale, but worse. I mean, in the former you would lose an item or something, but in this, the game would freeze up after a battle, with no way to get it back to normal. Also, sometimes the characters will morph into others on the save screen, all weirdly colored.
Another problem was the ''death'' of your party. You can have up to eight, but can only fight with four at a time. And if you lose all four, you die! Why? I don't know! Where the **** did the other guys go! I was pretty ticked at this.
And lastly, you can only save at certain save points, which are few and far between. It would have been nice if you could have saved in the middle of a dungeon.
Pant pant...
REPLAY VALUE: 7/10
Two more difficulty levels, and depending on the emotional levels (which I forgot to mention earlier) your characters will get different endings. Of course, the endings aren't that different, and it's kinda pointless to play through the whole game to hear your character say one more line.
CHALLENGE: 6/10
Eh, this game was too easy. I did look on the Internet, but even without it I could have beaten it easily. I only died a few times when I was getting used to the combat system, and maybe once or twice in the secret dungeon. Otherwise, not bad.
OVERALL: 8/10
This game is very big and engrossing, but has some pretty serious setbacks which hinder it. Also, many of the categories besides gameplay were merely average, which brought the score down even further.
RENT OR BUY
I always say buy, because you seriously can't go anywhere. You'd spend the first night getting through all the conversation (yet another thing I forgot to mention)and getting used to the combat. Otherwise, it's really a matter of personal preference.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/16/01, Updated 02/16/01