Now Square-Enix along with developer Gemdrops is back with a remastered copy of that original Playstation release entitled Star Ocean: The Second Story R. If you’ve never played a Star Ocean game before, this is the place to jump on and if you have, it’s time to get back to Claude, Rena, and the whole gang because the new game is absolutely outstanding. Everything has been redone with a style that’s reminiscent of the Octopath Traveller engine. This is a separate engine to be sure, but it definitely looks cool and it’s a big upgrade from the original release.
In Star Ocean The Second Story R, you have your choice of two protagonists, Claude and Rena. Claude is the son of an admiral in a space-faring culture and ends up marooned on a planet where he meets Rena, a local girl with peculiar ears who ends up accompanying him on his quest to get home. There’s a lot more going on than however, and you’ll end up travelling the world with a rather interesting cast of characters. A ‘Sorcery Globe’ has landed on the continent of Ell and things aren’t going very well over there since the globe is spawning a horde of monsters. There’s probably more to the situation than meets the eye though, so it’s best that you investigate. After all, who else would?
The plot in Star Ocean is interesting but definitely on the lighter side, even though there are some key emotional moments that tug at the heartstrings a bit here and there. Some burgeoning romance also keeps things interesting and there’s more than a bit of humor as you work your way towards Ell and start to figure out what’s going on. Since the main story in the game is a good 30 hours long, expect there to be a fair bit of character development and more than a few twists and turns along the way. The balance in the game definitely favors combat and dungeons over story though so it would be a shame to ruin any of the main plot here. If you really want to know what’s happening, you can look it up anyway (and shame on you).
From a mechanical standpoint, Star Ocean is a very traditional action/RPG. Combat consists of random battles both in the overworld and dungeons and enemies appear as purple blobs with glowing eyes (green blobs if you’re too strong for the enemies). As they spot you, enemies chase you and attack when they touch you and if multiple enemies get near each other they connect in chains, forcing you to fight them back to back but increasing your experience gains with each consecutive battle. When we say traditional, that includes the encounter rate in Star Ocean The Second Story R as well.
Encounter frequency is insanely high and just standing around is guaranteed to get you attacked. If you’re not constantly moving and paying attention, you’re constantly in combat and that’s genuinely irritating. Vintage RPGs used to have random encounters every few steps but in a way this is even worse because you’re forced down narrow corridors and areas and enemies just pop up right in front of you all the time, forcing you to stop every few seconds to fight again and making it hard to keep track of where you’re even going. The high encounter rate also significantly slows Star Ocean The Second Story R down on Switch because the load times between battles and before battles are just long enough to have a cumulative effect on the amount of time you play. The game runs smoothly on Switch and looks great but the load times are too high and it can get incredibly irritating to be attacked constantly when you’re just trying to escape an area.
Combat itself is a real-time affair with your button presses enabling attacks and special attacks. You can only control one character but can switch between any of your four party members (once you have four) freely during combat. Enemies move around the combat area and you can move your active character to meet them head to head or cast spells that target them. The system isn’t particularly complex which is great, but the system isn’t particularly complex which is somewhat irritating as well. Unlike traditional ARPG games, Star Ocean feels like you have limited control over additional party members and you’re just trying to keep other characters alive while your tank (usually Claude) is slowly whittling down the enemy forces. It definitely would be better if the fights weren’t so omnipresent but on top of that problem, leveling is a bit too slow, resulting in a massive struggle to survive on standard difficulty unless you grind for hours to get your levels up.
This is where we come to one of the key issues with Star Ocean The Second Story R. Leveling up characters simply isn’t all that effective. You can grind and grind and you’ll barely be surviving dungeons because the level-scaling in other modern games like the Trails series and Final Fantasy XVI just isn’t present here. Instead, there are a whackload of skills and other things you’ll have to take into consideration if you really want to survive in Star Ocean The Second Story R. Each character gains points as they go up levels. There are actually three points systems available in the game, one for combat skills, one for specialties, and one for passive combat.
As you level up, you’ll gain points for each character in each system. Using the combat skill points makes your special attacks more powerful but the points are less common so you need to allocate them more carefully. The passive combat abilities add additional boosts to combat, allowing you to slip past enemy defenses, do additional damage, and cast spells more rapidly. The key points system however is the specialties system. Each character has a number of specialties they can choose from that boost their skills in things like Animal Training, Courage, Aesthetics, and lots more. Boosting these raises skill levels in a variety of areas and allows you to raise more important levels. For example, you can create items or food dishes on your own, make items to sell, and most importantly, craft and modify weapons.
Ignore the crafting system at your own peril, because it has a significant impact on whether or not you’ll be able to fight most enemies. Crafting weapons for Claude is ridiculously important and it’s remarkably easy to make incredibly overpowered weapons that do triple or quadruple the amount of damage that other weapons do. You can also craft a variety of accessories that provide massive boosts to defense, drop the cost of magic spells significantly, and plenty more. The more powerful and unique the weapon you try to modify (assuming your skill levels are high enough), the more powerful the result will be, providing base damage into the thousands and making some attacks hit 9999 damage with ease.
Getting the stuff to craft is almost as hard as crafting it though. If you’re on top of things and scrounge up the cash and skill points early, you can start pickpocketing quickly and make yourself even stronger, essentially breaking the game’s intended systems but also making Star Ocean The Second Story R much more approachable. Pickpocketing is awesome because you can do it on basically every NPC, even party members. Key NPCs always have better gear too, so stealing from them nets you some wicked stuff. There’s a downside though – your party members don’t like it when you steal from others and your friendship levels drop as you continue to steal so use it sparingly. Friendship levels dictate what the ending to the game will be like and since there are (no joke) 99 endings in the game, you can massively mess with the ending outcomes by pickpocketing too much.
Speaking of those friendships, you maintain them by participating in Private Actions throughout the game. When you are in a town, you can select Private Action by hitting the requisite key on the controller. Your party will split apart and you’ll be left with either Claude or Rena (depending on your pathway choice) and you can talk to your teammates and villagers to witness a variety of side-story events. The choices you make in these events affect how your party feels about you and change the endings you can get based on the strength and weakness of individual relationships. Conveniently, the map menu shows you which towns have waiting Private Actions for you to participate in and you can use the Fast Travel function to zip over to those places and complete them. Completists will be using this system and pickpocketing heavily to get just the right balance of friendships to see various endings but with so many, it’s difficult to believe anyone would have time to see them all.
Since you have an idea of what it takes to make significant progress in the game, let’s talk about the gameplay balance a bit more. There are three levels of difficulty in Star Ocean The Second Story R, Earth (easy), Galaxy (normal), and Universe (hard). With most games, the default difficulty is normal and it typically has better pacing than other modes. In Star Ocean, that’s simply not the case. Galaxy mode is skewed heavily towards combat, with enemies taking significantly more damage to defeat. Frequent deaths are common unless you manage to master the various crafting and modification systems of the game. Earth on the other hand is more fairly balanced and probably the best option for most players. Universe is for those masochists out there that just want to suffer endlessly and tweak tiny bits of the combat system until they fine-tune their approach, a difficult task in turn-based RPGs and much harder here in the fast-paced and frantic combat of Star Ocean The Second Story R.
Assuming you’ve selected Earth, you’re still hampered by the overall system design of Star Ocean though. For an action-based game, you’re still constantly utilizing sub-menus and sub-sub-menus throughout the gameplay. Selecting skills and balancing them is time consuming, choosing different items to combine and testing out their results is a slow process, and even cooking has screens where your characters dance back and forth while you wait for them to complete what they’re doing. This is no way to keep the player engaged unless they’re obsessed with spreadsheets and it’s unfortunate that there’s not a streamlined mode that allows for you to semi-automate some of the game’s background processes. As it stands, you’ll probably spend almost a quarter of your time managing menus and deciding on skills that may or may not help you. It’s a lot to take in and really detracts from the strength of the storytelling in Star Ocean The Second Story R.
With that in mind, there are plenty of positives to the system as well. Players of the original game will remember all these menus fondly (maybe) and there’s definitely a feeling of continuity with the source content. Additionally, if you’re patient and a bit clever, you can basically break the game’s systems by overpowering your characters in just the right way. That’s not appealing to everyone but for those few that really love tweaking menus and finding out what works best, there’s a lot to be gained in a system as open as that of Star Ocean The Second Story R.
Lots of other content is tucked away as well in those systems including bonuses for catching a variety of fish, books you can write and then use to upgrade and max out your skills, portraits you can make, different character images from each iteration of Star Ocean The Second Story (PSX, PSP, and current), and lots more. The world is your burrito and you can roll it up any way you see fit to in Star Ocean. With the ability to steal and modify weapons and grab ultra powerful armor from NPCs plus a ton of points tweaks and hundreds of items, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed by the amount of sheer stuff in the game.
Of course we haven’t bothered to talk about the visuals yet but they’re outstanding, a 3D fusion of pixel art and vintage-style HD polygons with crisp colors and excellent character portraits. Star Ocean looks like an old game made new again, which is exactly what a remastered game should look like. It sounds great too with an updated soundtrack, though the battle music will definitely get old after a while. What’s most interesting though is the fully voiced characters. Almost all dialogue in Star Ocean The Second Story R is fully voiced and the voice actors do a hell of a job conveying the emotional states of all the characters on the search for the Sorcery Globe. Rena and Claude in particular have excellent voice work and it’s an absolutely magical experience to hear the entire game voiced like this.
You get out what you put into a game and in the case of Star Ocean The Second Story R, you can put in a hell of a lot. There are so many nuanced options for players that some may find themselves overwhelmed and casual players might even discover that the game is difficult to play unless you master at least some of the available systems in the game. More seasoned gamers will have less of an issue with Star Ocean but the game is still remarkably involved and time consuming. A completist would have a field day with all the endings though, which means good value for your buck at the $50 price point that the game released at. Even with it’s flaws and challenges, this is a title that should be on your holiday gift lists and best of lists this year! You’re in for one heck of an adventure no matter how you slice it and unlike many other games in the genre, your approach is very much up to you, so you’d better head out into that great Star Ocean!
This review is based on a digital copy of Star Ocean The Second Story R provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Star Ocean The Second Story R is also available on PS4/PS5 and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
[…] has had a number of interesting releases this year. Star Ocean The Second Story R (review here) shocked pretty much everyone and before that it was Final Fantasy XVI, which is what you’re here […]