A remake of Star Ocean: The Second Story
Two worlds, one fateful encounter. In an endless sea of stars, at the edge of the universe, two people who live in different worlds go on a journey to save planet Expel. Choose your path and witness an awakened destiny.
Also in series
Reviews View More
Mechanically speaking, the game is great and has a lot to play around with and easily break the game itself. The characters are nice, however, the story didn't engage me at all, so I kind of played on auto mode and I couldn't care for it too much...sad.
This review contains spoilers
the first like, 3-6 hours of this game are the best by far. i LOVED what the demo had to show. beautiful visuals, i wish more "HD 2D" and remasters of RPGs from this era looked like this. and such great music throughout, too.
but before too long, my enjoyment slowly and steadily declined. there were super sudden difficulty spikes, and the difficulty selection felt totally irrelevant in the endgame. i knocked myself down from the hardest to the easiest close to the end of the game and it felt as if nothing changed. i'm sad to say that i am not motivated to do another run with new party members whatsoever.... how disappointing!!
venting a bit: the characterization and motivations for almost everyone in my party felt very flimsy, having no antagonist for the first two thirds of the game felt wack, and then the coterie of goobers they introduce (who we then summarily execute one after the other with very little fanfare) were not very interesting and each had basically no characterization whatsoever. even the biggest of the bads’ backstory was sequestered away as side content. i just don’t think that mainlining a JRPG should leave players feeling so hollow.
as for combat, it felt so much fun when it was just Claude and Rena, but adding more party members cluttered up the game and made it feel unrewarding to try and engage with the parry system. wish it were more enjoyable to control casters, as well. (or to manage them — no way to back out of a spell or interrupt yourself, no way to see what the AI is in the middle of casting until it comes out... these UI failures made it feel like my own team was leaving me in the dark often!) also, pro tip, simply walking up & down is so OP in this game. better defense than anything else.
i was excited to play a relatively short JRPG, especially one i had seen discussed as a classic for so long! but i wasn’t counting on finishing it nearly out of spite.
but before too long, my enjoyment slowly and steadily declined. there were super sudden difficulty spikes, and the difficulty selection felt totally irrelevant in the endgame. i knocked myself down from the hardest to the easiest close to the end of the game and it felt as if nothing changed. i'm sad to say that i am not motivated to do another run with new party members whatsoever.... how disappointing!!
venting a bit: the characterization and motivations for almost everyone in my party felt very flimsy, having no antagonist for the first two thirds of the game felt wack, and then the coterie of goobers they introduce (who we then summarily execute one after the other with very little fanfare) were not very interesting and each had basically no characterization whatsoever. even the biggest of the bads’ backstory was sequestered away as side content. i just don’t think that mainlining a JRPG should leave players feeling so hollow.
as for combat, it felt so much fun when it was just Claude and Rena, but adding more party members cluttered up the game and made it feel unrewarding to try and engage with the parry system. wish it were more enjoyable to control casters, as well. (or to manage them — no way to back out of a spell or interrupt yourself, no way to see what the AI is in the middle of casting until it comes out... these UI failures made it feel like my own team was leaving me in the dark often!) also, pro tip, simply walking up & down is so OP in this game. better defense than anything else.
i was excited to play a relatively short JRPG, especially one i had seen discussed as a classic for so long! but i wasn’t counting on finishing it nearly out of spite.
I had never played a Star Ocean game before this, and needless to say I was pleasantly surprised by it. I knew of the series but wasn’t sure where to start and this remake gave me a perfect entry point.
First of all, the game is just gorgeous. Everything about the HD-2D style employed here combined with the diorama-esque environments easily make this one of the best looking games to come out of 2023 and arguably the last decade depending on your feelings on the style. The lighting is great, and exploring the world is just a treat knowing every time you find a new area you can see how the art brings it and its inhabitants to life.
The combat is enjoyable, with the game striking a good balance between casters and melee units all wrapped in a fun, action packed bundle. Every character has a unique playstyle giving the player plenty of options on how they want to tackle fights. It feels very Tales-like in the way battles play out with everyone having unique arts and attacks as well as gear to customize them.
I found the story to be decent, but the game really tries to sell its characters to you and mostly succeeds. You’re able to recruit various characters you find in your travels through interactions (most of which are missable), and doing so will often lock you out of recruiting others allowing for replay ability in the future. In theory, you could have a completely different party than another player barring the protagonists which I find to be a neat idea. The cast all has unique personalities and goals that make the game a fun time in in its reasonable 20ish hour runtime (give or take some hours depending on how much side content you do).
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention how much the game encourages you to completely break it with its crafting and talent systems. Characters earn points doing things like battling and completing quests which you can funnel into different skills like Art, Writing, Cooking, etc. Some of these can allow players who know what they’re doing (and honestly those who just mess around with the systems enough) to acquire high level gear, power level their characters and their talents, and plenty of other things that can completely trivialize the experience which most players recognize as a Star Ocean staple.
Overall, whether you’re a fan of the series or not, I’d urge any RPG fans to check this one out. It’s a solid game and one that I think is gonna be considered a modern classic in the coming years.
First of all, the game is just gorgeous. Everything about the HD-2D style employed here combined with the diorama-esque environments easily make this one of the best looking games to come out of 2023 and arguably the last decade depending on your feelings on the style. The lighting is great, and exploring the world is just a treat knowing every time you find a new area you can see how the art brings it and its inhabitants to life.
The combat is enjoyable, with the game striking a good balance between casters and melee units all wrapped in a fun, action packed bundle. Every character has a unique playstyle giving the player plenty of options on how they want to tackle fights. It feels very Tales-like in the way battles play out with everyone having unique arts and attacks as well as gear to customize them.
I found the story to be decent, but the game really tries to sell its characters to you and mostly succeeds. You’re able to recruit various characters you find in your travels through interactions (most of which are missable), and doing so will often lock you out of recruiting others allowing for replay ability in the future. In theory, you could have a completely different party than another player barring the protagonists which I find to be a neat idea. The cast all has unique personalities and goals that make the game a fun time in in its reasonable 20ish hour runtime (give or take some hours depending on how much side content you do).
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention how much the game encourages you to completely break it with its crafting and talent systems. Characters earn points doing things like battling and completing quests which you can funnel into different skills like Art, Writing, Cooking, etc. Some of these can allow players who know what they’re doing (and honestly those who just mess around with the systems enough) to acquire high level gear, power level their characters and their talents, and plenty of other things that can completely trivialize the experience which most players recognize as a Star Ocean staple.
Overall, whether you’re a fan of the series or not, I’d urge any RPG fans to check this one out. It’s a solid game and one that I think is gonna be considered a modern classic in the coming years.
Best HD-2D remake of all time
Probablemente el Star Ocean más sólido que hemos tenido hasta ahora. Clasicista en todos los ámbitos posibles en un guion y una narrativa que se aprecian tan conservadores a día de hoy como funcionales en su momento (tampoco vamos a engañar a nadie, tiene momentos muy chulos) y, eso sí, con una jugabilidad sencilla pero de hierro. Visualmente el remake puede parecer extraño de primeras, sobre todo para no avezados en el mundo del hd-2d, pero el trabajo artístico funciona y el resultado es encantador.
Starved Ocean
Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.
Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.
The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.
This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.
Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.
Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.
Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.
The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.
This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.
Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.