As a wistful nostalgia tripper for The Second Story, I decided to give the OG a go. This game has super fascinating lore and the plot is insane for like the first two hours. The skill system is also very interesting on paper and fun to try and compliment character's latent traits with the proper skills to maximize efficiency. Also, pretty damn good voice acting and sound quality for an SNES game!

Okay the negatives. The game's plot loses all steam and does multiple ass pulls with super undeveloped villains and such, the skill system isn't exactly necessary to dive into when the game is so damn easy, and the combat has the illusion of depth, but is never necessary to take control off of the protagonist just mashing the confirm button besides the rare occasion he gets downed. Plus, enemy and party AI can be downright remedial in how willing they'll be to not attack at all. Even though I'm not exactly the JRPG playing type, even I can recognize that for a game like this, taking a turn based, menu approach might actually improve the gameplay dynamic. Cool game, but there's a part of me that understands why Tri-Ace totally remade this for the PSP