Star Ocean: The Second Story R

I had not played this game before and found it to be really fun. The story have its moments and chars are charming and unique. Im very keen the play the other games from this series :) Played on the Steam Deck.

This is an amazing remake of the original PS1 game. As a huge fan of the original, I really appreciated the QOL additions and thought the playthrough experience was on the whole very good. That said, there are a few criticisms that I would raise: -Item limit of 20 max quantity does get annoying, though in endgame it hardly matters. -I beat the game on Galaxy difficulty, which became truly trivial by about mid- disc 2 (the Fields). Eventually, fights were incredibly easy and I stopped having to do more than mash killer move buttons and let the AI run the rest of my party. I found Universe, though, to be too difficult - I think there could have been a middleground. -Huge warning for anyone who decides to use the Bodyguard skill: THIS WILL BREAK THE GAME, as it makes gaining levels way too easy - by the start of the Maze of Tribulations, I was average level 120 with my party, and by the time I had completed it I was around 200 - with Bodyguard on (as I previously said, fights had become kindof boring at this point), I simply walked through each floor auto-killing most everything, and the boss fights were extremely easy (minus the couple that have gimmicks to work around). Here's what I'd say - if you've played this game to death previously, and aren't absolutely dying to play it again, skip this one. If you haven't played it in a long time and mostly forgot the plot, characters, secrets, game-breaking exploits, etc., give it a whirl! And if you're a JRPG fan who has never played Star Ocean 2 - what are you doing, stop everything and play this absolute masterpiece of a game.

"I've got a Ocean you can Star in." Star Ocean The Second Story R. This was my first playthrough of this game. My original introduction to Star Ocean with "Til the End of Time" on PS2. The production, the music, the combat still sticks with me to this day. So I gave Second Story a shot because the art mixed with the Pixel Art is right up my alley! I played as Claude. He's likeable as a protagonist, I assume Rena is too. but my PoV is going to be through Claude only. You get to choose who to play as between the two at the beginning. He's the Melee/Tank archetype and she is the Healer/Caster archetype. Story wise, it's typical SO fashion of being on underdeveloped planet, things happen and so on. This story in particular does have some fascinating things happen that will make you do a double take. You can recruit up to 8 characters per playthrough and I think there's a total of 10 or so that pare playable? So there's reasons to replay the game through NG+ to experience different team setups and characters. Each character has their own spells/abilities that can make them feel unique to other characters and you can have up to 4 in combat at one time which was nice. The AI isn't very smart but you can dominate for the team and have them basically support you if you wish. Plenty of difficulty sliders to get a feel for what you can handle. There's a ton of different ways you can kit out each character and there is right and wrong ways of doing it but the customization of it all is neat, especially for a game like this! Deep crafting abilities allow you to make some really interesting choices with gearing, specifically in the late endgame. You will need to grind/farm late game areas to get the best gear to push those end game progression loops. This is outside of the main story of course. You can play the Main Story without having to min max, this is specific to just the very late endgame activities. Character models look fantastic and I really liked the touch of having characters pop up on the screen when talking. Allowed for a more immersive experience. Shoutout to Celine! The art in general was top notch and I'm really impressed with it all. Solid RPG and I'm happy to have played it. Here's to hoping they continue making for Remakes!