A remake of a PS1 semi-classic, Star Ocean: the Second Story R keeps the elaborate design of the original while giving its presentation and performance a massive upgrade and adding in some new content. But is this Second Story worth revisiting, or is it best left in the past?
Star Ocean is a game I remember playing in the Playstation 1 days, but didn't really enjoy; while it had a good concept in trying to bring western-style character skills and crafting mechanics into the JRPG format, it was plagued with a really dopey script, serious performance problems (including numerous post-battle freezes), a generally buggy and unbalanced combat system and some pretty heinous sound design, including some infamously bad voice acting and audio mixing even by the standards of the time period. So I just kind of forgot about it and never really bothered checking out its sequels for the most part (other than briefly trying out the third game). But after seeing it had gotten a remake on modern platforms by Gemdrops (and was on sale for exceptionally cheap during 2024's Black Friday sales), I figured it was finally time to give it another chance.
Well, having now played some of the remake I can state that the script is still pretty dumb, with a lot of really dopey dialog, childish humor and a general campy tone, but it's made considerably more bearable by the surprisingly high voiceover quality. Spike Spencer and Eden Riegel voice the two main protagonists Claude and Rena, and they perform their parts with the same high quality they put into any project. The rest of the cast gives their all too, so it becomes a much more bearable experience. Combat is much faster-paced and considerably less buggy now, though there's still some dumb quirks, like stopping short while pursuing a running enemy and swinging at air over and over again until they finally decide to stand still long enough to be hit. Your caster allies blow through their MP at a terrifying speed, resulting in me telling them to just avoid damage and cast only when specifically instructed to. Another new mechanic is Break Gauges - basically enemy now has an "armor" bar alongside their health, and once it's broken they'll be stunned for a little while and take extra damage until they recover. Bosses likewise have these, and when broken they'll unleash a shockwave that also stuns any another enemies in the battle it hits, making it a good strategy to target them first. Formations are a bit more practical now - there wasn't much point to them in the original owing to the real-time and chaotic nature of battles, but now they grant cumulative bonuses as you land hits on enemies and avoid sneak attacks and stuns, which vary depending on the formation you choose - everything from bonus experience and money to extra damage. Seemingly taking notes from The World Ends With You, up to five encounters can be chained together back-to-back, granting substantial bonuses to your gained experience, money and items if you manage to survive them all. Hitting various milestones in battles (number of enemies fought, damage dealt, et cetera) fulfills a list of Combat Challenges, which often give rare items or experience/skill point bonuses when fulfilled.
But of course, the selling point of Star Ocean is its incredibly elaborate skill and crafting systems, and there's definitely a lot to unpack in Second Story's case. Not only can you upgrade character stats and combat skills to enable things like faster casting, doing extra damage, shortening stun time or automatically dodging attacks, but there are a ton of non-combat skills as well - everything from Mineralogy to Herbal Medicine to Music to Biology to Aesthetics to Cooking, which lend themselves to item-based utilities and/or stat boosts for anyone who learns them. Some more abstract ones (like Poker Face) lend themselves to higher-level skills like Pickpocketing, so even if it does nothing on its own, it usually serves a higher purpose. Even some that seem pretty useless at a glance have surprising utility, like Bunny Call - this summons a giant rabbit you can ride on the overworld over virtually any terrain (just excluding the ocean), allowing you to both avoid random battles and reach many treasures that are otherwise out of reach. Unlike in the original version, you don't have purchase skills at shops - everybody has all of them available to purchase at the start. Instead, skill guilds now offer various missions you can complete for rewards, usually in the form of money, items or extra skill points to spend.
Many of these do of course pertain to random battles and powering up, and I found these to be quite a lot of fun to tinker with. Scouting can raise or lower the encounter rate, Training allows you to take a penalty to your stats to boost experience gains, and Effort lowers the amount of experience needed to gain levels. All of these combined with an experience-boosting Formation and the aforementioned chained battles mechanic allow you to power up at a surprising speed, and the Enlightenment skill lets you get less money rewards from battle in exchange for more skill points. Determination lowers the point cost of all skills (so yeah... always max that first), and Purity bizarrely just gives an escalating cash payout each time you take it. As you can imagine, all of these are quite abusable early on in the game, though as Star Ocean famously has a quite steep challenge curve on the highest difficulty setting, so they're pretty much necessary to make any headway in that mode.
Crafting is an enormous part of the game too, and there's a lot to cover under that umbrella. Making new weapons and armor and combining weapons with materials to transform them into other weapons is of course present, but one can also create musical works, cook meals with various effects, boost the effect of mundane healing items with Herbology (boosting their low 22% heal to a whopping 52% at max), transmute materials into stronger stuff, raise Appraisal to get better prices in shops, and paint portraits to sell. Perhaps most broken of all is Writing, which allows a character to create skill books and teach them to other characters at minimal cost, saving tons of skill point farming in the long run. There is of course a substantial random chance to all of this, with cooking in particular being somewhat annoying - rather than choosing what you want, you simply get one of a list of random items based on a particular ingredient you're using. So if you're after a particular type of food for some reason (like completing a mission), you just have to keep buying ingredients and rolling the dice until you get it. Failed rolls occasionally get you bad items too, like Bounced Checks (which cost you money to sell and continually deplete your cash as long as you have them in your inventory), so that's something to beware of too.
Several modern conveniences are added into the game as well. As mentioned above, the game's presentation is massively improved; not just with the voice acting, but by giving its audio and visual design a massive overhaul. Like many of Square's modern titles it utilizes a blend of 2D sprites for the characters (the same one as the PS1 version, in fact) and 3D backdrops, and it works surprisingly well here - the environments are gorgeous to look at and a joy to explore. Another addition is fast travel - one can quickly zip to not just any town they've previously visited, but any shop or even mundane house within that town, and even to the entrance of most dungeons. Private Actions (unique dialogs to build up affinity with characters) are now activated with a press of a button while you're in town, rather than on the world map, and items that can be created with a particular skill are now given convenient in-game lists so you don't have to go digging through an online guide every 5 seconds. The Voice Selection is now actually completable, unlike the original PS1 game, and there is indeed a trophy for doing so. There are a total of 99 possible endings to achieve based on the affinity you've built up with characters by the end, though you only need 15 to get the trophy for it, and it's fairly easy to just restart, use items to build up affinity with a different character and finish the final boss again to get new ones. There are also trophies tied to getting each and every recruitable character, though, and some characters are only recruitable if you choose to begin as Claude or Rena, so you will still need to do at least two playthroughs. Finally, my personal favorite new addition is a fishing minigame. Yes, you can indeed fish at just about any body of water on the overworld, and even trade in fish for various unique rewards with an NPC named Lure. Plenty of fun.
So, with all that said, Star Ocean: the Second Story R is an excellent update of a flawed PS1 title, upgrading pretty much every element I disliked about the original while keeping everything good intact. The story is still nothing special (and the dialog pretty moronic a lot of the time), so don't come in expecting intelligent science fiction or any particularly deep characterizations. But there's no shortage of elaborate mechanics, challenging battles and intricacies to discover, and the quick pacing of the gameplay and strong soundtrack make it a fun journey to undertake. Gemdrops did a fantastic job updating the game, and I wouldn't mind seeing them remaster some other forgotten games under the Square Enix umbrella. Like say... Bahamut Lagoon or Treasure of the Rudras?
