[PS1] Star Ocean: The Second Story Review

Ah, the PS1. It was the home of many great games like Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid and so much more. While most games got their much deserved spot-light, some games were left in a little corner gathering dust… when they should have been in people’s consoles. This is the story… of Star Ocean… Second Story.

The first Star Ocean game was released well over a decade ago on the SNES, but only came out in Japan so U.S. gamers never got an official chance to play it. Luckily, we ended up getting the second one, which was released for the Playstation (or PSX) in 1999.

The Second Story tells the tale of one named Claude Kenni (or Rena Landford, depending on who you choose as your main character). Kenni is traveling through space alongside his hero of a father and his crew, until they stumble upon a discovery which beams Kenni to an unknown planet (later known as Expel), and there begins the story. Soon after he is beamed to the other planet, he sees a girl (Rena) in danger as she is about to be attacked by an ape, so here comes Claude, pulls out a blaster gun and rids of the ape. Sometime later, we find out Rena thought Claude was a “Hero of Light”, a legendary warrior that would come and save Expel from its demise. Claude denies being such hero, but decides to go on a quest to help save Expel, and find his way home.

During the adventure, you get to make a lot of different decisions and plot turns depending on who you choose as the main character. See, if you start the game as Claude, you get what I just talked about. If you choose to have Rena be your main character, you will begin with a slightly different scene (no Claude in space for you!) but will still follow the main story of the game. Depending on who you choose, you will have different people join your party, while some others will remain optional.

Throughout the entire game, you’ll get to do different things like the usual RPG dungeon exploring, boss fighting, cooking (yes), dueling in colisseums and even bidding on races! There’s just so much to do in this game it’s almost overwhelming. You can even go as far as making your own weapons, armor and items. Each character has a skill tree (think World of Warcraft) that you can customize to your liking as you level up. Things in the tree include damage boosts, agility, blacksmithing, bonuses, I can go on and on. To make it even a little more interesting, each character has his own specialty (listed under their profiles) which sort of let you know what they might be best at. These change every time you start a new game, so it’s little things like that which make this game stand out.

Switching to gameplay, you’re looking at a mix of RPG and Action-Adventure. To compare it to today’s games, think of a random-battle version of Final Fantasy XII. It’s not turn based, it just puts you in a battle ground and things get hectic. For the most part, you will play as the battle leader (whoever you choose), while your team-mates will be AI-driven. You can give them guidelines to which they will try to follow, much like FFXII. All the characters have – along side the standard X attack – 2 special abilities that you can assign them to use. What’s really cool is that all of them evolve overtime the more you use them. So an attack that might be weak at first, might actually become very powerful once you’ve used it over 300 times. You get tons of special abilities for each character as they level up. You can switch throughout the characters as the battle is going on, so if your main was paralyzed, you can switch to another character to give him the cure. The gameplay seriously holds up well, even by todays standards. I’ll go as fars as saying most RPG games that are currently out there still don’t have this amount of depth in and out of battle.

Sound is great and horrible at the same time. Where the music is epic and fitting… voice acting (yes, there is voice acting)… how do I put this… sucks. If there is one thing that people remember about this game, is how bad the voice acting is. It’s as if they just got their friends together and did voiceover with no actual effort put into it. That being said, it doesn’t really take much away from the game since you only hear that during battle, and there is enough hacking and slashing going on there to drown that out. Going back to the positive side, the soundtrack is seriously good. If it weren’t for it, sound… would probably get a 1 in the ratings department.

The actual presentation of the game is pretty good too. It follow the old-school way of town, overworld and then town again. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The art direction in the game is unique yet follows the same style of most other RPG games which isn’t a bad thing, just something you’ll probably notice.

The game is – for the most part – in 2D. That includes both the towns, enemies, characters and just about eveything that isn’t the overworld or special effects. It might be a turn-off for some people but personally, I love 2D sprites so I digg it. The character sprites are kinda blurry which is dissapointing, but I got over it. In the end, the graphical aspect of the game is solid, but that’s about it.

Between the customization and the game’s main plot, you still have a ton more to do including finding secret locations. The game even has an ultra-difficult dungeon for expert players that are up to the challenge. If you save the game before the door to the last boss and go back to a certain location, stuffthatiwon’tspoil will happen and you have an opportunity to go to an ultra-super-secret dungeon which early enemies inside are harder than the last boss himself! Crazy stuff.

Final Score: 8.5/10