We were dazzled by the brilliance of Square Enix's Star Ocean: The Second Story R last year when the classic PS1 RPG reentered our lives in a swanky remastered form. With excellent combat, visuals and story, we thought that this was the complete package but developer Gemdrops, it turns out, had other ideas.

The dev has today released a huge update for the game, adding in brand-new features, settings, items and more. Oh, and the best part: it's available for free right now.

The above trailer gives a taste of what's on offer in the latest update, but we'll break it down for you here too. Chief among the additions this time around appears to be an all-new difficulty setting: Chaos. This looks to be only for the toughest of the tough, with beefed enemy stats making even early battles a strategic challenge.

Claud's adversaries from the main story, the Ten Wise Men, also make a comeback in this update's new endgame challenges where you'll have to take on the foes in fresh raid battles.

There has also been an arsenal of new weapons added to the game's Item Creation, a batch of fresh NPC illustrations, new character graphics and a playback feature so you can soak up all endings. Oh, and you can now customise repeat playthroughs to your liking, choosing whether character stats are reset or not.

All in all, it's a rather beefy patch. You can read about all of the latest additions in more detail over on the Square Enix website. And for a reminder of what we thought of the base game, you can find our full review below.

What do you make of this new update? What will you be trying out first? Let us know in the comments.

[source square-enix-games.com]