Star Ocean: The Second Story R Review - Screenshot 1 of 10
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The Star Ocean series has always occupied a weird spot in Square’s massive catalogue. This sci-fi-focused JRPG series started off relatively strong, but the last few entries have been middling at best and just plain not good at worst. Nonetheless, those earlier games were really something at the time, and 1998’s Star Ocean: The Second Story has been widely seen by fans as the pinnacle of the series. Though Square gave it an enhanced remaster on PSP, it’s now decided to revive this classic once more as Star Ocean: The Second Story R, a remake built from the ground up with modern features, and we’re thrilled to report that this revisit is a complete success. Star Ocean: The Second Story R manages to preserve everything that was great about the original while adding tons of extra features and content to make this the definitive version.

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The story of Star Ocean 2 is set 20 years after the events of the first game and follows dual protagonists Claude and Rena, one of whom you pick as your lead character at the beginning of a new file. Rena is from a distant planet named Expel, while Claude is a member of the interstellar Earth Federation, which travels the stars and contacts new civilizations. Claude and his father, the admiral, are investigating a mysterious disturbance with a ground team on a recently discovered planet when Claude foolishly approaches an alien object that teleports him across the universe to Rena’s planet.

The two meet shortly after his arrival, and Rena and the other members of her village believe Claude to be the fabled Hero of Light spoken of in local prophecy and superstition. The legend goes that this hero will free the land from the blight of hordes of monsters brought on by the recent impact of a meteor called the Sorcery Globe. Obviously, Claude has no idea what any of this means and just wants to find a way back home, so he sets out on a journey with Rena to find the Sorcery Globe and hopefully put an end to the monsters while finding himself a way to get back to Earth.

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It's a compelling story, one that manages to straddle an interesting line between fantasy and science fiction. Expel is a quaint and not very advanced planet, but we view it to a certain extent from the perspective of Claude, who has all sorts of fancy tech on his person and hails from a vastly more advanced civilization. So, even as you’re sleeping in inns and buying new swords to use to fight creatures in lantern-lit dungeons, there are subtle reminders placed throughout that not everything is as low-tech as it may seem. Something that locals think is ‘magic’ may be revealed to be nothing more than advanced alien technology.

The dual protagonist system adds some interesting wrinkles, too, notably in how you get to view scenes from an alternative perspective. To get the full picture of Star Ocean 2, you need to play it at least two times—most events happen regardless of which character you picked, but there are some scenes and even whole party members that are exclusive to one path. This adds a lot of replayability to a game that already feels like it’s designed to be played several times, which makes this already expansive JRPG adventure feel that much grander.

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We also appreciated how Star Ocean 2 doesn’t skimp on the quiet character interactions that fall between major plot beats, yet this depth is entirely optional if you just want to get a move on. The “Private Action” system can be activated at any time in towns and lets you find and trigger cutscenes with party members that flesh out their history and showcase a deepening bond between them and your character. Not only does this help to make each character more than just a 2D caricature, but it adds to a Persona-esque relationship system that affects which ending you get.

Gameplay follows the typical JRPG structure of exploring a grand overworld, buying equipment in towns where you can chat with locals and pick up sidequests, and delving into dungeons full of tempting loot and dangerous creatures. It’s not anything that you haven’t seen before, but what’s striking here is how well Star Ocean 2 manages to handle its pacing. It follows a somewhat ‘episodic’ structure, your narrative usually driven by whatever hijinks are going on in the next town you visit, and it does an impressive job of effectively splitting time between gameplay and story-driven sections. This isn’t the kind of game where it feels like you’re hammering the ‘A’ button for hours as yet another verbose cutscene drones on — Star Ocean 2 is a game that moves.

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Nowhere is that focus on movement more noticeable than in the combat system, which has been tweaked a bit here to make for an even more action-packed and thrilling experience. Random encounters have been tossed out and replaced by roaming enemy blobs that you can evade and, if you’re tricky, sneak up on from behind to gain the advantage when the fight starts. Once you’re taken into battle, things follow a typical action-focused combat system you’d find in something like Kingdom Hearts where you dodge enemy attacks, mash out combos, and cast spells and abilities when you’re given some breathing room.

It’s impressively fluid, partially due to the more effective lock-on system for this remake, and you feel a little more in control of the action now with the introduction of the 'Break' system. With this, every enemy has a separate Guard bar that can be chopped down with various attacks, and once it empties, they’re temporarily stunned and take a lot more damage from all sources. We appreciated how this adds a little more strategy to combat than simply bashing away with the hardest-hitting attacks, as there are many situations where it’s in your best interests to focus on stunning some enemies rather than focusing on raw damage.

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Though you can only control one character at a time, there are multiple settings you can activate for each party member dictating how you want the AI to act, such as focusing on healing or being conservative with MP spending. The AI overall does a solid job of running your other party members in battle according to your directives, and if you ever want more control over them, you can either swap to them directly or you can pull up a menu that pauses the action and lets you order characters individually to cast certain abilities or use items.

Some new mechanics have been added that make things even more dynamic, with the new Assault Action system headlining. With this, you can ‘equip’ benched party members (and even guest characters from later Star Ocean games) to the D-Pad and tag them in for a quick attack, buff, or heal at the tap of a button. These can be pretty powerful, especially if you time your drops well, though they’re governed by a cooldown that prevents you from spamming. Assault Action naturally adds to the combat system without feeling unreasonably shoehorned in, although we found that most fights are over long before we ever considered using this feature.

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A new Bonus system in this remake rewards skillful play with extra stat benefits. Every time you defeat enemies, they’ll drop a few golden orbs that go into your Bonus Gauge, and once this hits certain thresholds, you’ll get new passive buffs like higher defense or attack. The Bonus Gauge carries over between battles, but it goes all the way back down to zero if you make certain mistakes, such as poorly timing a dodge and getting hit by a telegraphed attack. It takes a while to build it back up again from the start, which can introduce a welcome little risk-reward system to force you to be a little more choosy in how you approach enemies.

Combat on the default difficulty option is laughably easy if you’re following the expected power curve, and it’s broken completely if you grind up to be just a few levels above where you should be. Even when not running grinded-up characters, we encountered many fights against trash mobs that were over in less than three seconds, which can be a bit disappointing when many of your encounters go this way and you’re not even really getting to engage with the combat system. This can of course be fixed by going up to a higher difficulty level, but we wish that the default (and clearly intended) difficulty level felt a little more well-balanced.

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Out of battle, character growth takes an interesting and slightly confusing approach wherein you manually distribute skill points across various skills and specialties that have a passive effect on stats. Essentially, there are a series of specialties that allow characters to do things like craft or smith items in the overworld, cook food, or fish, and each of these is comprised of a small handful of skills (such as 'Knife' being a skill you need for 'Cook'). If you want to level up your Cook ability so you can make more advanced dishes, you need to level up Knife and all the other skills under Cook first. Yet not every skill solely applies to one specialty. Mineralogy, for example, is a key component of the Appraising, Crafting, and Alchemy skills.

Raising certain skills will often directly raise a matching stat, but focusing on just raising the skills that give you desired stats means that you might miss unlocking new specialties for that character. And given that you need multiple characters in the party to know (or have a minimum level in) certain specialties to unlock party-wide Super Specialties, you thus need to put a lot of thought into how you distribute skills and specialties across team members so that you’re serving both that specific character and the needs of the party in general.

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To be frank, this skill system feels needlessly confusing considering the end product after taking the time to study it, though we can see what the developers were going for here. It’s not like you can make any wrong choice, especially as you can eventually max out every character anyway, but sometimes it feels like you’re just going through a lot of confirmations and menus to get a stat and skill bump that could’ve easily been tossed in when you last leveled up. All the same, hassle aside, this skill system adds replayability given that you can start out with different builds for characters each run, and this is helped by their innate starting talents being randomized each time.

As for its presentation, Star Ocean 2 uses a brand-new engine that appears to take more than a little inspiration from Square’s popular HD-2D engine. Here, rather than the whole world being expressed as pixel art, the world itself is presented in a 3D photorealistic style featuring dynamic lighting, while characters and enemies are sharply drawn as pixel sprites interacting with it. In many ways, we would say that we prefer this look to HD-2D, Star Ocean 2 does an outstanding job of creating this hyperreal and ultra-stylized take on the classic visuals that looks gorgeous in every frame.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

We especially appreciated the way that the camera is often directed to move around and offer cinematic angles in linear sequences, while exploring massive environments and structures in the overworld evoked a sense of awe that only games in the Xenoblade franchise have managed to capture. Even the smaller details have been attended to here, such as how Yukihiro Kajimoto designed brand-new character art for dialogue sequences. Suffice it to say, Gemdrops absolutely knocked the visuals out of the park; Star Ocean 2 is one of the most visually impressive retro RPGs out there.

Meanwhile, Motoi Sakuraba reprised his role as composer. The soundtrack has been totally remixed and even features a few new tracks. Many of these pieces were also recorded with a live orchestra, adding a richness and quality that MIDI could never hope to match. It all sounds great, particularly the main battle theme, making this soundtrack a fitting companion to the completely overhauled visuals.

Conclusion

In a year overflowing with outstanding new RPGs, Star Ocean: The Second Story R is among the very best of them. This revival of a PlayStation classic does a thorough job of mixing modern game design and artistic elements with old-school sensibilities to make for one of the most impressive RPG releases of 2023. A lengthy, player-driven story, thrilling combat system, gorgeous new visual style, and remixed soundtrack all come together to make this one of the easiest recommendations we can make to any RPG fan. If you’re even vaguely interested in picking this up, we’d encourage you to do so as soon as you can; Star Ocean: The Second Story R is comfortably the best entry in this series.

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Star Ocean: The Second Story R
Star Ocean: The Second Story R

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