A Great Enhanced Port of an Overlooked Classic!
To say it lightly Star Ocean the Second Story was mine and many others first exposure to the wonderful Star Ocean Series. The game remains one of my favorite Playstation RPGs, but to be honest, the game suffered from a few minor issues. These included poor voice work, and an equally poor translation. But none the less the adventures of Claude C Kenny, Rena Lanford, Dias Flac, and the rest of the wonderful and quirky cast captivated me.
A decade later, and about nine years after the original release a remake of the original Star Ocean releases, and a couple months later, only about six or seven months of its ten year anniversary an enhanced port of Star Ocean the Second Story releases and man is it a fantastic port that makes me just fall in love with this wonderful game.
What made the game stand out in the first place is its high replay value. You can play as either Claude or Rena, and each one has different set of events you can play through and even different characters you can recruit. As far as characters you can recruit, you cannot recruit them all in the game, you can only recruit some of them. And you have to do a certain set of actions to recruit them, and then if you need to, replay the games and see the events you did not see.
Another mechanic that added to the games great replay value was the amazing Private action feature. And to me this game utilized the private action feature the best compare to the rest of the series. Why? Well it allowed private actions with all the characters, and even the ones that you did not get. So that was even more consent to replay the games and collect those characters you did not in your first play through.
Now what these private actions did was you can go back to towns and activate events that are not part of the main story. What these events did was build up the relationship between the main character and his party mates. Which also meant that while Say Claude and Rena are the main characters, through private actions, they may not be the ones who get romantically involved. This also resulted in over 80 different epilogue endings that showed what the characters did with their lives after the events of the game. So two characters can be together at the end of the game. Let us not effect that private actions also effect combat. If two characters feel strongly for each other, and one of them will lose their temper and go crazy in battle. It adds a crazy unpredictable at times element in combat. One that adds depth to combat.
The combat is one of the games biggest strength. Now it is similiar, but not the same as it is in the Tales Series(Both series were created by the same developers, though Tri Ace only worked on the original tales game, and that is Tales of Fantasia.) Like the tales series, the combat system in this game utilzes both turn base and real time combat elements. In turn this leads a number of options on the way you can handle combat. You will control one character, most of the time your main character. Though you can switch this, and with that characters you can use your attacks in real time, or even go turn based to use items or other spells that you donot readily available. Also you can set your other characters to certain AI settings and giving them to do certain tasks, i.e have Rena as a healer, or Celes as a Offensive Magic user. You can also if you are not satisfied with a characters current move, you can also go in and turn base wise select their action. This battle system is flexible in the way you want to play it or the way the situation handles. That for me when a battle system presents itself in such a cognitive way, makes for a battle system. Of course there are standard elements in the system, such as elemental weaknesses and such, but the way the battle system is presented and set up it is excellent.
The Music again is another highlight of this game. Let me go on record and say that Motoi Sakuraba is one of the most overlooked game composers out there along with the Masterful Yasunori Mitsuda. Sakuraba's musical range in fascinating such as his world map themes that convey the feelings of going into the open world, to the fast and frenetic battle theme that gives the feeling of tension, and haunting tones for the forests and the tragic events that sometime convey in the game.
There is also the formidable skills sytem, which allows your character to build not only battle skills, but every day creative skills. You can teach Rena to be a great chef, and cook your party food to heal them, and have Claude by an artist to sell his artwork and make extra cash. It adds a nice side dynamic to the game, and is really a fun system to play with.
Now I talked about the basic elements of the game that applies to both ports, now lets talk about why this port is so special.
For one the localization is far better then it was. The original PSX port suffered from a poor script that at times had engrish intergrated from it. The PSP port presents and a solid and flawless script, with of course some cheesey moments, but despite that it is far more readable and enjoyable to hear. It helps makes one care for this great case of characters all over again, and get a better understanding of their motivations and personalities then the original script allowed you to do.
The voice work also is fixed. Now while voice work was minimal at best in the original PSX port, aside from battle, it was quite awful to say the least. Voice acting in this port though is more of a presence in the game, and it is well done. Claude performance particularly surprised me, as that he is voiced by Spike Spencer the english voice actor for the troubled Shinji Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion. What makes this performance out standing is that Claude is the total opposite of Shinji, a character who while has issues, has a sometime too optimistic out look on life, and is quite laid back at times. This shows Spencers voice acting range as he handles this character quite well. The rest of the voice cast is great, and each actor brings in their own touch to these great characters. Though I did have some issues with some of the very minor characters, as they sounded a little stiff, its not a big deal, the main cast for the most part is handled excellently.
The game also brings in a few other extra including a more streamlined menu then the original, which was admittedly clunky in the original PSX port imo. There is also two very cool anime intros, that bring the several scenes from the game to life in anime form, and are accompanied by the spunky and optimistic Jpop song Start by Jpop group scandal. Also note some of the ingame cutscenes are redone, where as other cutscenes remain the same from the PSX Version.
Overall this is a fantastic edition to any rpg fans collection. This game already had a great story line, with a quirky and fun cast of characters. If you missed this the first time, and mind you it is a rare game to find these days on the PSX, this new port is the definitive version of the game. Like to me the Chrono Trigger DS port is the defintive version, this port is the best. Now there is some slow down issues in combat here and there, to me that is the only flaw with this port that fixes many if not all of the major issues of the original game. Track it down if you missed out and you will not regret it.