Star Ocean: The Second Story takes old-school RPG action to a whole new level. Now everyone has skills -- from cooking to writing to fixing and repairing technology -- and you can improve them as the game goes on, learn new ones, and use them. The item creation system is unintuitive at first, but once you figure it out, it’s really, really fun. Battles are absolutely awesome, with a multitude of options as to how to play them, from fully real-time a la
Secret of Mana from the SNES to something more like
Final Fantasy VII. You can hide around objects, cast spells, and control multiple characters in your party. The party A.I. is really good as well, and quite tweakable, which you’ll want to do so that they don’t cast spell after spell after spell after spell... You can choose two characters to start with, either Rena or Claude (no, really, it’s not Cloud, honest), and although they join up early in the game, their paths differ enough to warrant playing the game again. The game is not
Xenogears length, but neither is it as short as
Lunar. And with the ability to play through it twice, there’s more than enough gameplay available.
The characters, of which there are many, have relationships to each other, which can be altered depending on how each of the characters treats one another. This actually has in-game effects, and can change the outcome of certain scenes. And with scads and scads of endings (more than 80 ending sequences), you can definitely tweak the relationships and characters that you get to your heart’s content, knowing that you’ll be rewarded with more cool CG. And believe me -- the CG in this game is AWESOME. You have been forewarned.
The main detriment from this game is the translation -- it seems very stilted at times; not as bad as Final Fantasy Tactics’ Daravonisms, but stilted nonetheless. It’s as if someone wanted the literal translations instead of making it make sense for Americans. It’s passable, but it detracts somewhat from the whole suspension of disbelief thing.
