The rendered static backgrounds in Star Ocean are gorgeous; like art-quality gorgeous. Prepare to go ga-ga as you wander around the various towns and such looking at the beautiful scenery. The game excels in this category. The characters and enemies and such are all sprites, which seem somewhat out of place, but end up working rather well. They tend to get pixilated when very far away or very close, but that’s a necessary problem with sprite-based characters. The designs are good, and it doesn’t look bad at all.

The music in this game is superb -- rivaling even the Final Fantasy series in aural ecstasy. I’d be glad to have a soundtrack of most of the tracks off of this game. The sound effects are good enough, with realistic spell sounds (does that make any sense?) and weapon sounds and such. Unfortunately, the voice acting in this game makes Resident Evil look like a top-quality production. It’s cheesy, laughably so, but it’s good to get a few kicks while you play. You’ll want to shut Claude the hell up before you get too far into the game, though.

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.

Once you figure out the battle system, which at first is rather confusing, Star Ocean plays well. It’s not amazingly easy, but neither is it really, really hard. You shouldn’t have any real problems going through the game if you level up a bit in-between areas -- but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in RPGs anyways? The game feels balanced, and stays enjoyable throughout.

The battle mechanic seems odd at first, but becomes really easy and really, really cool. You’ll love running around the battlefield and thwacking enemy soldiers in the back. It’s addictive. The menus are easy to navigate, and the overworld map is fully 3D. Star Ocean runs a bit slow, but not Legend of Legaia slow, so you shouldn’t have any problems with it.

The graphics are sharp, the gameplay is sharp, and if you can get around the rather clumsy translation and very, very silly voice acting, Star Ocean is a must-buy. You’ll get hours of enjoyment from its techno-fantasy setting. I heartily recommend it.