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Star Ocean: The Second Story R

12 months ago6,109 words

Star Ocean: The Second Story was one of the many games I had for the original Playstation during my childhood. It's probably one of the first RPGs I ever played, and was likely a huge influence for what I did with my own RPGs, especially MARDEK. I just finished the recently-released remake, so here's an exhausting excess of spoiler-filled thoughts about that!

(I meant to write a dev/life update post on the weekend... but stuff I'm struggling with got in the way. Hopefully I'll manage to write something later this week, or on the weekend. For now, this is just a distraction from all that.)



This game is the second in its series - hence the title - though I've never played the first. But I have played the fourth! But not the third, fifth, or sixth. Are there six?? I don't know! I wouldn't call myself a Star Ocean fan or anything.

This one registers to me now as very much a generic, cookie-cutter JRPG with all the typical tropes. I wouldn't call it well-made or inspired, really. There are a lot of things I'll be writing about here that I found quite annoying! But since I originally discovered it during a more impressionable time in my life, it evokes fuzzy, pleasant nostalgia for me... though not as much as I would have expected considering how many times I likely replayed at least parts of it back then?

I vaguely recall that I never finished it, though, so when I saw that there was a remake of it in the works a few months ago, I thought it'd be a great opportunity to finally complete that challenge from a lifetime ago, or something like that.

And I did! I got it on Steam, and finished in about 30 hours. Was that time well-spent, though? Hmm...



I don't like it when people criticise my work. Games should be about fun, gamers are too critical; I've complained about all that before. But I suppose it's natural for us to find failings in things we're otherwise enjoying - our minds are biased towards negative observations - and I unavoidably view other games through the lens of a developer, so I was constantly noticing things in this that I would have done differently or cared more about getting right.

So before I go into this and sound overly critical, I want to say that I did overall enjoy the experience. I've not been feeling great lately (so unusual!!), and getting away from everything to delve into this world for a bit over the past couple of weeks has helped take the edge off a bit.

I want to take an overview of the whole experience from beginning to end, so there will be spoilers!

I suppose I'll break my thoughts into three parts: about the Narrative, the Gameplay, and the Aesthetics (which includes both visuals and music).

Narrative

I find it so interesting in games like this how they seem designed to accentuate the narrative aspects, but those actual narrative aspects are often trite, vapid, even incoherent. It's something I've noticed with other JRPGs, too, like most recently... that Bravely Default thing I can't even remember the name of. Was it just called Bravely Default 2??




The basic story is that a male human from a sci-fi future Earth is accidentally transported to an alien planet, where he meets a native girl and helps her to save her world from peril. It's not exactly hugely original or anything, but considering its age, what other RPGs of the time did, and the age I was when I first encountered it, I found it extremely compelling. I still do like the essential idea.

But so much of it is so... hollow. The guy arrives on this alien world, and there are brief comments about his outfit and laser blaster that don't fit in, but all the inhabitants look identical to humans, speak the same language with the same (very Japanese) mannerisms, even apparently have identical preferences and beliefs (eg at one part the human guy wonders if a place they find themselves in is 'Heaven', and all his technically alien allies already know what that is and wonder the same).




He's advised to stop using his laser gun because he'll stand out because of it, and as soon as he does, he fits right in. To replace it, he's given a mediaeval-style sword, which he accepts without question and wields fluently without training. Silly.

The second half of the game is set on a different planet to the first (with bizarre lore behind it), which I LOVE, and which really inspired me... though annoyingly the world map looks pretty much the same (different layout, but using the same kinds of assets); it could at least have been different colours or something! The world has also been highly technologically advanced for a ludicrous amount of time - something like 3.7 BILLION years - but the towns look barely different to those on the 'underdeveloped' mediaeval-fantasy world you spent the first half of the game on (the only differences being a teleporter here or a little computer screen there).







All the NPCs talk your language with the same mannerisms, of course; while most at least use different sprites, some share sprites with the supposedly-a-different-species inhabitants of the first world. Monsters on the second world were mostly palette swaps of monsters from the first (eg knights in armour, which made no sense at all). Even your money from the backwater planet is what's used on the super-advanced world and you can buy the same items (mediaeval swords and armour etc) for the same prices!

It all felt like some huge wasted opportunity... I kept thinking about how if I'd ever got that far with MARDEK, I would have had any new worlds have everything as different and alien as possible to really create an otherworldly feeling.



The human guy and alien girl are both the primary protagonists, and you can choose to play the game as either. Both join the party, but certain events or characters who you can recruit as allies differ based on who you choose as the primary protagonist. I like this! Leads to a lot of replay value, and I remember being fascinated as a child by the differences.

Now I'm old and tired, it bothers me that I can't see everything unless I replay the game, which I don't know that I can be bothered to do, but that's a 'me problem', as they say.




Speaking of allies, there are a bunch, and I remember having to check a guide back in the day to figure out how to even acquire some of them. I think you have to NOT recruit one to recruit a couple of others, that kind of thing, and it's impossible to get them all in one playthrough (there are more than your party can hold, and some only join based on who you're playing as). I like the variety of options, and how late in the game some of them join the party! Some of the designs really stuck with me over the years, especially this guy, Ashton, who has a pair of dragons joined to his back:




In villages, you can press a button to go into 'private action mode', where your allies go off by themselves and some optional scenes unlock.




I love this in theory, or rather the potential of it, but most of the scenes were far less interesting than they could have been. (I think that Bravely Default game had something similar, and I had similar issues with it?) At least in this remake you could see when these were available; you need to do some to unlock certain characters, but in the original I vaguely recall it being a nightmare knowing whether any could be activated (eg while you're in town 6, a crucial scene unlocks in town 1, for a brief window, and if you didn't make the effort to go back and check, you'd miss it).




Characters have 'friendship levels' between one another, which I liked in theory, though they seemed to mostly be improved through these private actions, and not always in a way that made a huge amount of sense. They may or may not have grown through battling together, I'm not sure. I also don't know what they did, gameplay-wise, if anything, beyond unlocking the 'endings'.

The characters' characters were also undeveloped and inconsistent, I felt. I wouldn't be able to discern their personality types, for example, because there was so little there. What you see in the first impression is about all they remain for the duration of the story. I think a lot of stories are like this, though, which is why those that go deeper stand out.




A lot of the dialogue came across as... naive, to me? Something like that. A lot of exchanges like "I think these are the magic crystals", "the magic crystals?", where one character would state the obvious and another would repeat back what the first said as a confirmation-seeking question thing. And of course anything involving romance was childlike ("I don't like him that way, teehee!"), though I wonder whether that's as much of a Japanese cultural thing than anything; it seemed very typically anime to me.



Other bits just felt odd to me. Like this scene near the beginning, where the two main characters are talking with a town's chieftain about stopping some bandits or something, and they've hired a swordsman who's the childhood friend of the girl. They talk about him a bit, and then later in the conversation he speaks up and leaves, since he was sitting right next to them the whole time. Though they talked about him as if he was elsewhere. Weird.

(As a side note, this swordsman, Dias, is a bad boy who the nice guy male protagonist envies since he and his love interest share a past, and she drops the nice guy for the bad boy a couple of times for plot reasons. He also only joins if she's the chosen protagonist. I remember hating him as a child!)

The first half of the game is spent trying to help the underdeveloped world out by locating a thing called the 'Sorcery Globe', which is a meteorite that the high-tech human guy suspects might be alien tech. I liked having something clear but mysterious to aim for like that... though oddly I didn't remember it at all from playing the game as a child? Not even slightly. Maybe it had a different name - I suspect the original English translation was poor - or maybe it's because it was mostly just referenced and only briefly shown? Even though it was mentioned over and over through much of the dialogue. I barely remembered any of the plot events, though.



When you do eventually find this Sorcery Globe, which is indeed alien tech, suddenly a group of TEN 'Wise Men' appear all at once and start villainously monologuing about how this thing was made by them and it's meant to make the planet you're on crash into their homeworld... or something?? And they dump a lot of bizarre lore on you. During this playthrough, this sudden, abrupt reveal certainly made me feel something, like intrigue or curiosity combined with dread, though in hindsight it seems so bizarre to have such a large group of villains, and to introduce them all at once like this without even so much as hinting at them earlier in the story. It all feels like the developers made things up as they went along, like I did with much of MARDEK. Sort of. Though this was like if you got to the end of MARDEK 2 and then suddenly all of the GdM appeared at once without them ever having appeared - or mentioned - previously and were suddenly the main antagonists.

(I had a vague recollection of these 'Wise Men' from playing the game as a child, but thought there were eight, and that my memory must be wrong because that's an absurdly high number. But there were actually ten! It also felt like a "that can't be right, can it?" kind of memory that they were included at all, probably because they only appear half way into the story.)



These Ten Wise Men have been sealed away in some other dimension for 3.7 billion years after almost destroying their world in the past, but they got out... somehow? Because of the 'Sorcery Globe'? But didn't they make that? How could they, if they were sealed away? And is its purpose to redirect the orbit of planet Expel, or is it the Symbol of Annihilation?? The lore doesn't make any sense. Par for the course, at least; when I played the Chrono Cross remaster not too long ago, I noticed the same thing with its story.

You end up on their planet when you get caught up in their warp... energy... or whatever... and the mayor of this 3.7-billion-year-old hyper-advanced utopia decides that your gaggle of backwater alien misfits who have just randomly shown up are the ones who must stop them. You then spend ages buggering around collecting MacGuffins from dungeons which you do absolutely nothing with once you've got them all. Padding!




Then there's a bizarre scene where you go to a high-tech VR arena and are told there are simulations of the Ten Wise Men you can battle against to learn how to fight them, and your characters agree to do that, ready their weapons... then it cuts to three days in the future with all this training happening offscreen. Why??



THEN three of the Wise Men show up and you... just kill them? No fanfare, barely any deal is made of it. They're not difficult, and I think they attack you one-by-one? I thought maybe they'd come back later or there'd be some grander point to it all, but... no. They just show up randomly, you kill them, and that's that. After all this lore dumping about how ancient and world-shatteringly powerful they all are as a group. Such strange storytelling.

The Ten Wise Men are all named after biblical angels, of course! Have to get the religious references in there somewhere; it IS a JRPG, after all. Though the apparent leader is called Gabriel and the second-in-command is called Lucifer; I would have swapped those. You raid their lair and battle five of the others in two groups and... then they're just dead. They say a single line about how you beat them, fade away, and that's that. One of them doesn't even comment as he dies. It all felt like the sort of thing that'd turn out to be a fake-out, but... no, that's it.

They're all designed, too, but barely explored. Seems like such wasted opportunity. Maybe they explored them better in the manga and anime of this game that probably exist and which I have absolutely no interest in seeking out!




In the final battle against Gabriel, he summons a sexy angel guardian and mutters pretentiously about how "humanity" doesn't understand him and his plan... to destroy the universe, because... he wants to destroy the universe? Even though the race he's part of - and whose planet you're on - are called Nedians, and humans are something else entirely. It's ludicrous. He's only had a handful of lines before this and it wasn't even clear until the end that he was the leader or strongest of the Ten Wise Men or anything (looking back through the 1000 or so screeshots I apparently took, his leadership is mentioned once during the lore dump when you arrive at the second world, but that's it). He doesn't even have a Final Form; he kind of summons the sexy angel guardian which attaches to him, but stays looking like a person throughout.




So much of it gave me feelings of "huh? Is this it?"; underwhelming, confusing. What were the creators thinking? Or are all stories kind of like this, and I'm just expecting too much?

Other bits just seemed like plot holes or inconsistencies. Like one bit where you spent a while preparing to fight the Ten Wise Men, then the next scene had the characters saying "we have to fight the Ten Wise Men??", or something like that. I forget the details (even though I played through this like two days ago...), but remember thinking something like "you JUST talked about this at great length!! Why have you immediately forgotten?"

The developers seem proud of the fact that the game has 99 (or was it 100?) endings, though I'm not sure what that means exactly. I was shown a couple of short scenes with pairs of characters whose friendship levels were highest between one another, which in my case was Claude + Rena (the two protagonists who I suppose are the main canonical couple), but also a 16-year-old inventor girl and the 20-year-old guy with dragons on his back, since they're the two I remember from playing the game as a child.




I certainly don't have the interest in playing through the game over and over to get the other 90+ brief scenes, especially if that's all the 'multiple endings' thing means! Maybe I'll look up a YouTube compilation or something at some point... though the thought bothers me since I'd rather unlock things myself.

With my own work these days, I'd greatly prefer to make something where you can unlock everything in just a single playthrough. Different preferences and priorities that come with growing older, I suppose.

Speaking of old work, I wonder if MARDEK - which I wrote mostly as a teenager - has storytelling on par with this. Makes me wonder if it was made by a bunch of twenty-somethings, which doesn't seem unlikely. Much of the creative stuff in the world probably is. I feel old.

Much - though not all - of the character dialogue was voiced... poorly! Or rather, I got the impression that the voice actors were just given a list of all their lines without any context, so while they were mostly delivered competently if heard in isolation, a whole lot of lines have stresses on the wrong words and you get exchanges like:

Claude: Rena!
Rena: Claude!
Claude: Where are WE?
Rena: THIS looks like a teleporter!

Something I've noticed more over the last few years than I did as a child is that while translations of Japanese media do translate the words, they keep in a lot of Japanese culturalisms or mannerisms or whatever you'd call them which you wouldn't really get in Western-made media. I imagine you'd see a lot of them if you're an anime fan, which I'm not, and personally I find them annoying.



One example is just saying a person's name in isolation as a whole line (a significant portion of the lines during the scenes in this were likely made of a single character's name), with all the meaning condensed into the delivery. At least the tone was mostly correct for these! (So you didn't get a brusque, angry 'Rena!' when a soft, loving 'Rena...' was needed. Though imagining that makes me laugh!)

Another is this h-hesitant s-speaking when a character is sh-shy or s-scared, but it's not meant as s-s-stuttering. Though I only saw that a handful of times in this.

I imagine a lot of young creators who are into anime and/or Japanese games incorporate these mannerisms in their own work. There are likely instances in MARDEK. I haven't really seen them in Western-created media though.

Gameplay

The battles were very active and snappy. They're not turn-based, and instead you run around and attack with a button or use special skills with other buttons. The battles tended to be over in less than maybe 20 seconds - often less than 5 - which... I suppose was nice, and I can see how that would appeal to a lot of people (I saw a Reddit post where someone called this game 'the best JRPG ever', and I imagine this was a big reason why), though I personally prefer something slower and more cerebral where I can actually tell what's going on and plan my next move.




I especially disliked the battles against the Ten Wise Men, because as soon as they begun, all of my allies assaulted the lone Wise Man and the screen just erupted into particle effects and a cacophony of screamed-out skill names, then within a handful of seconds the victory screen appeared. Barely a boss battle, and I didn't get to savour their music or even really see their sprites; I had to check the Encyclopedia to look at them later.

I found the difficulty curve odd. For the first hour or two, I mostly encountered enemies with like 10 HP that'd die in one hit. Then there was a sudden jump where in the next dungeon they had 1000 HP and could one-shot me; I saw the Game Over screen a lot (though thankfully you could just restart from the beginning of any lost battle). Then when I got over that hurdle, everything became very easy again and I mostly breezed through all the battles in my way.

Mostly. Sometimes amidst a sea of easy encounters I'd suddenly enter into a battle against a group of spellcasters who'd wipe out my party with unusually powerful AOE spells before I could even react. Not exactly fun.

Enemies have an armour bar in addition to HP, and depleting it 'breaks' them, which stuns them and probably increases the damage they take. Seems a lot of RPGs make use of this kind of thing? I don't remember it being in the original, so it's probably a modernised improvement.



Some encounters had a 'leader' monster, which was bigger than the rest and which granted various bonuses to its allies. I found the idea interesting, and it definitely added interest to battles, but when the concept was new to me, I struggled a bit with certain bonuses (like one that blocked all spells - including healing - or another which granted huge attack buffs to all the foes so they all swarmed and destroyed my party... then the very next time I tried the battle I managed to do the same to them without getting hit).



One battle mechanic I like a lot is the ability to summon the allies who aren't on your party for a single attack, using the D pad buttons, and the attacks have a fairly short cooldown rather than an MP cost so they can be used quite often. You decide which skill the characters use when summoned, too, from their available arsenal. I like the idea of gathering a bunch of allies, but always found it a shame how only a small number could be used in battle at a time, so this feels to me like a great solution to that.



The original had random battles, but thankfully those are a thing of the past, and this remake had abstract representations of monsters on the map. At first it seemed these didn't respawn in dungeons and I could clear them out, which I liked, but in later dungeons they respawned. They were coloured according to difficulty, and any of sufficient difficulty pursued you while any that were too low-levelled remained placid. A decent way to alleviate grinding while encouraging - or requiring - some combat, I thought. I'll keep that in mind for my own games.

There wasn't much in the way of strategy, because the battles were so frantic and brief. Characters had long lists of spells and abilities, but they were all fairly similar and I mostly used basic attacks with the one character I controlled while my allies spammed their skills seemingly at random. Not that I could really tell what was going on amid the chaos. I wanted to use more special abilities, but they cost MP, and seemed to do less damage anyway, so it usually felt pointless. Though Claude - my character - unlocked a skill which damaged all foes around him while restoring his own HP, so I used that a lot.

Personally I prefer having control over all my allies, but that's impossible if battles are more active. I like how the FFVII Remake did it; maybe I should finish the post I started writing about that at some point!



Characters have these weird lists of non-combat skills that they can optionally learn which just felt overwhelming and barely relevant to me, and I ended up ignoring a lot of them and accumulating tons of unspent points until close to the end when I blindly spent them all at once. Like you could increase some skills such that a character would learn some kind of music performance skill and they could all perform in something like an orchestra... as abstractly shown in the menu, at least. Or they could make paintings or food, or write books and take them to a publisher, and it all just felt so... why? Why bother?




Maybe if I were a child who was enraptured by the thought of joining these people on a quest through an alien world, it might be more appealing to me, but... Now, as an "adult" who sees them more as designed game characters, anything this 'bitty' just irks me, and I try to avoid it in my own work, using a minimum number of skills, items, etc (that wasn't the case for MARDEK, which was probably influenced by this and other JRPGs and included more stuff than was really necessary).

One of the few things I recall about playing through the original as a child was how the items were shown in the menu as 3D models, and I remember the feeling of fascination as I cooked up some meal using characters and imagined them actually using the skills I'd taught them to do that. It stuck with me, at least vaguely, more than most of the other stuff in the game, so maybe it is really just a case of being in the wrong space mentally for this kind of content to land, and other more receptive people would like it a lot.

I finished the game at level 97 or something, which I liked, as I'm used to games like Final Fantasy or Pokemon where you finish in the 50s or 60s.

Aesthetics

I'm generally not a big fan of the pixel sprites on detailed 3D backgrounds that a few of these games have been using recently, though I suppose this one grew on me. The sprites seem to be exactly the same as the ones in the version I played as a child, though; I don't know if they were in-the-style-of recreations, or if they literally reused the exact sprites. Oddly, pretty much all of the sprites have often major inconsistencies with the 'proper' art of the characters (Rena's hair is dark blue in her portrait and lighter blue on her sprite, for example). I wonder why they didn't just redo them to match the official art.

The one that bothered me most was this character, Noel, whose portrait has elf ears (or Nedian, technically, which his race is shown as on the menu), but his sprite has cat ears on top of his head instead:



Especially annoying since the Star Ocean games have a race called the 'fellpool' who do have cat ears on top of their heads, so it looks like he's one of those. Maybe he was meant to be and they changed it after making the sprites? Odd. (Or maybe he is and that's revealed in a bit I missed.)



(Also, Leon, an obnoxious 12-year-old boy who's a respected professional scientist with a dozen PhDs or whatever - another anime thing - is a fellpool who lives on Expel for some reason? If that's explored, I never saw it because I hate him and wouldn't let him join my party! Hmm, I just noticed his name is Noel reversed. I BET THAT'S HIS FATHER THEN. My father is called Saibot. Which sounds like an anime mecha. Interesting.)




Characters have these large portraits that appear during dialogue... sometimes, but not always. Like maybe one out of four lines a given character speaks will be accompanied by their portrait. Odd choice. The portrait's mouth moves while they talk, which I liked.



I liked how in the menu, you can switch a character's portraits between the newest one, the original, and an anime-style one that seems to be from another re-release of this game that I've never played. The old portraits look so amateurishly-drawn to me, knowing what I do now about art! Though I don't remember noticing any issues as a child. I find it interesting that the skill bar wasn't all that high for becoming a game artist back then. Seems to be much higher now, as the newer, much more impressive portraits show.

The second half of the game is set on a 'planet' called 'Energy Nede', which is a floating island with a bubble on it, like this:




Or is it a saturn-like planet in a nebula, like this, as it's later depicted?



I found that inconsistency annoying. They also call it a 'planet' repeatedly in direct contradiction to that first image there.


Music in games is more important to me than maybe most other aspects, which is why I compose my own. I found the music in this quite disappointing. While I played the game a lot as a child, only one piece from close to the beginning had stuck in my memory (which I foggily recall had some poorly-translated title like "Pure a Stream" when I sought out an mp3 many years ago). None of the other music tracks seemed remotely familiar...

...which is especially odd considering that there only seem to be like three town and dungeon themes that are used across both planets. Ugh! I hated that! You awaken on this new, alien world, in this kind of aethereal garden-like place, step through a door, and find yourself in an interior area almost the same as the other planet's with the background music of one of that planet's towns playing. Would it really have been so difficult to give the places in the new world their own music?? At least the worlds' world maps had different music!

Both of the Star Ocean games I've played have had similarly-styled dungeon music, which I don't like at all. It's this... I don't know, electric... organ or guitar or something high energy noise sort of stuff that just isn't my kind of thing and which I couldn't really follow or discern any clear melody in. Maybe other people like it, though?

I at least remembered the basic battle music, which makes sense since it's used for almost all the battles in the game, across both planets. I was disappointed by that; I remember some other RPG I played (though I can't remember which one) which used a different battle theme when you visited its world's second continent, and it really reinforced the "we're somewhere different now" feeling. There was also a boss theme, though I don't remember that at all and don't know if I'd even recognise it if I heard it again.

Absolutely bizarrely, though, the battles against the Ten Wise Men seemed to have different music. A "Ten Wise Men Battle Theme" would have made perfect sense, but instead I think they all had different battle tracks?? Despite the battles lasting just seconds and being dominated by constant combat sound effects and voice clips so I could barely hear the music anyway. Why?? Why was the composer's energy directed there rather than to different area music for the new world?? Maybe he (most likely a he) preferred high-energy battle music? It does seem to have the most appeal.



Anyway, those are my thoughts about a game you've likely not played and probably don't have any interest in playing! I only looked into it because I had it as a child, but I don't know why I did; did my mum just see it in a shop one day and thought I'd like it? Did I pick it out myself?? How did I even get games back then?!? I can't remember!

Apparently the first one was also remade a few years before this one. I might give that one a go; I'm curious to know how much is similar between the two.

...This turned out much longer than intended! Whenever I play games these days, I always imagine as I'm going through them which bits I might write about in a blog post later - and I take a bunch of screenshots of bits I might want to write about - though it's been months since I actually managed to push through the reluctance and write one. I suppose it's only because I've been struggling to focus on other stuff that I should be focusing on that I was able to get through this one. It's procrastination, essentially.

At least it's been a pleasant distraction for a while. Back to work tomorrow!