Star Ocean: The Second Story R Review – Review
A full remake in hand is worth two ports in the bush.
The Square Enix RPG series Star Ocean has been around for nearly 30 years but only recently made the leap to Nintendo platforms in the west. The Super Famicom original came to Switch (in PSP remake port form) in 2019 and now a fully remade version of the PlayStation sequel is hitting Nintendo Switch in the form of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. Unlike its predecessor, Second Story R is not an upgraded port of a PSP version. Instead, Square Enix and developer Gemdrops took the foundation and put together a modern remake with a gorgeous art style and presentation and refined combat and gameplay mechanics. It is a marked improvement from First Departure R that allows the quality of the ‘90s RPG to be easier to see in 2023.
Set 20 years after the events of the first Star Ocean, Second Story R kicks off by giving you the choice between two protagonists: Claude or Rena. Regardless of your choice, the pair will quickly team up and set off on an adventure to find out what’s up with the Sorcery Globe, a meteorite that landed on Rena’s home planet Expel and has brought about monsters and destruction. Your choices and decisions matter in the grand scheme of the plot and combat. Claude and Rena are locked in as playable characters, but the rest of your eight-person party can be filled out with a number of others, which can alter aspects of the story, leading to different endings. Similar to First Departure R, some of the finer details of party-building feel like they aren’t conveyed as clearly in the game itself, but it’s less obfuscated in this sequel.
Beyond the characters themselves, a robust skills and specialities system deepens them beyond the story. Skills all funnel into the action RPG battle system, where you upgrade special attacks and abilities to fine-tune your different party members using points accrued in battle. Separate from that are specialities, that factor into more than just battle. You use a different bucket of points earned from battle to do things like increase character’s blacksmith or writing ability. Some of the abilities unlocked fall in line with RPG tropes, like being able to cook healing items, while others are weird, like a book-making skill that lets your team publish a book and collect royalties on it. The full breadth is daunting, but if you figure it out, you can do some wild game-breaking things like be able to pickpocket the world and vastly improve your experience points by upgrading the training skill.
The action RPG combat is quick and snappy, in spite of the slightly too long load times on Switch. In the same vein as the Tales series, you run into a battle on the overworld and go into another screen where you actively attack, defend, and use abilities. The remake adds a lot of flourishes to the combat to make it better and more engaging, including the “break” system where you can stun enemies and Assault Action, where you can call in secondary characters (generally from other Star Ocean games) to help you out in battle. It’s a fine combat system and the new twists keep it from feeling stale. A few difficulty spikes would occasionally slow my progress, but that makes the inclusion of three difficulty levels all the more helpful.
The visual presentation might be the overall highlight for Second Story R, as it takes the original’s late ‘90s PlayStation art and modernizes it in a 2.5D blend spectacularly. All characters are sprite-based, rotating in the full 3D environments. Running around the overworld is often stunning, especially as the updated Motoi Sakuraba soundtrack blasts in the background. Those snazzy visuals help to paper over some of the slower pace in the opening hours of the 40-hour-long journey. It’s worth sticking around because the story opens up and gets more interesting in the back half. And honestly the slower pace is just because the game shows its Enix roots by having a lot of Dragon Quest-style vignettes in towns.
Star Ocean: The Second Story R is a great remake of a less heralded PlayStation RPG. Unlike First Departure R and some of the other ports and remasters out there, this is a smart, modern upgrade to a decades-old adventure. It’s an enjoyable action RPG with a wealth of player choice and a lot of charming quirky aspects. If you’ve ever been curious about Star Ocean and have an affinity for old-school action RPGs, this is a must-play. Even beyond that, the beautiful presentation might be worth the price of admission by itself.
