I have this habit of not finishing the video games I start. The weirder part is that the more I love the game, the more likely I am to leave it near its climax. Over the years I came to the conclusion that I simply don’t want to see the characters journey end, or more precisely, my time with them. Because of this, I have save files littered with half finished entries to all manner of games. Some from the same game over and over again, starting from the beginning and quitting at just about the same time. This bad habit can also be found in other forms of media as well. While I generally always finish a book, movie, or television series, I do this thing where I pause in the middle of the action because I am too emotionally overwhelmed. Or maybe I am right at the peak of my emotion and I want to hold on to it for as long as possible. In either case, when it isn’t a video game, I always tell myself I need to muster the courage to finish what I started, my emotional highs be damned. I only started consistently finishing games that I started relatively recently, maybe the last 7 years or so, and it wasn’t of my own volition. I started streaming regularly and would switch what I was playing regularly. A friend of mine who often dropped in to watch my streams casually prodded me about having started so many games that I never finish. The prodding evolved into teasing, and much like Marty McFly, nobody calls me a chicken. This ended up impacting my gaming consumption in an unexpected way. I have a full time job, other hobbies, friends, social obligations, a work-out schedule I loathe, and a myriad of other things vying for my time. This would mean that I would only get to play and finish about 3-5 games a year, depending on their length and difficulty. At 2 to 3 hours on a good night, maybe 15 hours a week, a 40-60 hour game will take me around 1 to 2 months to beat. I supposed I should have expected that, but it really means I have to be way more discerning about what I choose to play. 

Or I should be, but I haven’t been able to shake one of my other bad habits. I like mid games. I like bad games. I like hard games. I like obtuse games. I like trite games. You don’t need to feel any guilt about walking away from them. But I am not sure I can handle truly good games. Targeting a good game is usually pretty easy. They have a broad fandom, lots of press, and in some cases a good pedigree of known talent behind them. Sometimes they even spawn a series or franchise. Knowing I have a limited amount of time to game means I have to seriously consider the games I want to play, to the point that when I have created a list and some games, even the ones I already bought somehow don’t make the cut. But just because you have a well defined list doesn’t mean new games aren’t constantly being released, which means like a well maintained bonsai, you have to make well defined cuts. And even then, with all the care in the world, sometimes something unexpectedly jumps to the top of your list. 

Ever since I was introduced to the Star Ocean series, I have bought into it consistently. Its mediocre nature has meant that I have never finished a single title in its franchise. They have always felt so mid, flavored like a piece of Fruit Stripe gum with the same kind of lasting effect. But somehow, also like Fruit Stripe gum, there is this allure that it maintains. Maybe it’s the idea that it could be good, or that it’s simply good enough. The release of Star Ocean: The Second Story R, the 2.5HD remake of the Playstation 1 title literally broke my list and shot right to the top for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. It could be all the mid-ness I mentioned earlier. It could be rose tinted glasses. It could be the rise of 2.5D remakes and their general improvement. Of all the save files across all my memory cards, none have an entire series of games without a single completion except for Star Ocean. I have it on PS1, PSP, PS2, PS3, and PS4. None of them have been completed, but I have played them all. 

Star Ocean is the most mid-tier of JRPG releases, both difficult and easy, well written and hackneyed, lovingly crafted and broken, it hits a sweet spot with this beholder. I had a feeling that with this new release and all its fancy shortcuts and broken mid-ness, I would finally be able to beat and thoroughly enjoy the very game that brought me to the series in the first place. But then I actually got to play it and it taught me something about myself today and something about myself in 1999.

It would be fair to say I spend an outsized amount of time following gaming news. I have been reading about gaming for such a long time, it’s hard to imagine what would fill the void if it were to be completely removed from my life. But sometimes you just miss an article or public announcement, or maybe some companies are actually good at keeping things close to the vest. Or maybe no one is asking because no one cares. Star Ocean had a brand new entry in the series just before the release of the Second Story remake (SO2R), which is subtitled “The Divine Force”, a title I couldn’t even remember, and in a hilarious twist I looked it up online only to realize I already owned it and it was next to me on my shelf. It’s entirely possible I played it and forgot (I checked, I hadn’t. Yet.). But from all accounts it looks about as bad and mid as I like it. I will get to it someday, but it’s highly unlikely I will ever finish it. In the vein of Fruit Stripe gum, I’ll chew on it just long enough to absorb its flavor and move on. Unlike Fruit Stripe gum though, after some time passes I will come back to continue where I left off for a bit longer and then move on again. I will repeat this cycle maybe 3 more times before it ends up forgotten. This happened with every single Star Ocean release since I first tried the original Second Story (SO2) in 1999. For whatever reason, this series has a way of drawing me in and keeping me around. It intrigues me as it plays with the Star Trek trope of the “Prime Directive”, a catch all rule for highly advanced civilizations to play limited roles in the worlds of the more primitive cultures. It also has that tinge of shonen anime and saturday morning adventure about it. That plants my right back on my butt in my childhood bedroom, a trip worth making. In fact, SO2 has a 26 episode Anime called Star Ocean EX that seems to follow the major story beats, and has a dope opening theme. I wish I could recommend it, but unless you love the game, you don’t really need to watch it. 

It’s becoming clear to me that my video game reviews are turning into those terrible cooking recipe websites wherein the author waxes about how they came across Grandma’s Sticky Toffee Pudding on the morning of their own root canal, high on nitrous. I would apologize if I didn’t love writing this way. Now, I owned or have owned at one time every North American release of the Star Ocean series, and played at least a quarter of each game. But the fire started with Second Story. I have occasionally loaded up my ancient save only to be greeted with a harsh world wherein all my characters die instantly because for me in 1999, SO2 was confusing as hell. For a refresher, I went back and took another look. The major changes in SO2R are immediately apparent. From the graphics to the menus, everything has been streamlined. Well, maybe not streamlined, but its mechanics are explained more thoroughly in game. More on that later. The music arrangement updates are sometimes outstanding, better than the original, and other times way worse. In the cases where it isn’t as good, it was like they felt forced to update some weird electronic sound with a completely different instrument that was meant to give a similar sound, but falls way short. The soundtrack in both versions of the game are the standout feature of the titles. SO2 was composed by Motoi Sakuraba, a man with an amazing list of titles under his belt before and after the original release including Tales of Phantasia, Valkyrie Profile, Golden Sun, and many others. I found myself just idling in place to listen to some of its best beats and switching between both the original and arranged just to enjoy the differences. But I am afraid this is the only point I can think of that is without flaw, and while Star Ocean 2 has received the best PS1 Remaster to date, a veritable perfect 10, all the issues that remain are legacy issues rather than completely new to the game. It’s possible that the remaster even exacerbates these issues or sheds light on something that was always there but couldn’t really be seen.

Let’s start with the story, the aspect of RPG’s that should draw the player in to begin with. I was drawn to the game initially with the idea that the story would be a mix of JRPG, but in space instead of the usual backdrop of villages, kingdoms, magic, and demons. While that always seems like what will initially happen or eventually happen in Star Ocean games, it is predominately the classic Tolkien-esq/Medieval-esq backdrop but instead is viewed through the eyes of our characters who come from a super advanced human race who have suddenly been dropped into a sword and sorcery world. It’s enough of a detour from the norm to at least be interesting, even if it’s only window dressing simply reframing the classic JRPG world through a slightly different lens. I can still remember being immediately drawn into the story and world of SO2 with this simple premise alone. While you can choose the character you want to view the world through, space faring Claude or humble villager Rena, the major beats are all the same. In Rena’s story, you are a teenage girl living in a small village in a peaceful country who takes daily walks through the woods near her home, when one day she is attacked by an abnormally strong monster. Just before disaster sets in, a young man appears with a golden weapon and banishes the monster, saving Rena. She immediately believes he is a man of legend, one who will save the world. In Claude’s story, you are the privileged son of a Navy Admiral, and while you have proven yourself by being at the top of your class, everyone believes everything you have is due to nepotism. While on an excursion to an unknown planet that showed signs of distress, Claude moves ahead of the team against his Father’s orders, touches some kind of mysterious device and is suddenly transported to another planet. Lost in the woods, he hears the cries of a person in distress, and while he knows he shouldn’t interfere, he brandishes his weapon, a light gun, and vanquishes a monster preying on a young girl. This simple branch in perspective and circumstance made for a really interesting entry into a genre bereft of originality. It takes a casual trope and spins it into something slightly different, that also immediately characterizes our protagonists and creates an endearing, if not trite premise. 

–** SPOILER WARNING FOR THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THE GAME **–

While it takes a while for the plot to get rolling, its strength is that it is surrounded by great music, graphics, and trope-laden dialog. If I had any major criticism, it’s that it is hard to grasp exactly how dire the situation really is, because they speak of their predicament as simply a tremor instead of a catastrophic earthquake. From here, the story escalates unevenly throughout the adventure, randomly dialing up the intensity without our characters reacting as if it were all that bad or surprising. Relayed tepidly by the town elder, the premise is that just 3 months before Claude’s appearance, a strange magic sphere crashes into the planet of Expel right at the center of the kingdom of Ell, located on a different continent north of Rena’s home kingdom of Krosse, destroying the capital and many of its citizens. The people of Expel have dubbed it the “Sorcery Globe”, and with its arrival, a whole new class of monsters have appeared. The entire kingdom of Ell has been overrun by monsters, but you wouldn’t know it based on the attitude of the people in Rena’s village. More than surprising is that during these 3 months, it would seem the kingdom of Krosse has been lackadaisical in working on a solution to the problem. They sent explorers and adventures overseas who never return and still everyone seems to be living a more than average way of life. The prince of Krosse is still preparing a wedding during all of this, a wedding he doesn’t actually want that is being thrust on him as a duty. And what’s stranger, you could miss this entire subplot if you didn’t bother talking to anyone in the castle or the town, and even then it’s hard to notice if you aren’t playing Rena’s storyline with Celine in your party. While the prince’s wedding may simply be seasoning that is unrelated to the overall plot, it serves as a character anchor for Celine in one version of the story. In either case, everything is calm, peaceful, and serene. People talk of normal problems or issues. Other people are happily getting married. It’s a bit odd and the game never really tries to make sense of this. 

Just before leaving Rena’s village, you also learn that Rena is adopted and that she was found stranded alone in the woods next to some kind of unknown technology. All she had with her was a “pendant” that had her name written on it. This being brought up at the beginning of the game implies they are going to use it to create tension as the characters move through the story, but it is never mentioned again until we get halfway through the game, and even then, it is only truly resolved at the very end of the game. It’s information that is never capitalized on despite being told to us at the beginning. I guess we are just supposed to be thinking about it in the back of our mind, but why should we if Rena or Claude aren’t. Getting to the Sorcery Globe is half of the game, and during this journey to the Globe, they never expand on this pendant or learn anything about it, at all. Sorry, this was a sore spot for me. 

After an explanation of the circumstances for the planet of Expel from the village elder, Claude reveals that he is actually from outer space and is not the hero of legend. This disappoints Rena, but after running out and crying about it for a bit, they both have a heartfelt talk and decide to sleep on it. In the morning, Claude and Rena join forces and decide to investigate the Sorcery Globe; Claude thinking it may get him home and Rena thinking that Claude may need help navigating the world of Expel (and because she thinks it may help expand her horizons now that her religious hopes have been dashed by a man from outer space). 

From this point forward, the story itself is fairly straightforward if you stick to only the main story, but in doing so, you will miss quite a bit of information that fleshes out both the plot and the characters. In an effort to simplify this, I am going to stick to describing the main plot with a light peppering of extraneous story points that I think are meant to make the story more complete despite being very easy to miss or simply ignore. I will be skipping the various character introductions as all of them are entirely optional from this point forward and distract from the main plot. And one more thing to understand is that there is so much story not ever expressed directly in the game but rather in other side projects that its incomplete nature is somewhat by design, but I am not sure if it was done this way on purpose. This story actually left in the game is hilarious when you put it down on paper. So here we go, enjoy. 

Claude and Rena set out and they travel to the kingdom of Krosse to ask permission to investigate the story globe. The king gives his permission because he’s simply out of options. Everyone he has sent so far has not come back. He is not particularly alarmed, adventurers die all the time. The king sends Calude and Rena to a northern port town to take a boat overseas to Ell where the Sorcery Globe landed. The boat they plan to take is suddenly destroyed by a massive earthquake (the boat is in the water, yes), and the port town is destroyed. No one knows how this happened and no one suspects anything but mother nature or abstractly the Sorcery Globe’s influence on nature. 

Detoured to a different port town, they decided to ask the adjacent kingdom of Lacuer for help in the investigation. After winning a completely random tournament in Lacuer that has nothing to do with the plot (seriously, it doesn’t even seem that the need to win to gain an audience with the king, they just decided to do it to “get stronger”), they stumble into an audience between the king of Lacuer and his scientists who have created a weapon to fight against the monsters who suddenly seem to be a growing border threat. Now suddenly our sword and sorcery game has scientists in lab coats and modern-esq tech that seems to be powered by magic instead of hard science. After you are sent to find and return a macguffin stone to power the new weapon, they head off to the northern border of the kingdom of Lacuer where a battle between the kingdom and hordes of monsters is being waged. At no point until this mission has it been mentioned that the monsters on Ell are intelligent or alien to the planet of Expel at all. In fact, for the first time in the game, a monster who can speak and represents the monster hordes named Cynne appears and explains that he plans to destroy the kingdom for no particular reason. After a quick battle, Cynne is sent packing. The weapon is fired and obliterates the monsters in a single strike. 

Let’s pause here for a second. Between the beginning of the game and up to this point in the story, their investigation has turned up exactly zilch about anything of actual concern. Technically, they never get a chance to investigate anything, nor at any point is the world in any actual peril that the player can see until this exact moment. In fact, the down beats between each of the major story points I just listed are mostly about filling out the world of Expel. Where their magic comes from; who each of the characters actually are as people; meeting families and friends. This is where one of the best mechanics makes an appearance, the “Private Action” sub stories. You can initiate moments as Rena or Claude to walk around the villages or cities alone, talking to each other characters and initiating special cutscenes that can augment your relationship meter with each character. We will discuss this later. In any case, these moments make up the actual fun of the story but impedes the pace of the game in between the major story beats. In almost every case, this never furthers the actual plot or their intended investigation in any way, but it can impact the ending you get, of which there are over 80. 

Getting back to the major story beats, it’s at this point that the party decides to help the attacking kingdom take the new weapon overseas to use against the sorcery globe. However, it turns out it was all a trap by our sudden monster representative Cynne from the initial battle at the border, and that what the monsters really wanted was to give the kingdom a false sense of security so they would put the weapon on a boat. Which they seem to believe will make it easier to steal its power source without giving a reason as to why they would believe this to be true. Also the macguffin stone just so happens to resonate with a pendant Rena was given as a child. On the one hand, I kind of understand this tactic, the monsters are a mix of land and flying types, and getting the weapon out on open water makes it easier to assault than when it was on land at the top of some border castle, but still, it feels like very lazy writing, because they never really express how they came up with this plan or why, nor what they ultimately need the power source for. I suppose it hints that you might find out if you keep going, but at this point, they don’t know where the monsters are coming from or why the monsters want the stone, and our characters are just blindly moving ahead towards the Sorcery Globe in hopes that it will have some answers, despite having learned absolutely nothing up to this point. Again, by this point in the game, it has been roughly 3 weeks since a disaster that wiped out an entire continent. Half the planet seems to be aware, but also not at all in a hurry to figure any of this out, despite monsters knocking at Lacuer’s door and the Krosse getting an entire port town destroyed. Anyway, Cynne destroys your party, the boat, and steals the power source. You are thrown into the ocean and later find yourself waking up on the shores of Ell. The team rallies and heads to the Sorcery Globe with absolutely no plan whatsoever. 

Once they get to the Sorcery Globe, it turns out they have found two important items, one is something only Claude can recognize, a keycard; the second is of course Rena’s pendant. With the keycard, we finally get our first actual hint as to what the Sorcery Globe could be. By this point, you have been playing for about 30 to 40 hours, depending on if you did side quests and private actions. There has been no actual story progression in that whole affair. Just a bunch of pit stops on the way. I think the reason this bothers me is because of the casual attitude of the inhabitants of Expel up to this point and because they identify a goal so far in advance and then you learn nothing about it until the very moment you are in front of it, and that it makes up the exact halfway point of the game. I think any other RPG would have had you meet all sorts of people who were on their way to the Sorcery Globe themselves and had their own goals and reasons to help or stop you. You would learn what they know and make enemies and allies. But instead, the designers decided to simply have you run into completely unexplained problems or side objectives that ultimately deepen the world of Expel, but have nothing to do with saving Expel. For instance, there is a dungeon you can do as a side quest that alludes to the planet of Expel having an ancient race of giants that fought each other or fought monsters. There is some kind of archeology plot that as a whole never gets resolved. In a way, thats kind of like real life. You might discover some ancient artifacts and never in your lifetime learn what actually happened. But that doesn’t appear to have been the intent with this storyline. I think it was simply unfinished or meant to be attached to something later. Anyway, now at the Sorcery Globe, this brings us to the crux of the halfway point. After getting to the end of the Sorcery Globe dungeon and defeating Cynne, you discover the reason for the Sorcery Globe’s existence, and you meet the “true” leading antagonists: the “Ten Wise Men”. 

This is when the game takes another drastic and silly turn. The Ten Wise Men proceed to tell you that the Sorcery Globe is actually something they call the “Quadratic Sphere”, a powerful tool they plan on using to steer the planet of Expel into something called Energy Nede, which turns out to be a highly advanced and hidden satellite that houses an entire people called the Nedeians. The Ten Wise Men were expelled from Energy Nede for trying to take control of the universe using the advanced science of the Nedeians. They had been using the monster hordes to gather up the strange stones that resonate with Rena’s pendant to power the Quadratic Sphere, which in turn would allow them to alter the orbit of the Expel to crash into the hidden satellite of Energy Nede, or more specifically, the impenetrable shield around Energy Nede. This crash will cause an explosion, the of power which they can use to power the Quadratic Sphere even further and allow them to teleport through the advanced shield around Energy Nede and take control of Nedeian science once more. Very convoluted, just take it at its word. But in a twist, the power in Rena’s pendant turned out to be more than enough to start the process. Without it, it would have taken a hundred years to gather enough energy to allow them to follow through with their plans. After a short, losing brawl with one of the Ten Wise Men, you are all sucked into a portal and land in the gardens of Energy Nede.

Explaining the story up to this point makes me feel a little crazy. I feel a bit of nervous laughter bubbling up. This is the end of the first disc in the original release. This was the moment that you had to sit and really digest what had even happened while you started to change discs. I am going to break down a few elements that bother me here. In a short moment, you will find out they destroyed the planet of Expel, like they said they would, leading to my first issue. Destroying the planet to gain access to another planet sounds absurd as a story point in general, but in this particular instance its even more disappointing because we have spent an entire half of the game building up the world of Expel. You will come to find out that from this point forward, you will never step foot back in that world again. All the people who live there, the kingdoms, the towns are all washed away. The sheer forward momentum of the plot has robbed you of the chance to further deepen relationships and storylines that are still up in the air by the time you reach the Expel’s destruction. In other RPG’s, this is generally where you would get a ruined version of the world, like a war torn time skip or something, like the “World of Ruin” in Final Fantasy VI. But in this case, you don’t even get to live in a world where the party was too late to help. There is no one to help, just a new antagonist group that up until this point you hadn’t even heard of and were not given any reason to believe they would exist. And there isn’t just 1 or 2 of them, there are 10 of them. All of them with their own distinct character models, personalities, weapons, and presumably desires. But we aren’t going to be that lucky enough for the game to actually expand on 10 bad guys. I bet you are getting a funny feeling by now. If the first half of the game was just a build up to losing the entire world we just explored without so much as a single antagonist until the final stage, then the second half likely isn’t going to offer much more. If that is your feeling, you are pretty spot on.

The rest of the story can actually summed up pretty easily and the beats are not very far apart anymore and because Energy Nede is actually a small satellite, it’s very easy to traverse. It’s especially easy to traverse because the first major beat is to get yourself a flying beast of burden dubbed a Psynard. Once you have this, you are tasked with visiting 4 temples, Might, Wisdom, Courage, and Love. There is only the thinnest of reasoning behind these four dungeons, but they make up almost the entirety of the second half of the game’s playtime, and you do them all in a row. Depending on which character you are playing, you get flashback sequences that relate to each attribute. For example, in the Wisdom dungeon as Rena, you see a flashback wherein a very young Rena finds one of her forest animal friends is dead, but she is too young to understand this. And while this is actually one of the most touching scenes in the game, Rena’s mother explains death to her in a very odd way that didn’t sit right with me. She explains that the animal had the best time of its life playing with Rena, but now it’s all played out, and it needs to rest and move on to another place. It’s sweet if you don’t think about it too much. 

After you watch each of the dungeon sequences, regardless of who you are playing as, you are finally told exactly who Rena is and where she comes from. It turns out that she is of course Nedeian, but it’s weirder than that. She is actually the daughter of a great scientist that was trying to master time travel. Her mother, Rhima, accidentally causes a meltdown in her lab that will destroy everyone in the vicinity. Without enough time to escape, she makes a last ditch effort to save Rena by placing her at the center of the explosion with her special energy crystal pendant. If she is lucky, the result will be that Rena will be flung, alive, somewhere in time. It turns out she lands on Expel 700 million years in the future in the forest where she will also meet Claude. You are also meant to surmise without actually being told that the ruins of this explosion are the same ruins that sent Claude to present day Expel, and that the ruins of this experiment can be found all throughout time across the universe. This is the final story point that is actually spelled out for you. What comes next is just a series of events to move the plot towards the end of the game.

Now that you have revealed Rena’s origins, you are then thrust into the final dungeon of the game, a research facility called Phynal taken over by the Ten Wise Men upon their arrival on Energy Nede. When you get inside, you are immediately shown the door despite having been forced to level up to make sure you could take on this foe. It turns out, they have special armor or shielding protecting them, so you are going to have to return to home base to determine how best to defeat them, which of course turns out to be another macguffin. Once you complete this macguffin dungeon that requires you to kill and utilize living rocks, we build some new weapons and test them out at the local amusement park, Fun City. Like every amusement park, it is equipped with a state of the art battle arena and you can test your new weapons against versions of the Ten Wise Men. Can you imagine that in the future, you can go to Disney World and queue up an AI version of your school bully or your boss and just beat the shit of out of them? That’s what’s happening here. But suddenly, 3 of the real Ten Wise Men show up. You dispatch them with your new weapons, and head back to Phynal, the research facility. With 7 of 10 left, you make your way through Phynal until you reach the final of the Ten Wise Men, Gabriel, the original mastermind of the group. It is at this point that you might be asking yourself why none of these story beats have anything to do with the Ten Wise Men as individuals. It’s because they never reveal anything about them in any direct fashion. If you want to learn more about them, you really have to dig, finding books on shelves or snippets of conversations with random Nedeians across the various towns that serve no actual purpose beyond showing that Energy Nede has inhabitants. Maybe the designers felt that it would slow down the story if we actually knew our antagonists. It’s more likely that the developers were running low on time and money. This is the uneven, escalated pace I had mentioned earlier. If it weren’t for all of the interpersonal character interactions on both Expel and Energy Nede via the Private Action function and the distinct perspective of your chosen main character, there is almost no meat at all to the story. It’s just a series of events that force the characters from one place to the next, robbing them and you of any agency. I can’t say I have played a game in recent memory that dropped the ball so drastically. Other JRPG’s at least try to mask a lack of plot agency by giving you or the characters some emotional stakes; or minor decisions that appear to change the direction of the story even if they ultimately don’t; or maybe even just more thorough explanations of characters’ reasonings. But Star Ocean 2 really makes you work for it.

So who are the bad guys then? Do our characters even care? I’ll sum up what little the game offers you. If you decide you want to know more about the individual Ten Wise Men, check out the very thoroughly laid out wikis, but I can at least outline Gabriel, who seems to be the only character the game discusses, though indirectly. When I got to this point of the game, I started to read those wikis just to get a grasp on any of the 10 wise men, so its going to be hard for me to know for sure what I read in the game versus what I read in the wiki, so excuse me if I don’t get it quite right. There are parts of the wiki that don’t seem to line up exactly with the way the game explains it too. There is actually quite a bit of information that differs from what I came across in the game myself. 

For instance, I don’t think the game directly says this but, Gabriel is not his real name. It’s Dr. Lantis, a super scientist who created the Ten Wise Men, biological super soldiers designed to help conquer the universe. I would have you defer to the Star Ocean Wiki for the real truth, but in my 2 complete playthroughs of the game, once as Claude and once as Rena, the story I recall was that the Nedeians were a peaceful and super powerful culture. The story goes that for BILLIONS (with a B) years, they had power unlike anything, and had complete control of the universe. But Dr.Lantis, realizing the power of Nedeian science, felt the need to consolidate this power into his own hands. Once the Nedeians realized it wasn’t only possible, but probable that they as a culture could actually accomplish the feat of universal domination, and that Dr.Lantis was well on his way to using his super soldiers to do so, they decided to banish him and his creations to “Eternity Space”, a place where time stands still in a pocket outside the known universe, and willingly cull their own people and separate off their society into the satellite structure known as Energy Nede. This is the extent of spoken dialog you get out of the game if you were just playing through normally. (Minus the Dr.Lantis information, I think. They simply call him Gabriel, maybe? The end of this game goes by very fast.)

This is a very different and incomplete explanation by comparison to what is in the Star Ocean Wiki. It seems to say that the Nedeians themselves were trying to conquer the universe and that when their technology got into the hands of their enemies, the enemies in turn used it to rebel. Slowly but surely they were losing the war against the rest of the universe which had band together in a united assault against the Nedeians. In an effort to defeat the rebellion, they tasked Dr.Lantis with designing a weapon that could help them win the war. But Dr.Lantis’ solution of using biological super soldiers didn’t exactly sit well with Nedeian culture, as they deemed it unnatural, and though they were starting to push back the rebellion, they felt that the cost of doing so was too grave. Tragically, during an attack by the rebels, Dr.Lantis’ only daughter Philia was killed. Possibly afraid of what he might do or in an effort to keep him working for the Nedeian war machine, the government hid this information from him. When Dr.Lantis finally learns what happened, he reprograms and activates nine of the super soldiers he has dubbed “The Ten Wise Men” with orders to destroy the universe, leaving the last soldier body, his masterpiece, in stasis. While the soldiers are sent on a rampage, he builds a copy of his daughter Philia and uploads what memories of her he has left to the copy before ultimately loading his consciousness into the last of the Ten Wise Men, which he called Gabriel. However, Dr.Lantis and his super soldiers are not able to withstand the Nedeian military, and while cornered in his lab, Dr.Lantis sends his daughter, the 9 super soldiers, and his copy Gabriel into “Eternity Space” of his own volition, and then commits suicide. The Nedeians find Dr.Lantis’ corpse and realizing that he banished his own creations to “Eternity Space” are left believing that he decided to do what was right in the end and figure the matter is finished. However, this was all part of Dr.Lantis’ plan, as he gave Gabriel a key to extract themselves from “Eternity Space” over a billion years in the future to exact his revenge on the entire universe. 

All of this Dr.Lantis/Gabriel information is completely absent from a regular playthrough of the game. I am not sure that any of this is even possible to find in the game proper, which is why I brought it up in the first place. This is actually a pretty great villain arch that reminds me a bit of Mega Man’s Dr.Willey. It’s tragic and even somewhat realistic for a sci-fi adventure that expands across literal billions of years. Another cool twist is that in the game, you actually meet Philia on Expel. In the town that is destroyed by an earthquake as you are trying to make your way to the Ell Kingdom, you see her acting as a prophet, telling the people that the town is just about to be destroyed. Later, at the very end of the game, if you stop just short of the final boss room in Phynal Tower (yes, it’s almost phonetically Final Tower) and go all the way back to the central Nedeian city, you can find her just inside city hall explaining that her father, Dr.Lantis/Gabriel, is calling her back to him and that you must kill her before this happens, or else he will become too powerful. This causes the final boss to have 3x more HP and MP, as well as I would imagine a general boost in strength. Oddly, if you don’t do this, you obviously aren’t there to see it happen, and the boss has a regular amount of HP and MP, so I guess he doesn’t technically call her back. But during both versions of the battle, after you take about 1/3rd of his HP, he enters a second phase and starts calling her out by name as a healing or attacking spell. Again, only if you go back right before entering the final battle room and going all the way back to town to see her being summoned does he become his “true form”. What would have made more sense would be if you could have actually killed Philia when you go back to the city and that enrages him into his true form OR the opposite and causes him to halve his power because he can’t syphon her power. Or he just kills himself because his daughter is finally dead. But then this game would have done something right. Its natural state is to be confusing.

In the final moments of the game you learn that Nedeians have also mastered Symbology, the magic you first learn about on Expel. They were able to uncover a spell so powerful that it will destroy the universe, or at least be able to destroy Energy Nede, which will cause a chain reaction that will destroy the universe, or something like that. Luckily, in the final moments of the game you also learn of another spell that will deactivate the bad spell. But in a weird and useless twist, the Nedeians government, without a vote or telling its people, decide that a single, all powerful culture capable of taking over or destroying the entire universe has outlived its natural life span and decide to go ahead and allow the bad spell to at least destroy Energy Nede and all of its people. They will then use the chain reaction to send the party back in time and restore Expel and all of its people using the same technology that sent Rena and Claude to Expel in the first place. Energy Nede explodes, killing off its people, and you and your party return to Expel as it was just before crashing into Energy Nede. And that’s it. That is the end of the game. Everything after this point is simply one of the various endings you receive based on your character’s Private Action relationship meters and a few other flags that I am going to leave a mystery.

To be clear, there are many minor story points I left out in this beat by beat retelling of the plot, simply because they don’t have any consequence for the plot. For instance, on your first trip to Phynal Tower after you learn who Rena is and how she became an orphan, the writer’s decided to make Claude an orphan too. Just before you arrive on Energy Nede, Claude is randomly able to contact his ship. He is forced to return home where he finds out that the planet he was on is about to collide with some form of energy and it will be destroyed, there is nothing they can do. In the end, he tricks the ship’s crew into sending him back to Expel without any way to get him back. He did not want to leave his friends in the lurch right before their big discovery at the Sorcery Globe. He also wanted to stick it to his Admiral father and the rest of the crew by showing he is a capable soldier. If you play as Rena, you do not get to see this or even hear of it at all, as Claude simply teleports away and comes back, the screen fading momentarily to show the lapse of time. You as the player do not get to make any choices and there isn’t even a hint that anything important happened. You are just left to assume you will have to play as Claude to find out. As Rena, you would have no idea that Claude’s father and shipmates basically watch the planet of Expel explode and assume that Claude is dead. When you get to Phynal tower, you will learn that the Admiral and the crew hung around after Expel exploded to investigate and mourn. You learn this in Phynal Tower because the Ten Wise Men use Nedeian technology to completely destroy Claude’s ship as it was still in orbit around Energy Nede, which to them simply looks like a star or energy cloud of some kind. They do not realize it is a hidden satellite because it’s using super advanced technology to hide itself. I am pointing this out to you now because it’s probably the only important thing that happens in the entirety of Claude’s run through the story. It characterizes him, but does not change the plot in any way. He never discusses with Rena or the party about who he is or where he is from or how any of the stuff he has works beyond a few simple sentences in the main story. He does make more of an effort in the Private Actions, but because they are optional, the main story rarely recognizes these conversations took place. Even when he meets other space faring people like Opera and Ernest (two other optional characters), they all kind of dance around that they are aliens and the people of Expel just kind of let it go. Afterall, they have magic and dragons, and even what appears to be a giant’s graveyard. In the end, the explosion of Energy Nede returns both the planet of Expel and Claude’s ship and crewmates, but not the Kingdom of Ell, the one that was first destroyed.

This is the kind of depth that comes from the more minor story points, but as a plot point, it matters relatively little. In particular, Claude’s side of the story is almost completely devoid of character growth or development despite you playing from his point of view. Because he has access to similar computer tech that we have and an understanding of space travel and the universe at large, the game tends to assume anything he sees has to be explained to him the way it would be explained to us, but he takes it at face value. For instance, he lands in a forest, trusts a nearby village, decides to visit the king, all of these things without batting an eye or questioning the legitimacy of anything anyone is saying to him. It’s simply the nature of the story perhaps, but it makes for a very bland character. Even when you get Ashton in your party, a character possessed by two dragons who stick out of his back, Claude is not surprised at all. I suppose that the universe is so vast and his education so wide that nothing “Magic” surprises him at all. He may even understand the science of it, but the game never lets on. Instead, throughout the adventure, he simply laments that his home planet has lost all of its natural beauty unlike Expel. However, what he does expose in return is the world of Expel and the basics of the story unhindered by extraneous information, which is why I would suggest playing through the game first as Claude if you simply want to play the main story and level up your characters for a new game plus. Because Rena is both a child of Expel and Energy Nede, she has much more perspective on the state of the world and its surroundings, and she talks about them at much more length. Even though I wouldn’t have thought it would be the case at first, it would seem that they developed the game from her perspective first, and then added Claude later. My reasoning is simply because she has much more character growth and story elements that actually play in both the main story and the sub story events. Claude just kind of has casual observations and his motives are not expanded on in the main or sub stories. You would think the space JRPG would star the space dude, but I guess technically Rena is too.

 This is the first time I have ever written a review in which I go over the entire story of a game, summarizing in an effort to deconstruct what was going on with the game, with me, and why this particular entry has stuck with me since 1999. This is the first JRPG I have ever played to its completion two times, back to back. I say this somewhat reluctantly, but this release of Star Ocean 2 seems to have rounded out a series of firsts for me. It’s like an outstanding B movie, a few steps away from greatness, and that in and of itself perpetuates a fascination. It has so many loose ends. Back in 1999, getting the level of information you can get from a Wiki was practically unheard of, so finding out the answers to all my story questions was very intriguing. And as I said many pages ago, it made me realize that today, I am just a little bit more of a shrewd reader, and I was able to pick up on things I never noticed when I was a kid. Which isn’t exactly startling, that’s to be expected, but what really shook me was how stark it was. Unlike re-reading your favorite childhood book for the millionth time, coming back to a story you haven’t read since you were a kid, but have very vivid memories of is the ultimate nostalgia trip. The only weird thing is that I never would have finished the original, it’s only Star Ocean 2 R, with all its updates, that actually turned this B into a B+.

That being said, what really blows me away is that they didn’t push the game beyond its original release. They could have filled in every gap and tied every knot. The wiki is chock full of information absent from the game that they clearly pushed out into other projects over the years. This could have been the Final Fantasy VII Remaster we all wanted instead of the Final Fantasy VII Remake we got. The only real faults of this game are all the faults of the original left unpolished, which is to say that there is very little left to nitpick. You can make the game as hard or as easy as you like. It has an insane battle system and leveling system as its backbone, with a series of skills that absolutely break the game, but they are all optional. I think I just don’t have the heart to be critical of the game in the same way I am about its story, because its story is its bruised and unpolished diamond. With that in mind, I will press ahead with the last of the story mechanics.  

As I have mentioned earlier in this unending documentation of my ability to ramble, there are these substory events that can be enacted via a function called Private Action. Everytime you enter a city or town, you can enter into these moments where you send each of your party members to go run their own errands. It’s probably the most realistic aspect missing from every other JRPG. These people have lives outside of the party, and letting the roam freely is a pretty great mechanic. It opens up a series of possible flags that ultimately will change the end of the game. Star Ocean 2 R allows you to see your progress with each character, allowing you to fall in love or become best friends. The more often you interact with them in Private Actions or by giving them special items that they like, you will increase their friendship meters. However, the love and friendliness is mostly lip service. They do have some unique and deeper conversations, but again, it does not affect any action in the main plot.

The meters do change the ending you will receive at the end of the game. It just so happens that the ending you get is entirely unrelated to the real ending, they are just little epilogues to type up some of the loose ends. In fact, the original game box boasted that there were “[…] over 80 possible endings”. In SO2R, this has been expanded to 99 possible endings with the addition of a new recruitable character (“Welch”) that is kind of a roaming, comic character in each of the games following the 3rd game in the series. The endings are born of a kind of math, in which each character grouping creates a new series of possible endings, so you can actually clear a series of possible endings per playthrough. For instance, you have a Rena/Claude ending, and then a Rena/Welch ending, and so on. They play in succession at the end of the game. 

As you can imagine, the multiple endings are largely unsatisfying. It would seem the game was designed in two parts. A very light dating sim and a traditional JRPG. The only thing they have in common is the forward momentum of the plot. In reality, there is only one ending to the main story of the game, and 99 possible epilogues to the game. Having never beat the original but remembering deeply the promise of 80 endings, I remembered imagining endlessly the possible differences. But as the game progressed, it was clear that it was narrowing the possible endings because by the halfway point of the game, they destroyed the entire planet you started on with no way to alter that outcome. Maybe that’s why I always quit at the halfway point. It was jarring and interesting, but it detracted from the weight of the initial promise of multiple endings. On the bright side, it means you only have to play the game twice to get the full picture of the main story, Rena and Claude having very different perspectives of the same events.

I think this is a great place to stop. There really isn’t much more I could say that isn’t belaboring the point. The graphics are amazing, the battle system broken but fun, the voice acting engaging, an amazing retrace of the art style, but that’s all beside the point. The reason this review is only about the story is because by far it was its biggest flaw and its greatest success. And yet, Star Ocean The Second Story R is definitely one of the best of its kind. All other classic remasters should aim to streamline the experience of the original the way this game does. It didn’t hide away from the original sins. It was a second chance to create the game they sought to create originally. They didn’t muddy the original at all by expanding upon all the story and aspects the original was clearly missing. They just polished the original. Its the kind of shine you always want to hear about, but rarely do. They gave the people exactly what they say they always want from these remasters. It’s what I always wanted from Final Fantasy VII. I have an equally long review of that game as well, but it’s filled with more disappointments. In Star Ocean The Second Story R, I was able to see the original for everything it always was and for all the things it was never able to be, only it was enhanced by the world also having advanced. I was able to look up so much about everything that was missing from the game, and while all that is missing is my biggest complaint, it was also the most fun I’d had in awhile. It produced the hunger I actually remembered having as a kid with a new game. Serendipitous. That is what this game is. Right place, right time, well made.