"The game play's fantastic features, and the interesting story are what carrying the game. Star Ocean: Second Story is one of those games that can seriously eat into a gamer's spare time, and it's worth every moment spent."

Platform: Playstation

Genre: Role-Playing

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Tri-Ace

ESRB: T (Teen)

Released: Q2 1999

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Star Ocean The Second Story

Here's a fine example where the nuts and bolts of a game shine through, raising the game's merits to great levels. Between the huge number of skills to be learned and the addition of "Private Actions" Star Ocean: Second Story provides an incredible amount of game play depth. On top of this is an intriguing story and a fabulous soundtrack, making the game a mighty fun little gem.

While some games offer a few skills for its characters to learn that usually only impact their performance in battle, Star Ocean: Second Story (SO2) runs the gamut of seemingly every possible life skill a person could every need, as well as battle skills. Characters can learn everything from cooking, to the Arts, to biology, aesthetics, and how to be a blacksmith. Even more amazing is that these skills aren't just there as a novelty, they can prove quite useful throughout the game. With them players can create new items, armor, perform better in battle, and enter the occasional mini game to test their skills. It's a great part of the game that actually encourages getting into battles just to level up quicker so to get more skill points to play with (to a point).

Another spiffy feature included in SO2 is the "Private Actions". With this players can go through a town solo, while the rest of the party are mulling around town. When a player comes across one of the party members he or she can talk one on one with the person, the results of the conversation directly affecting the character for better or worse. Make the character upset and he or she may perform worse in battle or leave the party. Make the character happy and that person may do better in battle. Neat-o!

The story itself is quite strong, as it supplies enough twists and turns to maintain an interests throughout. There are more than a few times when I found myself thinking, "Didn't see that one coming". Better still, the game gives players the choice between two main characters to play: Claude and Rena. Both characters, although in the same party, have their own goals, and as such the game takes slightly different paths depending upon who you choose at the start of the game. If that wasn't enough, there are over 80 different endings to the game, cranking its replay value into the stratosphere, although the variation in story isn't strong enough to justify completing the game more than a few different ways.

While the graphics have some nice touches in the various maps of the game, the overall look isn't the most eye catching out there. The character design is traditional anime, and the monsters and lighting effects aren't terribly awe-inspiring. The sound effects don't fair much better as they sound washed out and not very realistic. The voice acting is also fairly cheesy. However, the music is incredibly good, providing a wonderfully epic quality to the adventure.

SO2 does unfortunately run into the same problem so many other RPGs have, there are way too many random encounters with monsters. Sure it give players the chance to gain more experience for leveling up and getting those sweet, sweet skill points, but there is a limit to how much of that one can take. While players only control one character at a time, the rest are left on auto pilot. Be careful though, because there are several different AI setting for the characters, so a magic-user could be set to uses spells with reckless abandon, and may exhaust his or her spell points prematurely. Thankfully the AI, when set accordingly, serves its purpose adequately. One other problem with battles is that some of the spell animations take forever to run there course, not Final Fantasy bad, but close. Hearing the words, "Southern Cross" will quickly strike terror and dread right to the center of of many players hearts after a few castings. It can get especially annoying when fighting a boss where magic becomes a necessity.

All in all however, these shortcomings are easily forgiven. The game play's fantastic features, and the interesting story are what carrying the game. Star Ocean: Second Story is one of those games that can seriously eat into a gamer's spare time, and it's worth every moment spent.

- Mr. Nash