izigame.me

Playing the hardest mode out of the gate. An all-time favorite of mine. Played the original as a 9-10 year old, never played the PSP release, replaying the second remake and loving it along with the nostalgia it brings. This game was criminally good even for its time and holds its own well enough 25 years after its original release with modern quality of life changes that keeps this game fresh.
Skills used to be tethered to gear in the original, that has been changed by simply blessing all characters with the necessary core skills, while advanced skills unlock after certain requisites are met. The skills to raise on characters are abundant and affect gameplay both in and out of combat. Skill Points also used to be a finite resource with no way of refunding spent points. You are now able to earn these points outside of leveling, giving you the freedom to not lock yourself out of certain skills if you misspent or accidentally dropped your controller cause your cat decided it was no longer Star Ocean time, as it was now cat time, ruining a build.
Giving a brief overview, out-of-combat skills, in essence, is a lot of crafting. Make your weapons, make your gear, give them stats, raise those stats, dunk those into better gear to get better stats, rinse and repeat. The IC system will seriously turn you into a hoarder your first go-round. Cooking food to give you stat boosts for in-combat effects or boosts for out-of-combat crafting success rates and effects. In-combat skills range from random passive stat boosts, cast time reduction for casters, guard breaking, and giving every character a bad case of the zoomies.
One issue the original game had: Casters were considerably weaker than melee characters. PS1 games had the thing of stopping all gameplay to show you this cool looking skill via in-game cutscene. With no way of skipping it back then, and with melee characters simply not doing that, that's a DPS loss. This problem hasn't exactly gone away but has been mitigated in many ways for the better. Although the game still retains and remastered said cool cutscenes, you're now able to simply skip straight to the striking blow of the cast. You're now also able to setup assists: Characters who can be tagged in to perform a skill on-demand. This is where casters truly shine as a lot of caster skills offer a lot of battle utility.
That said, with all of these beautiful systems working so well in tandem and given the elimination of the old skill system, it is incredibly easy to break this game from a very early point within, making a lot of the game trivial if you know what you're after, especially collecting some key early game missables. This does not detract from the game, as the game intends for this as you'll continue coming across items and materials for crafting to continue pumping your characters for more customization as the enemies get progressively tougher as you progress through the story. These systems must be absolutely abused if you're to take on end-game optionals.
Even by the standards set by the original, I don't think this is that difficult of an RPG and this remaster makes it all the more easier. I'm not going to comment too much on the story because it's nothing groundbreaking; meteor hits planet and all hell starts breaking loose now solve it type of deal. Whether you like the story or not is subjective. Plot twist is ok, since I, for whatever reason, loved the villains it introduced way back when.
If you're looking for a new JRPG to play and never gave this game a try, it is a galaxy-high recommendation. If you like experimenting with a lot of well-designed systems and mechanics that further party growth and lets you stack the odds more in your favor, you cannot go wrong with this title.