Star Ocean: The Second Story R Review (Nishimo)
Great game. I really enjoyed my time playing it and the mix between the old 2D pixel style with new 3D environment graphics is really well done in this game.
It keeps all the traditional controls, leveling and combat systems from the old JRPGs while adapting itself with quite a few QoL options like fast travel and it's fully dubbed.
The graphics beautiful and an interesting mix of 3D and 2D pixel art, and the soundtrack is also amazing and reminds me a lot of the old Falcom games soundtracks.
Gameplay is also very interesting and fun to play and differs itself from most games of this style because Star Ocean is an action game, and not turn based. It is very simple, however, with only a basic attack and 2 skills that can be quickly used and the rest needs to be selected in a menu just like the old games. Progression pretty much follows the traditional style of the old games, including the big difficulty spikes in certain areas, but all of those can be circumvented by farming a bit of crafting/leveling up the correct status.
Story in Star Ocean Second Story R is average in my opinion. It is interesting enough, but does not go very deep into anything. I'd say that the balance between gameplay and story parts is very good, so that the flaws in story telling pace are not much pronounced. For about half of the game, we play pretty much an introductory section where we explore the world and recruit new members and nothing really happens, then in the later half it drops a huge section of plot and everything goes from there; The new enemies that get introduced do not have any time to shine or have any type of development, so that felt a bit unsatisfactory in my opinion. As for your companions, the entire character development thing is done through optional Personal Actions that you can trigger by talking to them in certain points of the game, and it is very important to do because they will change the ending of the game and make a difference unlocking all the 99 endings this game has (yeah, you read that right, 99 endings lol)
The game took me 20 hours to finish and I think it's a good play time for what it offers and how the gameplay loop system works. More than that would probably start to get a bit boring due to it's simplicity, but at the same time I think the story could've expanded a bit more. If it's on a good sale, Star Ocean Second Story R is a very good game for classic JRPG fans looking for a well crafted and chill adventure.
The demo is good and very long, at around 2.5 hours of gameplay to finish, so play that to have an idea of what to expect.