cosmicspear

I can't help but remember the Juggler trainers in Pokemon Gold and Silver, one of whom somewhat infamously has dialogue where he boasts about how good his ball technique is.

Naturally, Nintendo being cowards, they changed that line for the remakes

Every song was basically just smooth jazz or soft rock instrumentals, but where the lead singer or main instrument should have been playing, there was just a loud, constant car horn.

when I first encountered this post I was in bed and it was not the time to actually listen to it, but I was cracking up just at the concept, and trying not to laugh so hard that I would wake up my girlfriend and have to explain "love honk"

Now I get to listen to it and crack up again

Love Honk is the first unanimous entry in the Cohost Hall of Fame

Probably spaghetti, really. I personally can't get enough of the stuff

Now here's a game that really shows just how much ambition tri-Ace has. Hell of an introduction to them for international audiences, too, since what we have here is a game that takes a lot of the high concept from the original Star Ocean and refines it into a more cohesive and polished experience. It was originally on the PS1, with a PSP remake subtitled Second Evolution that came out in 2008/2009 to match the PSP remake of the first game (complete with a cover that's designed to fit together with the First Departure cover, which is kinda neat). That version got a later PS4 release that was inexplicably skipped for an English version, but they more than made up for it with this more substantial remake for current systems.

Star Ocean 2 has two heroes, and you can choose whose perspective you see the story from at the start. There's Claude C. Kenny, a recently trained officer in the Pangalactic Federation military and the son of Ronyx from the first game, who desperately wants to get out of his father's shadow. Then there's Rena Lanford, a girl living in a small village on the planet Expel with her foster mother, who found her next to a strange high-tech...something in the nearby forest. The story begins with Claude performing a routine survey of an uninhabited planet, encountering an unusual machine, and being teleported to Expel. He immediately runs into Rena and saves her from a wild animal with his laser gun, which she immediately decides must be the mystical Sword of Light that the prophesized hero of Expel is said to wield.

It is at this point that Claude realizes he's stranded on an underdeveloped planet, and he's not supposed to interfere with those—there are laws about that sort of thing, even. But now he's got locals thinking he has to be some sort of prophesized hero, which is certainly an unfortunate situation.

Though with nothing better to do while he tries to contact the Federation (who don't even know Expel exists) he ends up involving himself in local affairs anyway. Specifically, he and Rena take it upon themselves to look into the Sorcery Globe, an ominous meteor that hit the northwestern continent and appears to be increasing monster activity.

The structure of Star Ocean 2's story is...interesting. The game's first act, when you get right down to it, is surprisingly short—most of the time you spend in it is going to be dedicated to side events. The game's actual villains, the Ten Wise Men, don't even show up until the first act's ending, with nonspecific monsters being the main antagonistic force before that. And there's a lot of extremely important plot points locked behind easily missed sidequests, to the point where the final piece of the puzzle is hidden in a specific ending scene you only get if a specific character isn't paired up with anyone. Character development is also sparse in the main story, being mostly relegated to the Private Action mode, where you have your party split up in towns and see secondary events between them. It's very tri-Ace, to put it another way, and your opinion on the story will probably depend a lot on how you feel about that.

Then there's the gameplay. This is an action RPG, and to fully understand it you're gonna need to know that there's two diverging evolutionary paths the combat from Tales of Phantasia led to, with one leading to the Tales games with their ideas about how fighting should work and the other leading to Star Ocean. The combat in Star Ocean 2, then, is gonna be familiar enough to someone who's played a lot of Tales games whilst also being completely alien in several key areas. It's like the cricket to Tales' baseball, in other words. The standard system of moving around and attacking in real time is there, and Star Ocean was doing 3D battlefields back when Tales was still messing around with stuff like the Combo Command. You've got specials set to the shoulder buttons, which means you only get two, though you get the ability to set combos of two specials to each button later on. There's also a short/long range system, derived from the original iteration of the Phantasia battle system, where your attacks change depending on how far you are from enemies. This includes a few specials—for instance, Claude's Air Slash skill launches a shockwave in a straight line toward his target at long range while the short range version has the shockwave circle around him. Spellcasters, meanwhile, are extremely undynamic and obviously intended to be left on auto for the whole game.

For R this system has a few things to shake it up, though it's still mostly what you'll recognize from the older versions. There's now a guard break system, which lets you potentially leave enemies helpless for a bit after attacking them enough. You can also quickly step backwards, and timing it right as your enemies attack lets you slip behind them SO4-style, regaining a bit of MP and doing more break damage—this generally didn't feel useful to me, since enemies in this game are very good at turning to face you. You also get the Assault formation, which lets you set a move for each of your backup members to use as an assist. Though you probably won't bother with them, since you can also get items that let you set the heroes of the rest of the series in your Assault formation and they're universally better than most things you can have your regular party do.

There's a total of eleven party members in Star Ocean 2, and you can have up to 8 of them in your party. What's interesting about this is that Claude and Rena are the only mandatory members—every other character who offers to join can be turned down, and fully half the cast are people you need to go out of your way to recruit. Which means your experience in the game is going to vary wildly based on who you want to use—in particular, the events that let you recruit dragon-fused swordsman Ashton are mutually exclusive with the ones for the alien adventurers Opera and Ernest (the latter of whom is basically space Indiana Jones by way of infamous Wolf Team classic Earnest Evans, by the way) and each leads to a different optional dungeon. The remakes (all the remakes) also add an extra character in Welch Vineyard, a secondary character from Star Ocean 3 who ended up becoming a recurring series mascot of sorts, and involving her can change the dynamic of setting your party up even further. At the same time, though, planning your final party out is still a lot more straightforward than it was in Star Ocean 1, where you have even more characters to choose from and less room for them.

Party choice also affects the endings, of which there are a lot. In R you've got a total of 99, though you don't actually have to beat the game that many times since they're actually character endings. Specifically, a solo ending for each character and paired endings for everyone with everyone else they can share a party with. This is where that tri-Ace ambition comes into play, because these are determined by the relationship values every party member has with every other party member. Which also have mechanical effects in battle—if a character dies, everyone who was close enough to them gets powered up, for instance. It's a bit simpler in R, which has a single value for each pairing as opposed to previous versions which count friendship and love values separately with different effects depending on the genders of the characters involved. And yes, tri-Ace are the kinds of people who would go to that much trouble for a system a lot of players probably won't even notice.

And we haven't even gotten to the skill system, which is where tri-Ace proceed to go full sicko mode.

Skills in Star Ocean 2 are learned with skill points that you mostly get by leveling up. In pre-R versions you also need to buy the ability to learn the skills first, but you get them from the start in R. Skills are divided into battle skills (which do all sorts of useful things and will pretty much constantly be activating by the end) and non-battle skills. Non-battle skills may or may not have some sort of mechanical effect on their own (for instance, Herbology makes your basic healing items better) but their main use is to learn specialties. Specialties are a mix of a lot of different things, and are learned by getting all the relevant skills—so, for instance, you need Knife, Keen Eye, and Recipe to learn the Cooking specialty and start making food items. There's also super specialties, which are made up of multiple specialties on different characters the same way specialties are made up of different skills on one character. Specialties, particularly the item creation ones, are where the real game-breaking magic happens. Customization, for example, lets you upgrade weapons into better ones, and in a lot of cases there's a route you can use to get a character's best weapon from the moment they join. Writing lets you make books that teach certain skills up to level 7 (of 10), and the book for a skill is available to write if you have the skill at level 1—meaning that you only need to buy the first level of any write-compatible skill once and you effectively have it at level 7 for everyone. Pickpocketing lets you steal from characters in towns at the cost of maybe making your party members like you a little less, and there's a lot of good stuff to steal—the most famous examples are probably the Sprite's Bracelet (which gives you random items from a pretty wide list, including the infamous Counterfeit Medal that lets you set someone to need only 1 experience to level up) which you can steal from a one-time Private Action character in a specific town, and the Battle suit, which you can steal from Ernest in a specific early town and is good enough for the postgame. Replication lets you make copies of a lot of items, including the aforementioned Counterfeit Medals for a famously ridiculous grinding strategy. The list goes on, really.

All told, Star Ocean 2 is a remarkable game in a lot of ways. This is a game that will let you make the best weapon a third of the way in. It is a game where you can take time off from saving the galaxy to become a best-selling author and fund all your purchases ever. It is a game where, in pre-R versions, you can accidentally do an event that changes the final boss to his super-powered version meant to be fought after finishing the postgame without even thinking about it (in R you need to beat the game first).

Star Ocean 2 is an experience, and I mean that in the most positive way possible