It plays 99% like the first Star Ocean, only Square-Enix took all the cool characters out and replaced them with whiny teens. I’m about 6 hours in and things have gotten a little better since I added Ashton to my party simply because the whole Creepy ‘n’ Weepy saga is pretty funny. But that’s all optional content I’m pursuing because it amuses me. I still can’t stand Claude and his goofy face and I don’t like Rena as much as I thought I would when I picked her story. Every time she starts talking about Dias and every time Claude gets all mopey-wopey I just want to punch them in the mouth.
Visually and gameplay-wise Star Ocean Second Evolution is just First Departure with new battle attacks. Instead of AWAKEN! DRAGON FROM BEYOND THE CLOUDS! You have stuff like Cross Slash and Twin Thrust and some other stuff I haven’t really listened to because I usually keep the game on mute because the voices annoy me. Even the high encounter rate is still present, and Scouting still does zip and nil to fix that. The failure rate for skills like Appraising and Cooking is also as high as ever, but this time I know enough not to waste precious Skill points on them.
Also the pacing of this game is much, much slower. After 6 hours virtually nothing has happened. We’re supposed to go examine some big ball or another, but we haven’t even gotten close to the continent where it’s happening, much less the actual location. Part of that is my fault for turning around at Harley and going back to Salva to hunt dragons, but even that didn’t take that much time. By itself 6 hours of nothing wouldn’t be such a bad deal for an RPG, but when I compare Second Evolution to the first game and all the crazy things that happened there in the first hour alone, I can’t help finding this a major letdown.
Which is not to say I dislike the game, mind you. I’m quite enjoying myself. I wouldn’t be going out of my way to do a long sidequest if I wasn’t. But this game lacks plenty when compared to its predecessor. It’s disappointing, because I was told SO2 was an improvement over SO in every single way. Maybe this was true of the originals, but the remakes are basically the same game, only SO2 got the ‘teenaged angst’ story. Maybe that’s why it’s so popular. Dunno, dun care. As with SO1, I won’t be doing the PAs (too tedious) and I’ll only do any sidequests that really interest me. This shouldn’t take too long.
if it’s like the psx version there is a trick that let you have one of the most powerfull weapon in the game really early
there is a skill that let you pickpocket from NPC, one of the NPC has an item that spawns any random item from the game… do the math
Eh, no uber weapons for me. I’ve been pickpocketing a lot, but only for fun. I have no intention of breaking the game because the challenge is just right at present. If it gets any easier the game won’t be worth playing.
That statement was definitely directed towards the originals. The original SO1 was one of those games where you wonder if they shipped out a beta version.
Heh. I suspected as much.