IV: Star Ocean The Second Story R

Recommended by: metamour Ceri

I will preface this by saying that this was the 12th of 12 games to be recommended to me, coming via my at-the-time newest metamour Ceri via our polycule Discord server's thread for 12-in-12. (What a "me" sentence.) At the time, we had this conversation about it.

Cerisier Ink, [Dec 19, 2025 at 9:06:26 PM]:

this is so much responsimabilibuddy

no I'll get there

I kinda want to give you a weird game that I really like for kinda dumb reasons

Not weird as in Weird

weird as in "why would Ceri recommend this"

Ammy, [Dec 19, 2025 at 9:07:09 PM]:

I mean Proxy gave me Garage Bad Dream Adventure lmao

And then later:

Ceri — 12/22/25, 7:45 PM

Done. You’re playing Star Ocean: The Second Story R

Ammy — 12/22/25, 7:46 PM

Ceri we have very different definitions of "weird game" lmfao

I have a physical copy of the original, I played it when I was a kid :p

so this should be fun

Ceri — 12/22/25, 7:46 PM

I said weird like “why would Ceri pick this”

Not weird like “this is a weird game”!

Which, well, fair! Having finished this, I still haven't had the conversation about what the "dumb reasons" that Ceri likes it are. I suspect that that conversation will be more interesting than I found the game, though I did find it perfectly...fine, really. But we'll get there.

A while ago I saw a tweet that was something like "I'm playing Wolfenstein II, the seventh Wolfenstein, on my XBox One, the third XBox". Star Ocean The Second Story R (2023, and hereafter "SO2R", I'm not typing that title many more times lol) has that exact same energy: it is the third Star Ocean The Second Story game, after 1998's Star Ocean: The Second Story for the PS1 and 2008's Star Ocean: Second Evolution for the PSP. It is also a direct sequel to 2019's Star Ocean: First Departure R, which was itself a remake of an enhanced PSP port of Star Ocean (1996) for the SNES, a game that never came out in the US until said PSP port. So, yeah, the lineage of this game is extremely confusing, but for the most part I'm just going to be talking about the 2023 version, available on Steam and linked above.

Star Ocean has never been my favorite series, even though I hit the PS1 original Star Ocean 2 in 1998 and then the fan translation of the SNES original alongside Tales of Phantasia and Bahamut Lagoon (may you rest in power, Near) when I was in my phase of slurping up all of the previously-untranslated SNES RPGs that I could in my freshman year of college. I played Star Ocean 3 and 4 and thought both were reasonably just...okay, and then I didn't touch the series again until 2026, when I was, as I said to Ceri, legitimately excited to revisit something I hadn't touched for a long-ass time.

The remake adds a lot; a fourth difficulty called Chaos above the previous highest difficulty (Universe, which I played this run on), fully voiced cutscenes everywhere, a lot less mechanical obfuscation (particularly in the form of marking every single event with an icon, and then marking any of those which are missable with an hourglass; more on this in a sec), fast travel between all save points and shops (as long as an area isn't inaccessible for plot reasons), fast travel back to a save point or dungeon entrance from literally anywhere, quicksaves and quickloads, cutscene skips, just, all of the modern quality-of-life you'd expect from a JRPG in 2026. The result is a pretty brisk experience: my playthrough clocked at 18h38m, though I did absolutely spend some time early breaking the game into tiny pieces and then skipping basically every non-boss fight in the last five dungeons of the game. I have no idea what a completionist playthrough looks like, nor one that doesn't abuse the game's mechanics as early as possible. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which-

So, hey. Remember one article ago, when I talked about autistically precise engagement with a game's systems? Here's how my run of SO2R started: - do the intro content until I have the two main characters in my party - temporarily ecruit Celine, unlock item crafting - use my previously-unspent skill points to unlock "writing" and max its level - buy literal thousands of ink pens to be able to write every book in the game, each book giving one free level in a skill, each usable seven times - write 28 copies of every possible book to give my initial party seven out of ten in every skill, giving them dozens of levels worth of free skill points - use all of the free levels to craft lategame equipment for everyone

I'm now level 7 and can kill most things in the game, which is...really normal!!

Honestly, I think that the fact that the game lets you do this so early is neat. Also, I probably completely trivialized most of it in a way that makes me very unsure what a typical playthrough looks like. In her own playthrough, Ceri had defeated a newly-added post-game boss before the second town. The game just sorta invites it.

The fact that I've spent a lot of time talking about this subset of the mechanics also betrays that I didn't...really find very much about this game interesting besides this. The combat is fine. The story is...okay; it's not actively grumble-inducing like the story in SO4 was. The mechanical improvements are nice: it's no longer possible to miss a cutscene in the first couple of hours that locks you out of the "true" final boss fight twenty hours later, for example. But there's also just...not a ton that hooked me here past breaking the game to pieces. So, at the end of the day, yeah, it was fine! I just can't find much to yell about to my friends, either. 2/5, i.e., the perfectly average Doll score.