Resurrection: Star Ocean: The Second Story

‘Resurrection‘ is a regular feature in which Resolution dons its rose-tinted specs and heads on down Memory Lane. This week, Jennifer Allen’s been revisiting a Japanese role-playing classic…

I’d known nothing of Japanese RPGs outside of Final Fantasy until, one day, I read about Star Ocean: The Second Story on a now long forgotten website. It sounded amazing. With the promise of multiple different endings, plenty of side quests in which to participate and a new and exciting combat system, it offered everything I could have possibly wanted. It even had a weird but wonderful skill system, which meant that learning to compose music and pickpocketing could have equal advantages in the world of Expel. I had to have this game. I hadn’t anticipated just how hard this was going to be, though.

At the time, I wasn’t particularly experienced at Internet shopping. It was available, of course – it was 2000, not the Dark Ages – but I’d never really used it for much. There was still an air of wariness when it came to handing card details over to websites. Which sites were safe? And how could you check it was real? Naivety, of course – but if you can’t be naive at 16, when can you be?

I’d already searched all my local stores (all three of them) for a copy of The Second Story with no success. I was going to have to face the iInternet if I wanted a summer of obsession with a new JRPG. I eventually found it, on a site I now appreciate is completely legitimate and offers a large number of stores. Back then, though, they were only located up North, which was completely foreign to me and felt liike quite the risk to take. I’m glad I took it, though, as Star Ocean: The Second Story turned out to be one of my favourite JRPGs of all time.

SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE JRPG
You see, it might share many common elements from the JRPG field, but it’s also so much more than that. Right from the start it’s clear that this is an RPG of epic proportions. For one thing, you have the choice of two main characters, with different storylines that eventually overlap but still offer plenty of variety. The main story may be a little predictable, with the usual ‘world ending’ problem, but it’s the journey towards that end that feels more special than the usual fodder. Claude Kenni, one of the two main characters, is a young man who has been thrown out of his element. From Earth, he ends up trapped on the planet Expel, where he goes on to meet Rena Lanford – an impressively strong female lead.

I tend to deliberately avoid female characters in RPGs. I find them to be sickeningly, stereotypically girly and whiney. But Rena is as strong as Claude and the other characters, making her an extremely worthy combatant – even if she does get kidnapped briefly in the early stages. In comparison, Claude always felt quite two-dimensional, but I didn’t care: I had a strong female character to embody at last. Even better, she didn’t have ridiculously oversized breasts! She seemed normal! Or, at least, as normal as a cutesy JRPG character can be. [Continues]

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