Star Ocean: The Second Story

The item creation system is very unique - cooking, art, machinery, authoring, customising...it's all within your power. You choose the skills and specialities the characters learn. They write books for the other characters to read, make better weapons, compose music and create delicious (or not so delicious) dishes. They can even combine their skills to make super specialities, which allow you to get better at cooking, publishing, etc, and my favourite - where all the characters sincerely call Barney, a giant white rabbit to cart you around the countryside. Hilarious.

The graphics IMO are pretty good. The 3D backgrounds are lovingly rendered, even including really cool minor details like your reflection on a pond or in a mirror. Nice. The characters themselves are 2D sprites, which looks better than it sounds - no hassles with fuzzy polygons or anything like that. And Links has done a fine job (as usual) on the FMV - great eye candy.

The battle system allows you to take a much more active role in combat situations. In active mode, you basically dash around and try to konk the enemy without them hitting you. Fighting characters have Killer moves, which are special attacks that are assigned to the L1 and R1 buttons. They look cool and wreak havoc on the battle field. For magic users, the spell animation is nice too, and there is the interesting possibility of combining spells by casting them at the same time, which can lead to greater damage if done properly.

If I do have any complaints, they are generally not the fault of the game, rather the people who were supposed to be checking for bugs. Firstly it crashes - no game has ever crashed on me like this one. So save a lot. And there are little things, like the character voices getting mixed up - it is so funny to hear Precis yelling 'Parabola Beam! ' while Claude is doing Mirror Slice, and the wrong word appearing for spells. I guess I'm nitpicking.

As for the game itself, I find some of the character's voices rather irritating. But that's a personal thing. The music _is_ rather repetitive...they play the same tracks over and over, but even so, they still sound nice.

[I do have one large complaint, and this is that I had to import the game to play it, since it hasn't been released in Australia and doesn't look likely in the near future. There _are_ serious RPG players here and it would be great if the distribution companies recognised that.]

Star Ocean 2 is a really good game, offering so much - a great battle system, memorable characters, beautiful graphics and a pretty darn good story. A must for any RPG fan.