Star Ocean 2, the original, was an action RPG released in 1999. Made by the ambitious and currently defunct developer company, tri-Ace, it featured a simple yet compelling formula: mix a real time action centric interpretation of the "standard" JRPG formula, as popularized by Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, with roleplaying mechanics manifested as additional, non violent yet useful skills that could be invested into. Your characters could either choose to play through the game in a straightforward manner, or pick up cooking to make healing items mid dungeon, or call birds to supply them in dungeons, or even smith all sorts of amazing gear.
Sadly, as is the case with several tri-Ace projects, the final game fell way short of its ambitions. The alternative skills required absurd amounts of investment to pay off. Most of their results weren't worth the effort. Oftentimes even with excessive investment, failures were very common. As such, it was mostly used just to gamble on getting a few pieces of broken gear, with most of them offering very little utility.
The combat, meanwhile, was fun but had a fair number of egregious issues. It was often all too easy to stunlock even formidable foes fighting on their own. Spells would often stop combat entirely to play out their animation. Many skills had a long delay on them and so missed easily. Spell damage scaled very poorly. Most often fights boiled down to little beyond getting your fighters to gang up on dangerous foes while healing them and perhaps getting damage spells off to disrupt the enemy formation.
This remake fixes almost ALL of that. The alternative skills are a lot more convenient to use while also being less broken, and requiring more investment to shine. The combat, similarly, is a lot less obnoxious while requiring more strategy. Spells are a lot less irritating in execution, and skills in general are a lot more usable. Add the downright beautiful maps, the excellent remastered music, and generally less terrible dialogue and quest design, and this is simply a winner of a remake.
True, it's not fully perfect. The alternative skills could use more control over the final results, too often I got lots of junk filling my inventory when using them to create the one or two items I wanted. Fights with single foes still tend to devolve into a gangup, though this time formidable foes can still put up a fight singlehandedly. And the difficulty curve is still wobbly, the overarching story mediocre, the quest design still patchy in places...
But really, compared to the final product, these are but minor blemishes. This is easily a very solid action RPG, a brilliant realization of tri-Ace's formula. Few remakes get this good, hell few games in general do. Now, all I ask for is this: when will Valkyrie Profile get a similar treatment? ;)
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