Star Ocean: The Second Story landed on the original PlayStation in 1998, built by tri-Ace and published by Enix. It was the second game in the Star Ocean series and the first to release outside Japan, reaching North America in June 1999 and Europe in April 2000 through Sony Computer Entertainment. It earns an 8.3 of 10.
Claude C. Kenny and the Phase Gun
The setup is a clean piece of science fantasy. Claude C. Kenny is a young officer in a space-faring Earth organization, recently commissioned as an Ensign in the Earth Federation. His first mission, supervised by his father Ronyx J. Kenny, is to survey the planet Milocinia, where a mysterious energy field has appeared. Claude finds a strange device there and examines it up close, against orders to keep his distance. The machine activates and teleports him to Expel.
Expel is an undeveloped, medieval-level world, and that collision is the whole engine of the game. Claude carries a standard-issue Phase Gun, which the locals read as a “Sword of Light.” A girl named Rena Lanford finds him and mistakes him for the “Hero of Light” from Expel’s legends, partly because of the weapon and partly because he is dressed in what she calls “alien raiments.” She takes him to her village, Arlia, for corroboration.
The Sorcery Globe and the Ten Wise Men
Arlia supplies the plot. A meteorite crashed into Expel, and almost immediately afterward monsters began appearing and natural disasters struck with increasing frequency and intensity. The people of Expel, believing the events were connected, named the meteorite the “Sorcery Globe.” Claude explains he is not the Hero of Light, then offers to investigate the Globe anyway, hoping it might lead him home. Rena goes with him as his native guide, chasing knowledge about her own origin as an orphan.
The journey runs the long way around Expel. Claude and Rena cross the planet, gather whichever companions the player chooses, and finally reach the Sorcery Globe, where they encounter the Ten Wise Men. The plot against multiple worlds belongs to an evil group, and stopping it is the endgame. The scale is the point: a stranded ensign, a village girl, and a conspiracy that spans worlds.
Two Protagonists, Eight Slots, Six Recruits
The Second Story hands the player a choice at the start: play as Claude or as Rena. The journey evolves and ends differently depending on that pick and on the decisions that follow. There are ten other playable characters. The player can only recruit six of them, filling out an eight-member party, and some recruitment choices close off other characters permanently.
That is a real constraint, not a cosmetic one. A first playthrough is a partial game by design, and the party a player builds shapes what the story becomes. For a 1998 role-playing game, that was an unusual amount of weight to put on a menu screen.
Real-Time Battles and Nine Batches of Skills
Battles play in real time. The player has manual control over their character rather than choosing options from a menu. Combat takes place on a broad battlefield, and the character can move across it without limit, trading blows face-to-face with an enemy or circling around for a flanking attack. Up to three other party members are controlled by the game’s AI, and the player can set an ally’s strategy to one of six pre-determined options, including “Spread out and attack,” “Save your Magic Points,” and “Stand Still and Don’t Do Anything.”
Nine different batches of skills are sold in in-game shops. Once unlocked that way, they have to be learned by committing battle-earned “Skill Points.” Some skills raise a character’s statistics, some unlock Specialty abilities, and some give bonuses in battle, such as the ability to counter-attack. Specialties let characters create items, and the list runs from Herbal medicine, Cooking, Writing, Composing and Musicianship to Pickpocketing and Training.
Characters gain experience points from battle and level up, growing gradually stronger as more fights are fought. Between fights, the player moves from town to town and dungeon to dungeon, following the central story and occasionally branching off for side quests. It is the standard loop, executed with more freedom in the moment-to-moment combat than most of its peers allowed.
Second Evolution and the Long Tail
The game was the basis of manga and anime adaptations. An enhanced remaster titled Star Ocean: Second Evolution, developed by Tose, came to the PlayStation Portable in April 2008 in Japan, then in 2009 in North America, Europe, and Australia. It added newly animated cutscenes by Production I.G, a re-recorded soundtrack, and additional story elements. Second Evolution was later rereleased for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3 in 2015.
That is a long life for a game that started as the first export of a series previously confined to one country. The Second Story received favourable reviews on release and was lauded for gameplay elements not previously seen in the genre, while borrowing some of the best features of Final Fantasy VII. It has since built a cult following and is often considered the best entry in the Star Ocean series.
What Holds Up and What Doesn’t
The recruitment math is the most interesting thing here, and it is the part that has aged best. Ten other characters, six slots, permanent lockouts. Modern role-playing games sell that structure back as a feature. The Second Story did it in 1998 on a single disc, and it made the choice sting.
The battle system is the other keeper. Manual control in real time, an open battlefield, flanking routes, and AI allies the player can actually direct through six preset strategies. The “Stand Still and Don’t Do Anything” option is a small joke and a real tactical tool. Nine skill batches bought in shops and paid for with battle-earned points is a tidy loop that keeps combat feeding progression rather than competing with it.
The weak point is the plot’s scaffolding. Claude examines a device he was ordered to leave alone, gets teleported, and is immediately mistaken for a prophesied hero by a girl who needs a guide’s job. The Sorcery Globe is a meteorite that brought monsters and disasters, and the Ten Wise Men are the evil group behind a multi-world plot. None of that is subtle. It is functional, and the two-protagonist structure does more narrative work than the premise does.
The Final Fantasy VII comparison is fair and also a little unfair. The Second Story borrows what worked in that game and adds real-time control, which is the more interesting inheritance. It did not have the same cultural reach, and it did not need to. It arrived in North America in June 1999, a year after its release in its home country, and built its audience slowly.
The score, 8.3 of 10, matches the published critic aggregate across seven outlets. That feels right. This is a game whose systems outshine its story, and whose recruitment design was ahead of its time by a decade. The cult following is earned. So is the argument that it is the best Star Ocean.
The Numbers
- Score: 8.3 of 10
- Developer: tri-Ace
- Publishers: Enix; Sony Computer Entertainment (North America, Europe)
- Platform: PlayStation
- Release in home country: 1998
- North America release: June 1999
- Europe release: April 2000
- Remaster: Star Ocean: Second Evolution (Tose), PlayStation Portable, April 2008 in Japan; 2009 in North America, Europe, and Australia
- Later rereleases: PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, 2015
- Playable characters: Claude or Rena, plus ten others; six recruitable into an eight-member party
- Ally strategies: six pre-determined options
- Skill batches: nine, sold in in-game shops
- Setting: S.D 366 (A.D 2452), twenty years after the original Star Ocean
Verdict: 8.3 of 10.
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