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Are you ready for the Star Ocean: The Second Story remake? If not, here is all of the information you need to know about this upcoming game, including its release date, gameplay, and story, as well as the Star Ocean: The Second Story R release date and storefronts on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation.
Star Ocean: The Second Story R Release Date: November 2, 2023
Star Ocean: The Second Story R Launch Trailer
Star Ocean: The Second Story R has a release date of November 2, 2023, on PC through Steam, as well as on the PlayStation and the Nintendo Switch. The game was developed by Gemdrops and Square Enix and published by Square Enix.
Star Ocean: The Second Story R Gameplay
Star Ocean: The Second Story R is a remake of the 1991 PlayStation game. The game features new 2.5D graphics, bringing the game to life with beautiful sprite art and environments. As a video game, Star Ocean: The Second Story R plays out similarly to most JRPGs, with the player moving from one town after another as the story progresses, sometimes taking on the occasional side quest. Character progression works with experience points, leveling, and skill learning, typical of JRPGs.
What sets this game apart are three things: its almost a hundred combinations of endings; its two available protagonists, and its real-time, free-moving combat.
The game allows the player to play as either the human Claude or the Nedian Rena, with this choice affecting elements in the game like story progression and endings. Speaking of endings, Star Ocean: The Second Story R has almost a hundred different ending variations that are affected by the player's choices in the game, choice of companions, and the relationships of the companions and the player character to each other.
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Of these companions, there are ten recruitable characters in the game, although the player can only form an eight-member party, including Claude and Rena. Some character options make the choice for another character locked out. Relationships between these characters are explored in the game's “Private Action” system, which sees the party breaking up at certain points in the game to do their own business. The relationships made between characters also affect their performance in battles, with the characters possibly getting temporary buffs and debuffs depending on what happens to their closest friends.
In terms of combat, compared to other games of its time that feature turn-based battles, Star Ocean: The Second Story R featured real-time combat where the player gets to fight in real-time in an open battlefield that allows them to attack fully from the front or to go around to flank the enemy. The player can only control their chosen character in battle, with the rest of the party controlled by the AI, with the player influencing their strategy with different tactical options for each AI-controlled character.
Star Ocean: The Second Story R Story
Star Ocean: The Second Story R is a sequel to the original Star Ocean game, taking place twenty years later. The game tells the stories of Claude C. Kenni and Rena Lanford, a Nedian girl living on the planet Expel. Claude has just been commissioned as an Ensign of the Earth Federation and is assigned his first task: survey the planet Milocinia, where a mysterious energy field appears. Claude ignores orders during this mission and gets teleported by a mysterious device to the planet of Expel, where he meets Rena, who mistakes him for the legendary “Hero of Light.”
Now in a new planet, Claude helps Rena's people in combatting monsters that have just suddenly appeared in their world, while at the same time trying to find his way back home. Rena joins him as his local tour guide, although, as an orphan, Rena's true motive is to find out more about her origins. As they travel, they meet new characters, some of whom could become new party members, building relationships and discovering more about the mysterious events that happened recently.
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