Star Ocean TSSR also boasts all manners of quality of life features, from a generous quick travel system and auto-saving to tons of save files. More interestingly still, it provides you with a veritable treasure throve of neat Skills that most other JRPGs would kill for. By upgrading and ranking up your characters’ individual skills (Skill Points being earned by battling, leveling up and doing certain quests) you can gain and improve all sorts of interesting abilities. Sure, some of these are pretty standard JRPG fare – fishing, crafting, cooking, compounding, LARPing as a gypsy (aka pickpocketing), but many others are both pretty unique and extremely useful – like the ability to outright Copy all sorts of normally rare items and equipment that you own, alchemy powers to turn crappy Iron into some of most precious materials available, animal taming prowess enabling you to summon birds that will literally fly to shops and bring you various useful items while you’re exploring a dungeon. You can imbue your weapons and armor with specific traits and abilities, potentially improving them massively, teach your party members to intercept enemies in the overworld (or even instakill weaker ones), thus avoiding unwanted battles, and you can compose music that has various different effects in the overworld while playing – hell, you can even basically break the game by creating illicit, overpowered items using the Contraband skill!
It’s all so much that it can feel more than a bit overwhelming – but the game does cleverly incentivize you to learn about and experiment with the various skills, due to dozens of Guild sidequests directly related to them, as well as an Achievement system that constantly rewards you with money, Skill Points, Battle Points and even rare item for upgrading and messing around with your various skills. As someone who loves fiddling around with character builds, distributing skills points and finding little ways to improve my characters, all the options Second Story R gives you, and how rewarding and addictive it makes them, makes the game a real delight.
Unfortunately, the main story campaign of Star Ocean SSR isn’t all *that* impressive. For starters it’s pretty short by JRPG standards – like 30 to 40 hours. Of course, a game like Chrono Trigger is only 25 hours long and still one of the greatest JRPGs ever made, but that adventure is perfectly paced, feeling extremely eventful and satisfying throughout. Meanwhile, the first half of Second Story R basically just sees you dealing with a couple of kidnappings, exploring some dungeons and visiting various cities. It’s all quite enjoyable, if pretty low-stakes and pedestrian JRPG fare, though there is a twist: While the game’s setting (the relatively underdeveloped planet Expel) is seemingly medieval Fantasy, a main character that’s originally from a hyper-advanced civilization, as well as a mysterious meteor causing all sorts of troubles on Expel, hints that the greater Universe (and the Sci-Fi genre) will sooner or later come knocking. And indeed, eventually you do get just the kind of mindblowing, world-expanding twist that the game desperately needed, and which ends up greatly elevating the experience.
