Christi Junior on Nostr: 4/4 Finally, let me address where this game falls on my Based Morality Scale, which ...

4/4

Finally, let me address where this game falls on my Based Morality Scale, which actually makes for surprisingly cheerful reading in Current Year. Due to this being a remake of a 25 year old game, with the original script still intact, you inadvertently end up with some wonderfully countercultural and wholesome writing, making this game easily a +1, and I’d even go as far as handing out a +2 when looking at the sheer amount of things it does right.

This is a game where men are allowed to be men, and women get to be women – where concepts like being “a real man” or “a proper lady” aren’t taboo, but openly acknowledged as legitimate. “Gender neutral writing” is nowhere to be seen – you even see female characters worrying about putting on weight and it being played for laughs, not as an opportunity to decry Muh Unrealistic Beauty Standards. Hell, even the infamous “Now I can never be a bride!” line that wokealizers have declared Jihad against makes it into this game, albeit rephrased – no worries though, because female characters dreaming about getting married is the topic of multiple Private Action scenes!

There are almost too many Based little moments to count – there’s the early-game Priest character being a wholly positive presence (indeed, pretty much all the Old White Male authority figures are portrayed favorably), Celine the hot mage advocating for corporal punishment of misbehaving children, a belief in heaven seeming pretty widespread even among the more “sci-fi” characters, a hyper-advanced civilization’s abolition of the death penalty leading to some major future headaches, at least one character ending delighting Shinzo Abe – so much good stuff! And lest I forget, I counted a grand total of Zero nigger characters, which is the same number of singular theys that I recall coming across.

Obviously, all of this feels remarkably refreshing – like finally getting to breathe in clean mountain air after a lifetime spent in a smog-filled Chinese city – as well as very surprising, seeing how a pure +2 JRPG should pretty much be a physical impossibility these days. Any modern, text-heavy game seems almost GUARANTEED to be at least somewhat compromised by trannylator bullshit, and that’s before getting into the JRPG genre’s long-standing tendency towards gay anti-racist, anti-religion messages (Final Fantasy X being an obvious example), or even more recently, feminism (see Persona 5). Star Ocean: The Second Story R might just be the most *genuinely* wholesome JRPG I’ve ever played, and since the rest the of game on the whole is pretty great as well, it becomes extremely easy to recommend.