YES FINALLY GODDAMMIT

re: Star Ocean: Second Evolution
        PSP • USA RELEASE
        play time: 29:17

I take it back, I said before that I quite liked Claude? I take it back. He's...he's so obsessive and jealous for no reason whatsoever. I like to think this is Rena's fault, because he seems perfectly fine when she's not around (which is maybe 2 scenes), but while he left a good impression on me when he first appeared, this good impression did not last. And the longer I was on Nede, the more annoyed I got with both him and Rena. (Though Rena is a given.)

The game in the end managed to be Just About Rena And Claude. My other characters didn't really even SAY anything in cut scenes (that were ENTIRELY TOO LONG, LET ME TELL YOU). They just kind of stood there and let Claude and Rena (mostly Rena) do all the talking. In fact, their only purpose was to get me through dungeons. Otherwise they could have not been there and the story wouldn't have changed at all. This is not called good character design. I am not impressed.

SO, I managed to beat Star Ocean 2 with quite a bit of difficulty after playing for some 12 hours. I had hoped to beat it in 9, but extra training and equipment upgrade had been necessary to beat Michael and Haniel (easily the most frustrating battle in the entire game) despite having already been around LV85.)

Due to my extreme dislike of Rena Lanford, I refused to train her up and left her at LV12. She would have been left at LV2, but I needed her to get some SP so that she could learn Pickpocketing. And that in itself was so that I could manipulate the affection levels of everyone else in the party towards her. That, unfortunately, gave me a huge handicap because Rena is easily your most powerful healer in the game. I used Noel to substitute her, but he's just not very good. He's the only character that can both be a healer and an attack magician, but he's not very good at being either one. At LV100 he could still only heal my party about 3500 using Faerie Light, whereas Rena should have been able to heal quite a bit more. Also, Noel cannot learn the Resurrection spell, while Rena can. This was a huge, huge, huge problem.

Still, I managed to beat this game. The story... I think Star Ocean's biggest problem, as a series, is that it tends to try too hard to be epic. Especially when the characters leave whatever underdeveloped planet the story originally started on. It tries too hard, and often ends up coming off as just plain ludicrous. Like in this game, when the symbol of annihilation (again created by the super special and awesome race of nedians, and only they can do it of course because only they are capable of producing a power strong enough to destroy the entire universe) was supposed to be set off, they try to counteract it using something called the symbol of divinity. But the SoD doesn't actually neutralize the power, no, it just redirects it elsewhere.

This power to destroy the universe, accessed on Energy Nede, already in Energy Nede, is diverted TO Energy Nede and destroys this bubble of matter instead of the entire universe. Tell me how this makes sense? EXACTLY, IT DOESN'T. It's just...things like this. I actually thought Star Ocean 2's story was more interesting than Star Ocean 1's, but Star Ocean 1's story wasn't nearly as ridiculous, and stayed fairly believable the entire time. SO2 was interesting and had a lot of potential while they were still located and traveling around Expel and I enjoyed it. Then I guess Tri-Ace ran out of ideas and decided to pull a lot of bullshit out of their ass and the entire game just went to hell for me.

So, I'm done with this game. I got the Claude and Ashton, and Dias and Noel endings. Rena, Celine, Bowman, and Welch got solo endings.

Overall: 6.3
    5.5 Story
        3.0 Characters
        6.0 Plot
    8.0 Graphics
    8.0 Gameplay
    7.0 Sound
    4.0 Replay Value

This game got dinged really hard on the character and plot. I couldn't stand the two main characters, and the other characters were practically background fodder. The plot was entirely too ridiculous after we entered Energy Nede, and fairly predictable as well. And while I said in Star Ocean 1 that I couldn't ding Star Ocean too hard for replay value just because I didn't like the game that much, due to the million different endings and all the different characters to recruit, just one play through on this game tells me I'd never want to play it again. None of those other characters I can recruit would be any different from the extra characters I recruited in this game = they contribute nothing to the story, and therefore are unnecessary. So replay value is completely dependent on how the two main characters interact with other people, as well as gameplay, and you already know how I think about that.