YMMV / Star Ocean: The Second Story

• Awesome Art: Chibi as they are, the sprites are appealing and expressive, and the environments are full of color.
• Awesome Music: Once again, Motoi Sakuraba delivers:
  • The battle theme of this game, "Stab the Sword of Justice", is often hailed as one of the best JRPG battle themes to ever exist.
  • This game marks the first appearance of "Incarnation of Devil", a song so awesome that it has essentially become the theme song for the company tri-Ace, and has continuously been remixed not just in future Star Ocean games, but also in the Valkyrie Profile series, and one-offs like Radiata Stories, almost always for the game's strongest optional boss.
  • "STELLA" by the music duo Suiren for the opening to the R, which includes an image of the entire party cast against the Ten Wise Men.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Claude. Some fans love him for having a more fleshed out story arc and personality compared to Roddick in the previous game more, specifically his struggles living under his father's shadow, on top of finding his romance with Rena to be well written. Others, however, are completely put off by how clingy he is to Rena whenever Dias is involved, since Claude's only known her for a small amount of time compared to Dias being a childhood friend of hers that she hasn't seen in years due to the incident regarding his family.
  • Dias. Fans either love him for his stoic personality and his Hidden Heart of Gold while others really hate how standoffish and rude he can be, especially to Rena, who constantly tries to help him out. His performance in battle is also a large point of contention, with some fans finding him a very powerful character due to how spammable his first two Killer Moves are while others finding him overrated and one dimensional due to all his Killer Moves being single target and most of them not being very good overall. Most will agree, however, that by endgame Claude will be out damaging him.
• Cargo Ship: Ashton. Barrel barrel barrel BARREL barrel BARREL barrel BARREL barrel.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Remember how Cynne/Shin was an invincible boss where you either have to survive his attacks (causing a game over if he killed you) and then suffer a Hopeless Boss Fight and afterwards, he killed many people of Lacour just because he can? Well, the next time you meet him, it's your turn to curb-stomp him and make him pay for everything he's done.
  • The eventual fights against the true Big Bad Ensemble, the Ten Wise Men, who just destroyed Expel, killed Ronyx in front of his son, and are moments away from destroying the universe. Taking down even just one of them brings some satisfaction, complete with a Defeat Equals Explosion, making it one step closer to bringing (almost) everyone they killed back to life.
• Demonic Spiders: The game has a handful of these:
  • The Wizard series of enemies can cast powerful magic from afar, but approaching them at close range will cause them to phase out as they teleport to another location. Not only are they invincible to everything except for spells as they do so, they can quickly regain form and blast you with a fireball, stunning you long enough to turn invisible again. An entire group of them can be a problem if you don't have a mage to dish out spells to break up their chanting and teleporting.
  • The goofy-looking hourglass enemies can completely freeze the entire party, and the attack that causes this only takes a full second to start up and doesn't use any MP. If you're fighting a group of them, they can repeatedly chain these attacks together, leaving you utterly helpless as they decimate your party. Thankfully, at least in the PlayStation version, the freeze timer keeps going even if you open the menu, letting you recover from their attack much quicker.
  • The Salamanders and their palette-swap relatives. They have fearsome strength, HP to burn and their breath attacks are capable of inflicting poison, paralyze and stone in one fell swoop. They're bad enough with a full party, let alone solo runs or coliseum fights.
  • Gulper type enemies. These slime-ish enemy you first encountered at Linga Sanctuary as optional bosses has the ability to devour anyone attacked by it with high chance of success. That's treated like stone status or dying, therefore, close ranged fighters risk on getting killed instantly and there is no cure aside of killing that Gulper with your remaining party members (or wait until an indefinite amount of time in which these Gulpers will burp out the party member). This wouldn't raise a stinker, except for the fact that they can ambush and instantly eat you. Like the Salamanders, these type of enemies are nightmares for solo or coliseum runs.
• Disappointing Last Level: The end game feels very rushed, with the player blowing through the Ten Wise Men in groups at a time. This is sadly a bit similar to what happened to the first game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Leon. When the manga adaptation conducted its first popularity poll, Leon took fourth place (behind Ashton, Claude, and Rena), despite the fact that he hadn't even been introduced to the story yet.
  • Ashton is so popular that many forget that he's an optional character.
  • Among the Ten Wise Men, Lucifer/Cyril and Michael/Decus are often popular, the former being a Dragon with an Agenda and the latter a Large Ham with a Signature Move. Besides them, Zadkiel/Ruprecht is just as popular from his attractive boyish looks, even when he’s only fought as part of a three-man boss fight.
• Even Better Sequel: The Second Story improves over its predecessor in every possible way and is considered to be one of the best RPGs for the PS1.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Genius Bonus: It isn't that hard to tell, original English version aside, that the Ten Wise Men are named for angels; more specifically, the ethnarchs of the nine angelic choirs (Lucifer is the obvious outlier). Not so easy to notice: Their ranking is in the reverse order of their namesakes. Metatron, ethnarch of the seraphim, is the highest ranking in Jewish lore; in the Ten Wise Men, he's one of the three least of them, along with Jophiel and Zaphkiel (themselves named for the cherubim ethnarch and thrones ethnarch, the second highest and third highest). Meanwhile, Gabriel is the leader of the Ten Wise Men, not to mention the vessel of their creators' soul. But according to angelology, he's the lowest-ranking of the ethnarchs, heading the...um...angels (contrast to archangels, principalities, etc.). This is important because the lower-ranking ethnarchs are considered to be the ones closer to humanity, the higher-ranking ones closer to the divine. In other words, Nede was implicitly appropriating divinity, and all the impunity typically associated with it, themselves with the creation of the Ten Wise Men as galactic enforcers.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At one point, Claude mentions having a dog at home named Roddick. What makes it even funnier is that you realize who named it, making Ho Yay in the previous game.
  • One of Opera's weapons is called X-Box.
• Ho Yay:
  • Ashton in both a Private Action with Claude and his ending with Noel. Ironically, that Private Action also unlocks one of the bigger Ship Tease scenes between Claude and Rena.
  • Noel is a victim of this, especially in some of the Private Actions in Lotus-Eater Machine Expel.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • While Ernest does have a few good Killer Moves (notably Broken Heart), his normal attacks have a long animation time, and he lacks both the raw offence of Claude or Ashton and the powerful multi-hit killer moves of Opera or Chisato. In fact, when someone recruits him, it's either because he is necessary to recruit Opera, or because the Battle Armor^note an armor with 500 defense, which is tied with the best armor in the Bonus Dungeon and nearly 200 points better than every armor before then. can be stolen from him in PA mode.
  • The Red Mage Noel is considered a Master of None, as he joins with spells that do less damage than those of Celine and Leon by that point, and is a worse healer than Rena. The only good thing about him is that he can equip Bloody Armor, and thus heal with no chance of getting damaged.
  • Much to the consternation of the fanbase, Ashton got flattened with the nerf bat in the Remake. In the original PS1 release, he was a top-tier character by virtue of being the only character with a multi-hit basic attack, staggering them long enough to whip out Killer Moves that required him to stand in place, but who cared, the enemy was already pinned. While Second Departure lowered his value by giving everyone multi-hit basic combos, Second Story R finished the arc by putting the Shield system into place, allowing enemies to either knock him out of his KM windup or simply saunter away.
• Moe: Rena's very likable and cute.
• Narm: Nall briefing the heroes on the Ten Wise Men. We see the Ten Wise Men brutally massacre people in monochrome shots. These scenes would be actually gruesome if it weren't for the deformity of the figures while the Ten Wise Men are realistically proportioned.
• Narm Charm:
  • The characters' dialogue during battle sequences (such as Chisato's exaggerated "Oh no!" upon seeing a group of enemies) can come off as this, due to their (to modern audiences) weak audio quality. Some fans even complained because the voice acting was fixed for the Second Evolution remake.
  • The voice acting in the remake isn't perfect. There's just something incredibly hilarious about Claude shouting an overblown, "Dammit!" if he fails at item creation.
• Player Punch:
  • The death of Ronyx. Not only does this send the protagonist into a rage at Indalecio, but Ronyx was a pivotal and well-liked player character from the first game, even if he's considered lacking gameplay-wise.
  • Expel getting destroyed. Sure, it gets better, but holy crap...
  • Nede sacrificing themselves to save Expel. Consider that Nede's a little closer to home.
• Remade and Improved: The 2023 remake by Gemdrops received an excellent reception across the board. The game is built from the ground-up in a pleasing Sprite/Polygon Mix art-style. Motoi Sakuraba's score is redone.The remake cuts down on hours of downtime from the original due to the raftload of Anti-Frustration Features, only to then packs those hours back in with the introduction of new side-quests like the guild missions and Fishing Minigame. Almost every Game-Breaker is retained, and is in fact easier to accomplish. The result is a classic RPG given a gorgeous makeover that's now easier to play and even more fun to break.
• Sequel Displacement: The Second Story is considered to be the cornerstone experience of the entire franchise and considered to be the best game of the lot. It did help that this was the first Star Ocean game to be released overseas.
• Shocking Moments: Fans had been waiting impatiently for a port similar to First Departure R for years. Absolutely no one predicted the announcement on June 21, 2023 that the game would be getting a ground-up remake with a revamped battle system where high-level spells no longer freeze time.
• So Bad, It's Good: The voice acting in the PS1 version of the game is bad at times, namely Claude's. The PSP remake has completely redone voice acting.
• So Bad, It Was Better:
  • Some fans prefer the original voice acting over the remake's, similar to how Castlevania fans who liked Symphony of the Night's Narm Charm laden dialogue.
  • Some fans prefer the localized names of the Ten Wise Men, feeling they were more interesting and creative.
• Strangled by the Red String: How Dias and Chisato Hooked Up Afterwards can be a bit confusing to explain. To note, Dias doesn't have really high relationship rating with anyone else except Claude and Rena, so getting the Dias-Chisato ending requires the player to be deliberate in rigging their relationship rating. There are almost no PA between them. And somehow Blue Sphere made it like they're dating, and they're suddenly a couple... that leaves no descendants whatsoever in games after this chronologically to confirm and strengthen this beyond the dictionary implying that Chisato's descendants are Expellian.
• That One Boss:
  • There is a boss battle where you fight this pair of Egyptian apes called "Harfainx" ("Halfynx" in Second Evolution) who have 50% parry rates, know exactly when to counterattack to push your characters back, and - in the half-second gap while you're running back towards them - can drop a spell that takes off half your hit points. Later in the game, when you're searching for the local Unobtanium, they show up as random encounters. ...As 90% of the random encounters. ...In packs of three.
  • Haniel and Michael. They're able to chain spells to the point where you can't do a thing. They also love firing multi-hit attacks when you're trying to deny the other one from casting.
  • Camael, Zadkiel, and Raphael. Though the honor mostly goes to Camael and his ability to inflict status ailments like it's going out of fashion. If you don't have accessories to resist petrification and/or paralysis, you'll quickly find your characters being unable to do anything, forcing you to waste items to heal them. If you don't have any, then oh well. All the while the other two wail on your party for free. Zadkiel and Raphael are nowhere near as bad, but playing as a melee character makes hitting them a bit of an issue, given their perchance for teleporting.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Only two of the Ten Wise Men get any notable characterization, and most of them are taken out all at once. Considering they're the Big Bad Ensemble of the game, it's rather disappointing that we learn next to nothing about them.
• Ugly Cute: Rena certainly has this opinion of Creepy and Weepy once they shrink down and graft themselves to Ashton's back.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Likely Jibril/Raphael since the robes heavily darken their face.
• The Woobie:
  • Rena. Seriously, how would you feel knowing you were adopted, and that your real parents died hundreds of millions of years ago?
  • Claude after seeing his father's ship getting blown to pieces by the Ten Wise Men while his father was on said ship. Even worse is that Ronyx believed that his own son was dead, and never lived to find out that Claude was alive. If you're playing from Claude's POV, the flashbacks in the Fields detailing their relationship don't help at all, as you realize they can never resolve their issues.
  • Philia as her dad is the Big Bad.
  • Noel and Chisato will die if you don't recruit them. You can rest easily knowing that the people from Expel you didn't recruit (including Welch) are revived at the end of the game...but not either of them.
• Woolseyism: In the original PS1 version, the names of the Ten Wise Men were changed from the archangel references and given much more original sounding names like Indalecio.

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