I’ve had a problem with the Star Ocean series, going back a long time: for a series so steeped in science fiction, the games nevertheless take place on typical medieval worlds. At their worst, they feel like bog-standard RPGs with science fiction window dressing. Having played through Star Ocean: The Second Story R, I can forgive it. Second Story R is a wildly ambitious RPG, with tons of crunchy systems to sink your teeth into. It’s ambitious, it’s liberating—and it’s also rather fun to play.

Players might be overwhelmed at the amount of choice on display; there are a lot of in-game party members you won’t recruit on your first playthrough, for one. In fact, you even have a choice of which character to star in your game at the outset. The good news is that the character stuff doesn’t matter—not too much, anyway. This is the same story whether Claude C. Kenny or Rena Lanford is the star of the game: the story of a young man part of a galaxy-spanning federation getting trapped on a backwater planet, and a mysterious girl who has a strange power nobody else can explain. Brought together by fate, these two youths venture out to solve the mystery of an object known as the Sorcery Globe, a mysterious meteor that is bringing ruin to the land. Along the way, Claude learns what it means to grow up, and establishes himself outside of the legacy of his famous war-hero father. Rena, meanwhile, seeks her roots and the mystery of her birth.

The ensuing story is interesting, but the real mastery on display is the myriad systems. Partway into the game, you discover the Item Creation specialties—and it’s here that the game gives you endless tools to simply blow the walls off this game. Characters can learn skills and abilities using points earned from battles or guild missions. These run the gamut from allowing your characters to steal items from non-player characters to cooking to customizing your weapons, and so on. While some of these skills can also offer a modicum of buffs to your raw stats, the real appeal is the potential of these abilities. In our experience, we pumped a few levels of the Art skill into one of our characters. Using the resulting Sculpting ability, we could create items that could spawn a random assortment of items. From there, we’d pop Goodie Boxes like a gacha until we rolled mid-game equipment. These items allowed us to effectively steamroll enemies in the early parts of the game. And that was just for raw combat; with enough points in Writing (plus a good amount of Fountain Pens), you can make a whole slew of skill books to teach the rest of your party other IC/Specialty skills, up to level 7. Invest points into Training; your characters can earn boosted amounts of Experience Points in battle at the cost of a modicum of your stats—don’t worry, your Sword of Marvels will make up the difference. There is such a wealth of options for making your characters stronger that don’t revolve around grinding for EXP and limitless options for the kinds of shenanigans you can get up to that it doesn’t even feel like you’re breaking the game. It’s a degree of freedom I’ve seldom experienced in an RPG, and it made me want to keep playing just to see how these customization skills would pan out later in the game. And don’t worry: there are no mistakes in IC/Speciality allocation, and your SP are practically infinite in the long run, so you can’t trap yourself into a “suboptimal” build.

You might worry that combat is an afterthought, in light of IC/Speciality chicanery. But there is a lot to chew on in combat, too. You’ve got Formations, which can affect performance in battle. You’ve got a nifty Counter system performed by dodging enemy attacks at just the right time. There are plenty of Combat skills for modifying performance in battle, from randomly teleporting behind enemies to shortening the time it takes to cast spells. And you can even chain enemy encounters for increased EXP and currency acquisition. There’s also a new system for calling in cameos from older Star Ocean characters. Combat might not be the most important thing in Star Ocean 2, but it is still a system available to you in addition to its many other systems.  

Star Ocean: The Second Story R doesn’t quite bill itself as the definitive Star Ocean 2 experience, but it may well be. Its graphical improvements, along the lines of Square Enix‘s HD-2D stylings, are superb—albeit, you can see the strings. Sometimes sprites will end up at certain angles that only serve to remind you they are flat 2D sprites. What really impresses me are the rest of the display options. For starters: you have both the original in-game soundtrack, plus a new “arranged” soundtrack. Both are spectacular, featuring ethereal backing tracks for your villages and forests and wild progressive rock anthems with wild electric organ performances for other dungeons. I couldn’t blame anyone for choosing one over the other. You have your choice between the game’s original Japanese performances or the English dub from the old PSP release. The English dub is notably a bit dated, with some awkward deliveries, but is otherwise serviceable. You even have the option of choosing which profile art to display in each character’s profile screen, be it the original 1990s art, the updated 2000s artwork from the PSP release, or the modern designs made for this edition of the game. So if you’re an old-time fan with deeply-set preferences, fret not: you’ve got options.

Are there issues? Sure. While I can commend Star Ocean 2 for its characters (the plight of poor Ashton and his dragons, Creepy ‘n Weepy, could easily have been its own game), I cannot pretend that protagonist Claude and Rena are the most compelling. Their relationship is established as the intended core of the plot, and it never quite convinced me. Rena’s somewhere between a maiden of fate and a tomboyish country girl, and neither of these aspects of her personality really gel. Similarly, Claude’s a bit too much of a bull in the china shop for my tastes. While there are tons of systems at work in Star Ocean 2, it might feel like a game that you play with a guide rather than a game whose systems you can intuit.

This isn’t the newest iteration of Star Ocean 2, just one that appeared rather late (courtesy of this being a Switch 2 port). And who knows, Square Enix might make another one of these Star Ocean 2 ports in another decade or so; the PSP release still feels like it was just the other day. But this does feel like the best way to play Star Ocean 2. Its myriad systems are laid bare to you, you’ve got a wealth of options regarding its history of character designs and music, and its very nature of being a Switch 2 game means you can enjoy it all over your home instead of stuck on a console. I cannot blame people for being twice-shy about Star Ocean, because I was for a long time. Keyword: was. If future Star Ocean titles feature The Second Story R‘s level of quality and fidelity, we might have a real winner of a franchise again.