I grew up loving action RPGs like this game... yet somehow this one slipped through the cracks.

This game is probably one of my favorite JRPGs of all time now. Absolutely loving this game.

Thanks to my friend for gifting it to me!

Perfect Steam Deck game too!

Star Ocean 2 is one of my childhood games, and I love how much attention to detail they put into this remake.
My father bought the original for me when I was a child—not because he knew what it was about, but because he liked the cover and the title. I've always cherished this game as a special gift from him.

Now Square Enix, this is how you remake games. Do something like this for Chrono Cross, and you'll definitely get my money.

This was an absolute blast!

I never managed to finish the original, always got bored, but this remake with ALOT of QoL changes, made it so much more enjoyable but still being faithful to the original. It looks fantastic too. I love how the sprites pop out of the 3D background, it almost looks like a pop-up book.


Positives:
- Beautiful sprite/3D combo
- The new character artwork is one of the best I've seen, with the exception of Bowman, he doesn't look laidback anymore.
- Easily breakable in the most fun ways. You can cook some great buffs, create some broken iems, or you can work on your pickpocketing and steal the best armor in the game from your own teammate 20% through the game, and many more ways.
- A lot of replayability. There are 11 characters but only 6 free spots, some only join if you started with a different hero, some don't join if you already have someone specific, but this also means...

Negatives:
- The whole main story resolves only around those 2 main characters, the others mostly just say a sentence here and there once they're recruited, but there are a lot of PA events to give spotlights to those characters, and you get different events depending what character-combo you have.
- The overworld has a lot of stutter, mostly when enemies pop-out. The overworld doesn't look that great compared to everything else.
- The arranged soundtrack doesn't do it for me, it also sounds like it's lower in volume than the original. Luckily you can switch between the Original/Arrangement easily.

Overall this is my favourite remake for quite some while and I wish we'd get more remakes of old-school rpgs looking like this.