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Star Ocean: The Second Story Ris a remake of a classic RPG from the ’90s. Inevitably, this means it has a bunch of esoteric systems to learn and not very much in the way of tutorials. While the remake does attempt to solve this issue in many ways, there are still many things left up to the player to discover for themselves.
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This includes things such as the value of attack items and where best to invest the various skill and battle points you acquire through levelling up. Luckily, we have some helpful tips for getting the most out of the first hours of Star Ocean 2.
Do Your Guild Challenges
Early on in the game, you’ll make your way toKrosse City, a castle settlement to the north of Arlia and Salva.After visiting the kingat the castle and completing the events there, you’ll be prompted to head to theguildby your party members. You should definitely do this - the guild offers easy challenges to complete that involve utilising skills and Specialties, essentially tutorialising the relevant mechanics and rewarding you for engaging with them.
You can get some great rewards for completing guild challenges, includingpowerful consumables, strong weapons, and heaps of Fol.
More guild challenges will unlock as you hit certain story milestonesthroughout the game. Your party will remind you when new challenges are available whenever you pass by a guild (there are many throughout the game), but it doesn’t hurt to make a concerted effort to check them out whenever you pass a story event.
In addition to the guild challenges, make sure you’recompleting your regular challenges, which are accessible through the party menu. These track things like feats in battle, your usage of item creation skills, and even steps taken, and will provide ample rewards for your efforts.
Many Specialties in this game rely on youhaving a high skill levelto be used at their most efficient - stand-out examples areAlchemy, Machinist, and Crafting. Since Skill Points are rather limited and slow to farm, it makes sense to spread these Specialities throughout your entire party. Tryallocating every character two Specialities to max out to begin with, hopefully those that align with their naturalTalents(which can be viewed on the status menu).
It’s very convenient tomake your chosen player character, whether it’s Claude or Rena, yourdesignated Pickpocketer. This allows you to effectivelyPickpocket during Private Actionsand even steal great items from party members! Beware the inevitable relationship drops, though.
The only exceptions are thoseSpecialties that contribute to unlocking and levelling up Super Specialties. You’ll need two characters to have four levels in a Specialty (and another with one level) to unlock a Super Specialty and more party members to level that Specialty up to make the Super Specialty more effective. Another exception isCustomisation- every individual character has their own unique Customisation options, so it’s eventually worthwhile to level this up to max for every character (if you’re going for a completionist run of the game, that is).
Try tospread your further levels in those Specialties out thinlyso you’re not wasting too many skill points on a character’s secondary skills. For example, an effective way to getMaster Chefto the max level is to get the usual one character up to level ten in Cooking, another up to level four to unlock the Super Specialty, and then improve your other party members' Cooking skill by one point each until you hit max level. With that, you have the most efficient way to level up Super Specialties.
To make levelling up skills far more efficient,the first thing you should level up onevery single characteris the Determination skill. This doesn’t cost many skill points in the long run, and it will permanently reduce the amount of skill points it costs to improve every other skill in the game.
Enlightenment Is The Way
Enlightenment is a particularly powerful Super Specialty that has been buffed in this version of the game.
To unlock Enlightenment, you’ll need to havetwo characters with four levels of Trainand at leastone level of Survival.
In previous games, Enlightenment would decrease your party members' stats in exchange for a boost to your SP gain. In this game,the only thing that takes a hit is the amount of Fol you receive from battles. Fol is incredibly easy to come by (check the tip below for an easy route to riches!), so this isn’t a big sacrifice at all.
In exchange for a hit to Fol, you’ll gain abonus to the SP and BP you gain from battles and levelling up, which will make your party significantly stronger. Needless to say,once unlocked, you should enable Enlightenment and never take it off.
At level ten, which requires37 levels of Train(spread out among your entire party), you’ll have a60 percent bonus to your SP and BP gains, making it incredibly easy to max out the skills you need for each character.
Low On Fol? Go Fish!
A new Specialty added to this version of the game isFishing, which requiresItem Knowledge and Compounding. This will allow you to fish up creatures and items (and sometimes enemies!) from any body of water in the game, including pots of water and fountains, weirdly enough.
It doesn’t take much effort (or even heavy investment into the Fishing skill) to amass alarge collection of fish. These have great uses whentraded to Reel in Harley, but many are alsoincredibly expensive and a wonderful source of Fol(moreso if you useGroup Appraising). This is made doubly important if you turn the Enlightenment Super Specialty on, which reduces your Fol income for increases to SP and BP gains.
Eventually,Harley will become unavailable. At this point,Reel will move to the city of L’Aqua, which will be accessible once you have access to a Psynard.
Beware Relationship Sinkers
There are two Specialties that may seem like typical video game abilities that you can use and abuse to your liking, but there are consequences to your actions.
Pickpocketing and producing Contrabandwill both come with a chance of reducing the relationship values in your party. As relationship values are the key to engineering your preferred character endings, this may be a potential downfall or a useful tool. While the items you can get from these Specialties are potentially very powerful, even game-breaking in parts, it’s important to keep these consequences in mind.
To offset relationship drops, you can use thePublishing Super Specialtyto produce books that improve a character pair’s relationship!
Open Up Your Map Early
Star Ocean: The Second Story R comes with a very useful quality-of-life upgrade - by accessing the fast-travel menu, you’ll be provided with alist of every location in the game that you’ve been to. The important bit is that whenever there is amissable event or a Private Actionready to fire in those locations, they’ll be marked with an icon (anexclamation markfor an event, aspeech bubble with ‘PA’ in itfor Private Actions).
After dealing with the events of the prologue, covering Arlia and the escapade in Allen’s mansion in Salva, you’ll have access to a lot of the world map. The first thing you should do ismake an effort to visit every single green and red dot on the map. It’ll take a while, and you may encounter some tough enemies, but they should be easy to flee from if you’re too weak.
This way, you can be sure that you won’t miss anytime-locked eventsthat you’d miss if you didn’t visit places before you’re forced to visit them in the story.
Whenever you unlock access to a new part of the map (most importantly the eastern continent and when you eventually gain access to a Psynard), you should make an effort tovisit every areato make travelling around for events efficient and quick.
