What's your favorite star ocean game, and why?
I'm fond of The Last Hope, even if Second Story had a few things up on it--there were other elements TLH did better. Honestly, as much as I love SS, when you play as Rena the start of the game feels like you're hitting two hours of shameless triggers. TLH delves you into a desperate story. In counterance, though, there's much more exploration of every world in SS, and the system of character acquisition was way more interesting. It's neat where every person you gain in a party can take someone else away.
Also, Dias Flac and Arumat are both made of epic.";
I'm fond of The Last Hope, even if Second Story had a few things up on it--there were other elements TLH did better. Honestly, as much as I love SS, when you play as Rena the start of the game feels like you're hitting two hours of shameless triggers. TLH delves you into a desperate story. In counterance, though, there's much more exploration of every world in SS, and the system of character acquisition was way more interesting. It's neat where every person you gain in a party can take someone else away.
Also, Dias Flac and Arumat are both made of epic.";
Oh, and in addendum. Star Ocean: Second Evolution, the remake of second story. In many ways it refined Second Story, but there was one great fault I found in it: the introduction of Welch as a character. Welch had already been in a few games (including The Last Hope as the item combination person), but the others made sense until Second Evolution, which takes place like, 300+ years after the other stories. Their best explanation was that she had a legendary item from another game only useable by four dimensional beings so she was randomly transported to the Second Story/Evolution world by virtue of "trying to find her dream man".
...Can you tell I'm a gamer dork yet? I work in game retail and development not just to make a paycheck. It's a passion.
...Can you tell I'm a gamer dork yet? I work in game retail and development not just to make a paycheck. It's a passion.
Has... nobody here played the Star Ocean games? 
I've never even heard of them. I was kind of watching the thread with interest to see what people would say about them.
I've heard of them but never played any.
Oh geez. If you're able to play PS1 games on any system, I'd suggest finding Star Ocean Second Story, but the problem therein is that the game is valued at over 100$ these days. I got mine cheaper cuz it was missing the actual disc case but had the pamphlet and cover and everything, I just need to find a two disc case and it'll bump the value back up. (...anyone got a two disc CD/PS1 case?)
That said.
If you can't find that, look for Star Ocean Second Evolution on the PSP. It's essentially the same, minor changes. Star Ocean the Last Hope is both PS3 and Xbox360, but the PS3 version has special boons like being able to change the art style and the language/voices.
Star Ocean Second Story was this game where you could pick one of two lead characters, and depending which lead you picked it decided which other characters would join the later story or not. Some were available in both files, but if you picked character C, you wouldn't be able to get character E, so you had to prioritize what you wanted. I like playing as Rena because I get Dias Flac, who is made of epic. They let you find/learn like a hundred different skills that all fed into a system, like different aspects of cooking to learn, or practice, or machinery, synthesis, alchemy, etc--then you take items in the game and either on one character, or a blend of characters who know how to use the skill, reforge items, restorative food, etc etc out of it. The battle system was the origin of the "Tales of ___________" battle systems. You know, Tales of Symphonia, Tales of the Abyss, Tales of Fantasia, Tales of Graces--and also later the Valkyrie Profile series. The creators are Tri-Ace; so... Tales, Valkyrie, and Resonance of Fate are big things of theirs. I'm a huge Tri-Ace fan at this point.
The Last Hope kept a lot of things, changed some, added new--like you get the ability to do on the spot blindside attacks on enemies, and earn different bonus chains which is really cool. Rather than every character having the potential to learn every skill (save for a few hidden skills Second Story had), each character had areas of natural focus. Reimi had Harvesting and Cooking, and Faize had Alchemy, and so on. And then you can go to your ship, put the party in different creative groups, and see what each specialist comes up with when working alongside a few other party members. You don't need the items to design them then, just the knowledge of some of them existing, so then you make a blueprint by brainstorming with your party members and can build epic items later with mixes of alchemy, synthesis, crafting, etc etc.
That said.
If you can't find that, look for Star Ocean Second Evolution on the PSP. It's essentially the same, minor changes. Star Ocean the Last Hope is both PS3 and Xbox360, but the PS3 version has special boons like being able to change the art style and the language/voices.
Star Ocean Second Story was this game where you could pick one of two lead characters, and depending which lead you picked it decided which other characters would join the later story or not. Some were available in both files, but if you picked character C, you wouldn't be able to get character E, so you had to prioritize what you wanted. I like playing as Rena because I get Dias Flac, who is made of epic. They let you find/learn like a hundred different skills that all fed into a system, like different aspects of cooking to learn, or practice, or machinery, synthesis, alchemy, etc--then you take items in the game and either on one character, or a blend of characters who know how to use the skill, reforge items, restorative food, etc etc out of it. The battle system was the origin of the "Tales of ___________" battle systems. You know, Tales of Symphonia, Tales of the Abyss, Tales of Fantasia, Tales of Graces--and also later the Valkyrie Profile series. The creators are Tri-Ace; so... Tales, Valkyrie, and Resonance of Fate are big things of theirs. I'm a huge Tri-Ace fan at this point.
The Last Hope kept a lot of things, changed some, added new--like you get the ability to do on the spot blindside attacks on enemies, and earn different bonus chains which is really cool. Rather than every character having the potential to learn every skill (save for a few hidden skills Second Story had), each character had areas of natural focus. Reimi had Harvesting and Cooking, and Faize had Alchemy, and so on. And then you can go to your ship, put the party in different creative groups, and see what each specialist comes up with when working alongside a few other party members. You don't need the items to design them then, just the knowledge of some of them existing, so then you make a blueprint by brainstorming with your party members and can build epic items later with mixes of alchemy, synthesis, crafting, etc etc.
I played Til the End of Time. I really liked it, and really liked the play style. I watched someone play a part of Last Hope, and the voice acting was so bad, it completely turned me off to the game. I've been wanting to play Second Evolution, but have never gotten around to it.
woot got my phone semiworking. At least it logged me in. Pardon bad capitalization and lack of linebreaks as that apparently wont work. Till the end of time is definitely the weakest link of the series. So if you enjoyed it you should definitely try the others. On last hopes voice acting, lemme guess, the retarded little girl who goes "kaaaaay?"?? That actually has valid character behind it. I thought it was just crappy voice acting but it has to do with her being an emotional shutout. Shes actually 15 but stopped developing even physically. Faize speaks oddly but... He's an alien with a communicator and his end game voice acting actually shows the actor's skill in comparison, i just cant say more without massive spoilers. I loved edge's voice, bacchus is by a popular voice actor, reimi was pretty good and she's a big va too. Arumat has the same va as dias flac does in second evolution, second story's remake.
Sorry, I'm a real gaming nut n such but Star Ocean just doesn't appeal to me.
Whenever I looked at the boxes of the games when I still went retail it just had too much of a JRPG look to me and I'm not that much into JRPG's.
Also except for Legend of the Dragoon there's not a single turn-based RPG that strikes my fancy. I'm more of an FPS, RTS, Action-RPG, racing, fighting, Economy games person.
Yeah, anything except turn-based RPG's xp
Whenever I looked at the boxes of the games when I still went retail it just had too much of a JRPG look to me and I'm not that much into JRPG's.
Also except for Legend of the Dragoon there's not a single turn-based RPG that strikes my fancy. I'm more of an FPS, RTS, Action-RPG, racing, fighting, Economy games person.
Yeah, anything except turn-based RPG's xp
you.. Do realize its not a turnbased game, right? Like, at all? Its position based, without the lag of typical tactics games. Honestly enemies can juggle you like a ball if you screw up. It does definitely have jrpg qualities since, well, its from japan. However the series itself started in 1996 with a bunch of developers tired of the standard, as well as three major figureheads in three divisions, hence "tri-ace". They were like, music programming and something else. It showed with their mastery of the super famicom, which they managed to put at 48 bits and insert special chips in the cartridges that let them hypercompact data. they always put a lot of content in, it wasnt the traditional story in jrpg where you pick up a weapon along a linear story. your party, your story by proxy, can adapt. In second story, at least. Last hope was more linear but there was even better action influence to the game by allowing you to do chain combos and blindside the enemy, among other things.
Er phone txt limit. But i guess that's why our grandparents told us not to judge a book (or game here) by its cover. Its an action rpg series thru and thru, man.
But if I wouldn't judge a game by its cover I'd have to buy every game 
Anyway, seems I was totally wrong then! I can honestly say I never even bothered looking it up because, yeah, it's cover and images gave me the "typical jrpg" impression. Anyway seems I missed out on a possible good game then and will do so for a while. My gaming budget is already planned out an sadly has no room for any new games.
Comes with beeing a student =[
Anyway, seems I was totally wrong then! I can honestly say I never even bothered looking it up because, yeah, it's cover and images gave me the "typical jrpg" impression. Anyway seems I missed out on a possible good game then and will do so for a while. My gaming budget is already planned out an sadly has no room for any new games.
Comes with beeing a student =[
Second Story was... well, mid 1990s, so it's probably not gonna be up to snuff in the system with what you're used to now. However, it was extremely advanced for its era. Tales of Symphonia designers, and a few other tales games, got frustrated with the developers of that era and fled to the tri-ace team, combining edge of the line ideas and maximizing on the system in its era. In SS and Last Hope both: Every item, as useless as it seems, can have some worth because you can have your party members collect (in SS anywhere, in TLH on their ship) and split into different creative groups.
Like... hm. Last Hope. Edge is the Smith. The little girl I can't remember the name of is the Artist. Bacchus is the Tool-maker/Bombs/etc. So if you put those three in one creative group, you might create the "recipe" for a rune-laiden machinized sword. Whereas if Reimi the Cook, and Sarah the Synthesis girl, and Meracle the crafts girl come together, you might have some magically synthesized cuisine that can restore your HP and MP a great deal, or something else entirely.
In SS, anyone can learn in any crafting field, it's a matter of figuring who you want to assign to what. The item creation was a little less controllable though; TLH, you brainstorm on your recipes then try to collect the items if you don't have them. In SS, you have, say, your alchemist take a certain stone and work on it, and hope it doesn't turn into something weird because it self-designated what would happen outside of your control based on your level and a certain percentage of success.
SS had a linear progressive story but, at the same time, the personal stories you encountered and investigated changed depending on who you started the game with, and who you later accepted to your party. (If you get Ashton, you can't get the two three-eyed aliens). Also there was like, a ridiculous amount of endings, because each character had multiple potential endings. IF you had Ashton and Rena get high friendship over time, Ashton and Rena might get together instead of Rena and Claude, the other lead. But at the same time, you could have Rena and Claude get together, and have Ashton become very good friends with, say, Dias, and have some ending where those two go to a planet and do something together. Then all of the high friendship characters get their own respective endings, which stack into this big finale thing. The replay value is almost endless for that reason.
TLH was more linear in story/characters. You pretty much got who you got and went where you went, and if you had the main character spend time with everyone you earned their endings. If you bust your butt, you can even get endings for really important NPCs like Crowe. I prefer some parts of TLH, and in other ways I prefer SS. I love how flexible the character/party system was in SS, but in TLH you can do blindsides, and build combo chains, and out of battle chains that affect how you gain XP, Skill Points, how your HP/MP recovers after battle, how much money you earn, etc. That and like I said earlier, in TLH you could control what you were making better and weren't crossing your fingers dependent on a percentage chance.
Like... hm. Last Hope. Edge is the Smith. The little girl I can't remember the name of is the Artist. Bacchus is the Tool-maker/Bombs/etc. So if you put those three in one creative group, you might create the "recipe" for a rune-laiden machinized sword. Whereas if Reimi the Cook, and Sarah the Synthesis girl, and Meracle the crafts girl come together, you might have some magically synthesized cuisine that can restore your HP and MP a great deal, or something else entirely.
In SS, anyone can learn in any crafting field, it's a matter of figuring who you want to assign to what. The item creation was a little less controllable though; TLH, you brainstorm on your recipes then try to collect the items if you don't have them. In SS, you have, say, your alchemist take a certain stone and work on it, and hope it doesn't turn into something weird because it self-designated what would happen outside of your control based on your level and a certain percentage of success.
SS had a linear progressive story but, at the same time, the personal stories you encountered and investigated changed depending on who you started the game with, and who you later accepted to your party. (If you get Ashton, you can't get the two three-eyed aliens). Also there was like, a ridiculous amount of endings, because each character had multiple potential endings. IF you had Ashton and Rena get high friendship over time, Ashton and Rena might get together instead of Rena and Claude, the other lead. But at the same time, you could have Rena and Claude get together, and have Ashton become very good friends with, say, Dias, and have some ending where those two go to a planet and do something together. Then all of the high friendship characters get their own respective endings, which stack into this big finale thing. The replay value is almost endless for that reason.
TLH was more linear in story/characters. You pretty much got who you got and went where you went, and if you had the main character spend time with everyone you earned their endings. If you bust your butt, you can even get endings for really important NPCs like Crowe. I prefer some parts of TLH, and in other ways I prefer SS. I love how flexible the character/party system was in SS, but in TLH you can do blindsides, and build combo chains, and out of battle chains that affect how you gain XP, Skill Points, how your HP/MP recovers after battle, how much money you earn, etc. That and like I said earlier, in TLH you could control what you were making better and weren't crossing your fingers dependent on a percentage chance.
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