A Sea of Constellations: Let's Play Star Ocean 2

It's times like these I wish my old computer hadn't taken with it all that I had prepared, I can still stall though. First, a little background I guess.

Star Ocean: The Second Story was an RPG for the PS1 released by Enix on (if Wikipedia is to be believed) May 19, 1999. It received moderate critical acclaim but was not particularly successful.

The game stars two characters, Claude and Rena (or whatever you'd rather name them). I'm looking for a character select screen picture but drawing a blank, I'll add it later. The main difference between the two is the characters they can recruit, Rena gets a standoffish swordsman named Dias and Claude gets a bratty mage named Leon. There are other differences but they primarily consist of different viewpoints of the same events.

As most everyone has no doubt noticed, this leaves us with our initial choice, this has to be done before the LP can even start. Claude, or Rena?

I'll leave that up to you tyrants.

I'll probably stop the voting at 10-15 votes or 48 hours, whichever comes first.

ADDENDUM: I'll apologize right now for the rather short first post, I had a lot prepared, but as previously stated, my old computer bit the dust at a poor time. It'll get more interesting as it goes on, I promise.

I vote for Rena. Swordspeople > mages, and standoffish > bratty (even if just barely).

Unless we can rename minor characters too, in which case get Leon and rename him Negi.

Claude, mos def. Rena is as boring as virginal moe supergirls come and I love beating up on Dias (if only for brief seconds.)

Title



Crawd



Lena

I vote for the blue-haired girl, because I'm replaying as the blonde kid right now.

Every character can be renamed, at any point, if I wanted to rename Claude in the middle of a dungeon, I can just go into his status screen and change his name. The same applies for every character. Go nuts, name the characters anything you want as they come up

Thank you very much spineshark, I'd have just screengrabbed but I have to get everything in order.

EDIT: One more thing for you guys to decide right now, should this be a gamebreaker play through or should it be a normal, as if I didn't know how to break it run? There's a lot of ways to exploit game mechanics in a perfectly legit way that can make it incredibly easy so I'd like to know if that's something people want.

Man, I need to play through this again, but Spectral Force 3 comes in the mail tomorrow. sigh.

Unless you're going to be posting a lot of battle screens, it'll barely be any different for the viewers whether or not Claude is wearing the Eternal Sphere or whatever. I personally find most of the gamebreaking stuff to be a big pain in the ass and not really worth the effort, but I can't say that I *care* a whole lot either.

Also I'm just going to say this now, you have to recruit Bowman.

Rena looks like your typical anime magical girl, so let's go with Claude. I mean, granted, he looks like your typical determined and optimistic anime protagonist, but I figure that's at least a little bit better.

For those who haven't played this game, both characters are in the party essentially the entire game, and pretty much the only differences are in some scenes, which character appears on the map screens, and who joins for the last dungeon on Disc 1.

"Fun" Factoid: Rena seems to have been at least at one point a sword-wielding heroine, until tri-Ace decided to put off the gender role reversal until VP. Evidence for this comes primarily from the in-game drawing of her that you can make with the Art specialty, which shows her holding a sword. But I think the most incontrovertible evidence of all is that she has blue hair.

Rena because I never finished my playthrough with her.

I was thinking more in the sense of doing something like the mechanic explaining posts in some other LP's, put it there for those who want it, make it skippable for those who don't.

it would also affect whether I decide to try unlimited Indalecio and the bonus bosses, which might interest some people

Also, I'll bring up the recruitment issues as they come along, don't start getting too far ahead, Bowman's going to be a while yet. Rest assured that as long as you people don't hate me too much, I'll take him over Precis, I intend to never for the rest of my life here "HERE'S MISTER ENEMY!" ever again

I'll vote for Rena since I uh... actually like the standoffish swordsman. Yeah.

While Precis's "HERE'S MR. ENEMY" was bad, I always found her para-BOLA beam worse. How can you mispronounce that?

Do whatever you want so long as you recruit Ashton.

If there's a way you can provide voice samples it would be a real treat.

"Theeeere's MR ENEMY!"

I never played Claude so I'd kinda prefer that but Dias is HAWT so I won't be sad if we use Rena.

And I shall be campaigning for Precis. Because I'm evil and BANG BANG ATTACK!!! she's awesome.

I liked using Precis, but I had to mute the TV whenever she was in my party. As for mains, I guess Rena, since I like Dias marginally more then Leon.

Which is not to say I like either of them.

You wha

Oh. Carry on!

Trouble is they're both awesome. By which I mean Dias and Leon, not Claude and Rena. Dias stars in dozens of anime shows with different haircuts (mmm Kenshin...) and Leon fights with the Popup Book of Eternal Damnation! I'd rather we got both of them and neither of those two from the second disk.

There's also the awful choice of Opera vs Ashton.

Oh god, I forgot about Opera. Every time I used her she would screech like a banshee whenever she got hit by an enemy, and would sorta whimper when she died, and it would only be after a minute or two of relative silence that I'd ask myself why wasn't she screaming. And then realize she had died.

The whole Claude vs. Rena debate doesn't even matter past the first hour or so, so just flip a coin.

Also as I recall you don't have to trade anyone to get my favorite character, but she is the last person you get so please don't already have all your characters before getting to Nede and recruiting Chisato.

Are you going to break the game and get Claude's best weapon super-early?

I think getting Chisato blocks Noel, who is, in short, not a big loss.

Also, I like Opera >_> She even happens to be pretty damn good against flying enemies.

I've never played this game, so this is all new to me! I'm so confused. :s

Which is the better choice, Talking Time?

I am 99% sure it doesn't.

I think it breaks down like this: there are twelve characters and you can recruit eight in any given game. You get both heroes and Celine for free (3), have to pick between Ashton/Opera and Bowman/Precis (5), the Leon/Dias choice is made for you (6), Ernest joins if you have Opera (7), and you get Noel on Nede (8). So, if you get Opera and Ernest you miss Chisato since there's no room for her.

God damn I loved the crap out of this game. I regret being a penniless bum back at the turn of the century and selling off most of my PSX collection to buy whatever Gamecube game came out that I had to have.

I told Celine to go to hell when she tried to join. Thus, I had Claude, Rena, Opera, Ernest, Bowman, Leon, Noel, and Chisato.

I don't particularly care between Claude and Rena as the main character, but I have to vote for Opera since she's awesome. I vote for Precis over Bowman, too.

I want you to break the hell out of the game if you know how.

(I've never played this, so I have no idea what that entails.)

Makes perfect sense to me, especially if you're playing as Claude, because Leon is pretty much the superior caster anyway.

I vote the exact opposite; Ashton and Precis for life, yo. I only care about the Claude/Rena choice inasmuch as it affects Leon/Dias, I guess, and Leon is so much better so... Claude as hero. (I guess that's around... 50 points?)

It's possible, and it's AWESOME. I want to see it broken all to hell, too.

In battle: Rena is the white mage so she will probably be in the party regardless. Claude is a physical attacker and can be swapped out for another physical attacker fairly easily.

Storywise: Rena is a anime maiden wuss in general but comes off as slightly less of one if she's the main character. Claude as the main lets us see a few more sci-fi scenes.

Recruitment-wise: Rena gets an angsty bishounen swordsmaster, Claude gets a child genius mage who wields popup books. All other recruits are identical.

Since the former archetype's been played to death and the latter sounds more interesting, we're going with Claude then. The extra sci-fi on the side wouldn't hurt either. Thanks!

Mirror Slice > all other melee attacks

Yes, well I didn't want to bias the vote too much on the fact that when I took Claude out of my party I could not beat the last boss. -_-

I remember Claude and Ashton having a very specific set of specials that could juggle enemies in mid-air indefinitely if you could keep up with it. I remember this technique being crucial in some of the uberdungeon fights.

To give newbies an idea of just how batshit crazy this game gets: Chisato gets an attack called Tear Gas which can deal upwards of 20+ hits at 2000 damage per hit. With her best weapon equipped, she absorbs all that damage as health. This is not even close to the best attack in the game.