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

I had it freeze in there a few times, not enough to make me give up, but enough times (after getting good treasure and all) to piss me off. I think it happened once in battle, and a couple of times just running around the dungeon.

I second this salute.

A quick update because it's a skill that's been mentioned but never explained to my satisfaction. No pictures again, my apologies.

Pickpocketing is a rather unique aspect in Star Ocean. A useful skill set to be sure, but if the player isn't planning for it early, a perhaps prohibitively expensive one. I remembered too late myself some of the keys to this grand art, and had to replay the first 6 hours of Second Evolution (2-3 of those hours were level grinding). The keys to this art are: The Dexterity/Nimble Fingers talent, the Poker Face skill, the Courage Skill and, the Thieve's Gloves. I'll elaborate in that order.

The talent system is simultaneously a great and annoying aspect of SO2. Talents are either innate or learned. To earn new talents, the player simply needs to use their associated skills. This confers the talent after a while and gives the player an extra 100 skill points, a nice deal. The problem is that, without the associated talent, the odds of success at any given specialty are (depending on the skill) 1 in 10 to (for pickpocketing) 1 in 100. If you don't start with the Dexterity/Nimble Fingers talent, it's nearly impossible to steal the Mischief/Sprite's Bracelet because the skill sets that can actually give you the talent are on the other continent, inaccessible until after Clik/Kurick is destroyed.

The Poker Face and Courage skills are pretty simple, IIRC they come with the Sensiblility/Sense skills you should already have purchased immediately and are relatively cheap to get to higher levels.

The real pain here (aside from restarting the game until you have the Dexterity/Nimble Fingers talent) and where my 3 hours of grinding came from is getting the scratch to buy a Thieve's Glove, they cost 40,000 Fol, a frankly ridiculous sum of money early in the game. I don't really know of any "fast" solutions, but relative to most, grinding in a specific spot I'll show later in the LP is probably your best bet, it's a mountain path west of Cross/Krosse.

After all that, there are 2 places in particular that you should never forget to pickpocket and these are ones that must be successful. The first is the Mischief/Sprite's Bracelet, as previously mentioned. The other is in Mars village, an item called the Treasure Chest/Goodie Box. One of a kind, this item will give 3 random items for free, why does this matter if you already have the Mischief, you ask? Simply because the Goodie Box draws from a much larger, much better pool of items. If you can wait on getting Claude a far-too-powerful sword until after the Lacour/Lacuer tournament of arms, there's only one or two different items you must save and reload until you get. The Sorcerer's Knuckles (+1000 attack, +200 magic, - 1/3 spell costs) for Rena are one of (if not the) best weapons for her and can be acquired via the Goodie Box. the other thing you may want to worry about getting is the Tri-Emblem, which is more useful in the original version because of the nice elemental defenses it offers which are largely stripped in Second Evolution.

Sorry for the wall of text, I didn't mean to turn this into a FAQ, but I can't help but want to explain these aspects, if further explanation is required and for whatever reason you'd rather here my scatterbrained attempts at explanation, feel free to ask.

In the PS1 version, the desert past the mountain path have monsters that drop Orichulum and Damascus. That stuff sells insanely high, so saving goes a lot faster if you get a bunch and sell them. The monsters aren't that hard to beat once you've been grinding in the mountain path for about 20-30 minutes (to my memory anyway, I might be wrong- but Claude alone can take out all of the fat worm-looking things without ever getting hit because they're so slow). Did they take that little tidbit out of Second Evolution? Or maybe I'm just too willing to spend hours and hours doing things that no sane person would do in a video game... like get Claude's Killer Moves or whatever to 999 uses as I get them. And restarting until my main character literally has a blank talent page, except Rena who always has the Mana thing.

Hm, is it too late to request demand something for later in the game like having one of Dias' Killer Moves permanently being Air Slash? Assuming you use him, that is.

There's a Skill you can buy early on that gives you money (and nothing else) every time you upgrade it. If you max it out, you will have earned a total of 100,000. I've only done this on the PSP version, but I discovered it in a FAQ for the PS1 version, so it should work the same way. Just have a character who you're not going to use later in the game max it out.

Bit late on that, process is done for both versions. I guess I should have explored beyond the mountain path but I was getting decent money there and didn't feel like putting effort into it when I could just grind without thinking while doing something marginally more interesting, good advice though. I personally prefer not to put so much in the way of skill points into it either. You have to monitor what that skill gives you anyway Rosencrantz, if its the skill I'm thinking of, you need to make sure it gives you at least to Mithrils before it maxes out or you have to wait a lot longer to get the Eternal Sphere.

Dias is likely to be a member of the fighting team more often then not. Air Slash for him is one of his best killer moves though, so the odds of just not using it are slim.

Apologies to Rosencrantz. He was right and I wrong. I had put together two skills in my mind. There is a skill that just drops items from a pool into your inventory, but it isn't the same as the skill that just gives a bunch of money.

Don't worry about it.

I've got a question: is Effort worth it? The skill itself just seems to give you experience points, but I heard that the ability it unlocks (forget the name) lets you get an EXP boost in battle. Is that worthwhile? How big of a boost can you get?

As I've outlined before, train and effort are worth it. I'll post it again here if you'd like. Also of note, the super specialty enlightenment is well worth it, it's associated with train and vastly increases the amount of skill points gained per level.

Comprehension can also lower the amount of SP earned per level. Unless the super specialty is high level (or I want to savescum) I leave it off.