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Why Star Ocean 2 Fails to Sail into the Sunset

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Philip Bloom
STAFF EDITORIALIST

Tri-ace. A company known for making great, if flawed, games. Popular, action packed, eventful and filled with memorable personalities such as the completely awesome Ashton Anchors. They’ve built a lot of good games. Tonight, I’d like to delve into one of them... and go over why it fails.

I suppose that was guessed by the title, since it’s pretty obvious. Probably a lot of things are coming to mind about the game despite its fun battles and nifty hidden dungeon and all that. Some, rightfully, would say that it was the battles you couldn’t win that really was a dragging point. Nothing quite can be as frustrating as running into a battle you can’t avoid and realizing that you weren’t supposed to fight or win it OR lose it, but you were supposed to run around like chickens with your heads cut off for five minutes. Not fun, says I! But…that’s not its biggest stickling point, when you get down to it.

What about it’s flagging problems? Often it was fairly easy at times to miss a flag and get stuck such that you couldn’t proceed despite really knowing where to go. Always a pain, but many games had that. It brings them all down, but it also isn’t the staller of the game.

I got a good deal of friends that love Star Ocean 2 to pieces. They can quote every statistic in the game, as disturbing as I find that. They’ve beaten the game more times than they can count, some of them anyway. What they share though…is that none of them play the beginning of the game anymore. In fact I had a few people sit down recently to play it and they all screamed. The game may be fun...

But it suffers from a horrendously boring introduction. For the life of me, I’ve stopped there no less than five times myself when playing it, getting distracted and going to do something fun. Star Ocean 2 can be a very fun game but it also teaches an important lesson. Don’t make your gamers suffer for their fun. Don’t bury them in un-skip-able boring blocks of background text every time they try and start your game or you just make sure that they’ll never replay it, assuming they don’t put it down the first time through. No matter how awesome Ashton Anchors is when staring at a barrel...