Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Every series has that little portable kid sibling that, for whatever reason, never quite
made it out of the parents’ basement and has been languishing in obscurity and drinking
all the milk right from the carton, the shmuck. It’s Atomic Punk, or it’s Harvest Moon
GB, or it’s the planet-laden Mega Man V. (That was a Roman Numeral, even if you didn’t
hear me inflect it as such.) But usually these are stand-alone games that don’t really
muck up the original canon by trying to be direct sequels. Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, now
the only Star Ocean game not released in the west, mucks up the perfectly sensible four-to-eight
endings of Star Ocean: the Second Story (whichever you actually saw) and brings the gang back
together for one last Game Boy Color romp through SPACE.
Or so it would seem, until your crew crash-lands on a seemingly undeveloped planet... the same
planet Earnest and Opera crashed on, funny enough. As you go to find the lovebirds with
six eyes between ‘em, you meander through ruins, around towns, through the forests...
in a freakin’ RIDE ARMOR? Honestly, Precis? Whatever happened to that Prime Directive
Cough I Mean Underdeveloped Planet Protection Pact? You banking on the fact that your craft
crashed close enough to the outskirts of town that the jig is up already? I’m sorry, I
couldn’t make out your response, as you seem to be trying to jam highly-condensed
kanji into a font that can’t really handle it. That’s a pain to make out, even run
through a Super Game Boy, and it’s no better on the small small screen.
That said, this is a Star Ocean game, so despite some rather suspect plot considerations and/or
a difficult time making out exactly what ideographic character that’s supposed to be, there is,
in fact, some pretty cool RPG-style gameplay. Your party is reduced to 3 for this outing,
though you’ve got pretty much the entire cast of SO2 to choose from - save the missing
Earnest and Opera, of course, and Claude and Rena, who have better things to do. Each enemy’s
limbs and vital areas are tracked separately, and while some of the combat can become enmired
in faulty collision detection, it’s a pretty healthy attempt to boil the realtime action
of the console series down a bit, using a similarly detailed and true-to-form skill
system. If only the Star Ocean series hadn’t... well, I’m not going to go down that road.
There’s a reason Second Story is the one everyone likes, and this cute little Side
Second Story is certainly an interesting diversion. Especially if you like making your eyes hurt.