Star Ocean: Second Evolution for PSP Reviews by Gamers

SOSE represents the first Star Ocean game I've ever played. It was certainly an impressive introduction to the series, but at the same time it falls well short of perfection.

Let's start with the positives. Star Ocean has one of the expansive character customization systems I've ever seen. Every character can achieve up to ten ranks in literally dozens of skills that lead to specialties, which then further lead to Super Specialties. The usefulness of these skills/specialties varies heavily, but there is a certain entertainment value in increasing your character's Whistiling skill even if you're never going to need it.

SO's party development is equally impressive. It's possible to refuse every single party potential party member in the game except protagonists Claude and Rena. Don't like a character? Just tell them they can't come along and you'll never see them again.

Finishing up the positives is SO's "Private Action" system. This lets you take your main character into cities alone, leading to some interesting cutscenes and events that would not otherwise be possible.

And now for the negatives. First off, most of the voice acting in SO is downright awful. While Claude and Rena are usually passable, several other party characters and major NPCs were almost physically painful to listen to. There is no option to turn off voice acting.

The voice acting is certainly not helped by SO's convoluted mess of a story. The first half of the story is actually reasonably well-done, but it all ends up feeling pointless after a mid-game plot twist. The second half of the game feels like something ripped out of Scientology and features distractingly bad physics even for Sci-Fi, poor level design, and extremely little new plot/character development.

But in the end, these significant flaws are not enough to ruin the game. The battle system and the sheer amount of customization are more than enough to make up for lacking acting and writing abilities on the part of Square.