Virtual 100 – Game 47
Man, it’s been a minute since I’ve added a game to the Virtual 100. I have had my droughts in the past, but for some reason, this one seems especially protracted. There are a few reasons for that though, but the big two are the main culprits. First, life has just been pretty nuts over the past few months as I tried to wrap up on a huge project that has been in the works for a while. On top of that, work has been crazy, as it usually is between October and January.
Second, the games that I chose to play next have really, really been dragging out. I have a few running concurrently as I usually do, and they just keep going. I really need to start playing some shorter games.
I’ve been working on Star Ocean: Second Story R and Tiny Tina’s Wonderland the most, and while Star Ocean has been a treat, I have really been struggling to get through Tiny Tina’s Wonderland. That’s going to be a fun read, I assure you.
But, since I was enjoying my time with Star Ocean so much (and the Steam Deck is perfect for games like that) I focused more of my time on that one, and I finally managed to watch the credits roll. It was probably a good thing that I played Second Story R shortly after completing First Departure R, though I will be honest I was hesitant.
When I first started playing Star Ocean: First Departure R, I didn’t realize I was essentially playing a port of a game that is almost two decades old. And the more I played that game, the more it really began to show its age, and I’m not talking about the graphics. There were many, many design choices that were kind of a staple of the genre at the time, but over the years there have been multiple quality of life improvements that, sure, maybe dumb down the genre a little bit, but also make them much more fun and accessible. First Departure R harkened back to the days when games came with booklets that had all the relevant information in them. They gave you the rundown of all the mundane shit so that the game didn’t have to do it.
But games these days don’t come with booklets. And they didn’t bother to insert the explanations that to booklets would have had. So there was a lot of information the game just didn’t give you, and absolutely no explanation on how any of the talents worked, what you needed to do to get them, or what they even did. It was all a big frustrating mystery.
Thankfully, Second Story R is a modern remake of the original sequel, and as such they addressed a lot of my gripes with the first one. Not all of them, but a lot. For starters, they got rid of the random battles, which holy shit made the game so much more enjoyable. The single biggest drain on my willpower was getting thrown into a fight literally every five steps. It was fucking painful. This time around, battles appear as dark blue (sometimes green or red) cloudy blobs with eyes that wander around on the map. Some of them will aggro on you if you get close enough, and touching one of them will initiate the fight. Orientation matters, and if you touch the blob while it’s facing away from you, you can initiate a “back attack.” The same will happen to you if you get caught from behind. What matters the most, though, is that it’s your choice when or if the fight happens in the first place. And that is a game-changer.
The fights themselves are another matter. They still fall into the exact same trap that had me pulling my hair out in First Departure R. The enemies will constantly attempt to flank and surround a character, trading hits that can interrupt attacks or movement and deplete a health bar pretty quickly. Even weak enemies can get the better of you if you get stuck in that trap— and if their attacks can cause Petrification or Paralysis, you’re screwed. Be prepared to spam that item list.
The big problem though, is that while the player character can escape these situations by avoiding the double-team, the party A.I. is not smart enough. I’ve never chewed through so many resurrection items in any RPG besides this Star Ocean series. Just like in First Departure R, my melee fighters were constantly getting KO’ed by random weak enemies, simply because they were constantly getting caught in the stun loop.
Thankfully, the party A.I. is vastly improved when it came to healing. My healer characters rarely hesitated to cast healing spells or remove status ailments when necessary. If anything, it was a challenge keeping their MP stocked because they burned through them so readily.
The game is gorgeous, and it’s pretty clear by this point that the mix of 2D and 3D graphics are the new thing. If it wasn’t obvious enough before the massive success of the Dragon Quest HD-2D remakes, this is going to be the new norm for modernized remakes of old JRPG’s. And to be honest, I’m surprised it took this long. If it weren’t for Octopath Traveler, who knows what we’d be playing right now.
The story is where the game kinda lost me. It pulled the classic “you think you know what’s going on” trope (which I will admit was novel at the time) and by Act III, the game attempts to subvert your expectations by completely changing the location and main antagonists. Or rather, the main antagonists are actually revealed. The problem is, it made the vast majority of the game that came before it completely irrelevant. Nothing that you have done up to that point really matters. On top of that, there is a Point of No Return that the game notifies you of, but— at least in my experience— doesn’t really express itself clearly enough. I could be wrong, but there was a point where I finally realized I was never going back to where I was before.
To be fair, the game does suggest wrapping up whatever you want to wrap up, BUT it does that once earlier in the game as well, when there is a lengthy stretch where you can’t really roam freely. The game is on rails for a pretty good stretch, and the game will prompt suggesting if you need to do anything (i.e. farm materials, buy new weapons, etc.). And it uses the phrase “for a while.” As in, “If you proceed, you won’t be able to return to this area for a while,” And I think at that time it was probably an hour before I was back to free-roam. The second time though, right before Act III, I could swear it said the same thing. So I thought, “Okay, I got what I need right now, I’m good.” But it was not good. Because I never went back. It is literally a Point of No Return.
As such, many characters were left un-recruited. I left a ton of PA’s (personal actions) on the map, and the four characters I had with me since the beginning of the game were the ones I ended with.
That said, it brings up another gripe with the PA’s. I realize that most of the characters in the game can be completely missed if you don’t go to the right place at the right time. The game does you solid by marking these on the map and noting whether they are timed or not. The problem is, several times I went to these towns, wandered aimlessly for a while, talking to everyone I could talk to, and did not activate a single PA.
The only optional character I found was Ashton. My party at the beginning of the game was Claude, Rena, Ashton, and Celine in my active party, with Bowman as a backup. And that was the party I ended with. Had I known I would not be able to return to the planet after a certain point, I might have put in more of an effort. Oh, I guess I did have Leon, but I left his ass at the village because he was borderline intolerable.
The specialty/talent system is still kind of irrelevant in this game as well. To be fair, the game does a little bit better of a job explaining how to use them this time around, with the guild giving you “guild missions” that are essentially tutorials and goals to get the player used to using these abilities, but the game still doesn’t do a very good job of explaining why you want to do these things. Sure, food gives you buffs. Customize lets you change weapons. But writing, music, and all those other ones just aren’t necessary. I still don’t know what most of that shit does and I beat the game just fine. The only ones I really got use out of were the Customization and Remake, but Customization got considerably less use, because this time around, rather than a “success” making a weapon better, it just makes it… different. Many times my successful customization resulted in a weapon that was worse than what I had— sometimes even worse than what the weapon was in the first place. As such, it was essentially useless, and the Remaking skill became infinitely more useful because it could replace a Factor with a different one. A Factor was essentially a buff, which could add a trait to a weapon to do something like add fire element, or cause a status effect on attack. If you had a weapon that didn’t have a factor, or did but it sucked, the Remaking ability could possibly give you a better one. The thing that really sucks about Remaking, though, is that it’s completely random. You have a little bit of control over what type of buff you’re aiming for, but the end result is completely hit-or-miss.
Even so, Remaking was essential to my completion of the game, because holy hell did the difficulty spike in that final dungeon. Up until that point, the game had been relatively easy. I’m never one to run away from a fight, and the battles were usually short enough where I wasn’t too put off by them (it helped that it was my decision whether to fight or not in the first place.) So I was usually fairly over-powered for wherever I was, and if I wasn’t, it didn’t take long to get there.
But the boss fights against the Ten Wise Men were well beyond anything that the game had prepared me for up to that point. And I get it; these guys were supposed to be the most powerful beings in the universe, but damn. The first time I fought each of them I got my ass handed to me because they were both more significantly more powerful than anything I had encountered to that point, and they usually had some form of debuff or status effect I had to prepare against. Every boss fight was a matter of swapping around accessories and armor to ward off as much as I could. The rest was just good ol’-fashioned grinding.
But it got to be so ridiculous toward the end that I almost gave up. The final boss, Gabriel, spams so many hard-hitting spells so fast that it’s difficult to heal against them. I was low-90’s in level when I got there, and when I looked online, most people were suggesting being at least 110. For someone who had fought every fight, no matter how optional, it was ridiculous that I was still coming up that short. Most of his spells could one-shot any of my characters, no matter what they were wearing. At about 30 hours in, I was done grinding. So it took a lot of tinkering and a very lucky Remaking result to finally defeat him.
When it was all said and done, I got an ending that took place “months later” where Claude and Rena end up together. Claude basically turns into his parents, leaving Rena at home for months at a time while he does his military thing. He says he hates leaving her alone, to which Rena replies that “she won’t be alone,” implying that she’s pregnant. Claude is happy, and they leave it at that.
Celine and Ashton also end up together, and she’s clothes shopping while Ashton forks over the cash. This was a weird one for me, because while the game played up the relationship between Claude and Rena like a high school drama, there wasn’t the slightest hint that Celine and Ashton had a thing. But when you fight side by side with someone and witness the near destruction of the universe, I guess you tend to kind of form a bond. They didn’t explain how that whole dynamic works though, with Ashton having two dragons growing out of his back, and I wanna know dammit.
Last, Bowman is back in his shop, and he gets a visit from the guy in town that finally deciphered the ancient book, and he has news for Bowman that he already knows (because he LIVED it.) And yeah, that’s pretty much it for him, because he wasn’t even kind of a main character.
The thing that really bugs me though, is that after the big turning point of the story, all of the little side-stories end. Characters who can be recruited into the party make cameo appearances. There are the little ones like the reporter chick who keeps popping up in little cut-scenes. And Welch (who I would have liked to recruit) running past when the player walks into a town for the first time.
But the biggest ‘what the fuck’ was with Dias. This guy plays a huge part in the first half of the game. He’s downright unavoidable. There’s this weird triangle between Claude, Rena, and Dias that plays out through the entire first two acts. The guy is a dickhead, and we even get a backstory on why he’s a dickhead, cut-scene and all. All of this leads up to him being a completely optional recruitable character, and worst of all— it’s completely missable!
I didn’t even know I was supposed to go after this guy until the Point of No Return (you know what, fuck it— SPOILER: The planet blows up.) After the planet blows up, Dias just dies with everybody else. All of that back-and-forth with him and Rena, and the little rivalry between him and Claude, is all for naught. It was completely pointless. Whatever his story was leading up to should have been mandatory, with the player ultimately making the decision if he comes or goes. But no, Dias walks off while Claude and the party have important shit to do. I’m sorry, I don’t have time for sulking when the land is under attack by an army of demons. And it all happens pretty close to the Point of No Return, so before I knew it, he was dee-diddly-done along with everyone else on Expel.
According to the internets, the game has a total of 99 possible endings. While these no doubt are just each party member’s various endings depending on relationship levels, there are a few things that don’t really get explained. Did Ronyx stay dead? (Oh, Spoiler: Ronyx dies when his ship is destroyed). Claude and Rena appear to be on a ship during their ending, but they don’t explain if it’s Ronyx’s ship or a different one. I can’t imagine why Claude would return to the Federation that ruined his life (remember, his mom was never around and his dad was kind of an asshole). Why not just stay on Expel with Rena? Why not push Ashton out of the way and have a threebie with Celine? These are questions that go unanswered.
I will be honest, I would be willing to give this game another go in the New Game Plus mode, but I have so, so many other games to get through, a lot of which are other JRPG’s. I still have about five other Ys games to play through, a couple of Tales Of games, a Final Fantasy, an Atelier, and probably a couple of others I can’t think of off the top of my head. Those alone could account for the next year or two of game time.
So for now, I’ll chalk this up as Number 47 in the Virtual 100. I’m getting closer to the big 5-0, and they might come in quick succession, because I’m nearing the ends of a few of the games I’ve been working on simultaneously. Plus, I really do need to bust out some of these shorter experiences. Which game will be next? Who knows, but I still have a feeling it will be Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. I’ll either complete it soon, or I will take the digital version I have, copy it to a disc, create a label for it, print out cover art, put it in a case, take it the back yard, and set it on fire. Just so I can watch it burn.
We’ll see!
