Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I have just started Star Ocean 2 on PSP, it is confusing trying to figure out what is going on as nothing has been explained so far at all in terms of the different systems going on.
taiyang@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The skills system really calls out for a guide, it’s really easy to misallocate points early game. Or at least that’s my understanding; I did SO1 on PSP recently but uses the same system more or less and you can make life a lot easier with proper planning.
The recent remaster supposedly has better documentation, although I’m not sure I like it better.
theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I went in wanting to play as blind as possible but after being thrown into combat with no tutorial what so ever and then absolutely no explanation of what anything is, skills, specials skills, skills sets etc etc I started doing some cursory searching. Then everyone is screaming about levelling determination fully first and so I had to go down a rabbit hole just to find out where to get that because everyone spoke as if you had it from the start, which you don’t.
Even the guides for this game aren’t super helpful to someone that has zero background knowledge on the game at all. I’m still not sure if I actually want to delve as deep into it as it seems is necessary but I’m going to out a few more hours in and try to not fuck up my characters in that time and see how well it clicks.
I heard the first one is even more painful! How did you find it?
taiyang@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I managed, but I’m a glutton for punishment. In the first one you can kind of go guideless as long as you know a few fundamentals: determination is most important as it gives more skill points and easily pays for itself - by endgame you easily have everything capped. Certain combinations of skills also become game breakers, like being able to duplicate items or pumping up exp gains, etc, but the game isn’t that hard and if you want to do everything you have to run multiple times anyway. That holds especially true in SO2, apparently.
On that note, SO games use divergent path storylines but rather than being a “choose a faction” or something, it’s dependent on party members. In SO1, it’s basically three ways things pan out for certain arcs depending on who you recruited, with some members required for others. Luckily there was a flowchart, so blind-ish runs can sorta use that without blatant spoilers. It gets kind of interesting because certain mutually exclusive characters are related in unpredictable ways, so multiple playthroughs kinda reveal more depth… at least as far as a game originally made for SNES can be.
Luckily the game isn’t that long so it wasn’t much of a chore to do multiple playthroughs, especially with fast forward functions of ppsspp emulator. Doing it on original hardware might have been more of a chore, though.
theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I am also to some degree but I think I went into this with different expectations, not expecting punishment and so therefore I was taken aback.
Thanks for the tips, I have read you can break the game within a few hours but that isnt what I’m really looking to do so I’m going to try and use a guide as little as possible and just look up specific points I need clarifying.
Apparently I inadvertently chose the more difficult character but the storyline differences does seem interesting. I’ll see how well the game clicks over some more time!