I finished Star Ocean 2 R!
Took around 45 hours and that was with doing all the side content available throughout the story and the post-game content (check out the EXP gains I was getting there)
So overall I would say I enjoyed this game a bit more than SO Divine Force. Story was still eh but at least I did feel Rena was a good character (my chosen protagonist) and there was an interesting backstory hidden away for you to discover on your own in the endgame section. On SO6 I was struggling fierce to pay attention on cutscenes. One problem is that none of the party characters besides Rena and Claude are interesting, and that’s probably to blame on every character but them 2 being optional.
I already posted before about how nice this game looks but I’ll just repeat it again that I really enjoyed the visuals. Never played the original but yeah Gemdrops did very well glowing this game up.
For the character-building RPG stuff, I liked it a lot more than SO6. Felt more streamlined and easier to understand here. I still didn’t really bother with the crafting and all that till the post-game, but I’ll tell you now that it absolutely breaks the game in half. So I just had fun playing through the game like normal and then beating the shit out of it for the post-game.
So yeah, great 8.5/10 game, hope it’s on the shortlist of Square games to come to Xbox so more people can play it.
BTW as you can tell from my screenshots I played through it in JP because why not. Surprisingly easy, picked up maybe like 30 new words total from it lol. I talked to every NPC too. I was able to understand all those hidden logs and stuff at the end of the game no problem as well. Really happy with my progress on this throughout this year, callback to this post where it took me 5 hours to get to Heliodor on DQXI (which I dropped out of boredom not long after this post, already 100%ed on Switch before it was on Xbox, may go back at some point on Xbox for the achievements now that the game is 100% baby-tier for me) and now I’m playing through JRPGs practically at the same pace as I do with English text