I was trying to fully drain my phone battery so I randomly found this tier-list review of Star Ocean First Departure characters. When the guy said "We'll start with the sh*t tier: Ronyx" I burst out laughing. Ilia and Claude (in the SO2R tier list) are both top of the top tier, obviously. "Mom, Dad's dragging us down!!"
(The added irony is that Ronyx/Ronixis is the most lauded one in the in-game universe. Whatever, Dad)
Me: I have lots of creative projects to get to today!
Me: *writes a whole thesis about why family is the most important relationship in Star Ocean 2 with 3 more mini-essays interspersed*
(In fairness, it was sitting at 80% completion in my pillowfort drafts for a while now and I was tired of seeing it floating around there)
This has been sitting in my drafts for a while, and at last I've gotten around to cleaning it up! It's a light thesis of a thought I've had about Star Ocean The Second Story (Star Ocean 2/SO2)'s story for many years. I also included a few bonus mini-theses, as well!Of course there are story spoilers under the cuts.As an experience, Star Ocean 2 is very much about character relationships. It's core to the gameplay and the game's overall appeal. This is easily seen through the PA system and the huge number of possible endings focused on how your playable characters can be paired off, depending on how you've built up their relationships over time (or not). Essentially, any playable character can have an ending with any other playable character, aside from the ones who can't be recruited together.When it comes to the main narrative's most important relationships, I'd venture that a lot of people might immediately think of 1) a relationship between the protagonists Claude and Rena, and/or 2) the Claude-Rena-Dias relationship (a very story-important dynamic that often gets mistaken as a rivalry or love triangle. I've debunked it previously here if you scroll down to "Appendix A: Debunking common misconceptions about the relationship between Dias, Claude, Rena" lol.)But I would argue that the most powerful relationships in Star Ocean 2 are not any kind of romantic love. Instead, family is actually the main theme and driving force behind the key relationships and conflicts throughout Star Ocean 2.The marketing for the game in Japanese calls it 愛と勇気のRPG, literally "the RPG of love and courage". This was present in promos for the original 1998 release (a quick search for "スターオーシャンセカンドストーリー 1998" easily turns up old ads and auctions of posters with the phrase plastered all over artwork of the characters), and the SO2R remake marketing reuses it. I don't think it appears in the North American marketing, which would make sense because "RPG of love and courage" sounds amusingly fluffy and generic in English. But I find the two-part idea of "love and courage" actually works quite well to summarize the two parts of "family theme as driving force". Think of "love" as the bonds of family and its resulting burdens (so to speak), and "courage" as being brave enough, or having the will, to redefine/recontextualize the bond in a way that is productive instead of destructive.This permeates the story in several ways. When you start looking you'll find a lot of relationships in SO2 that demonstrate the theme. Here I'll focus on the four main manifestations that I feel are key to the central narrative: three parent-child relationships and one sibling relationship. They are: Claude's story; Rena's story; Dias' story (very important because he's essentially the second deuteragonist - deuteragonist in a situation where you consider Claude and Rena as sharing the protagonist role, or a tritagonist); and the truth behind the game's actual antagonists, the Ten Wise Men.Claude's key relationship [READ-MORE]Father and son. Super obvious. I don't think anyone would disagree that it's the whole point of Claude's story; they really beat you over the head with it. Claude's father, a war hero, is so famous and so influential on the direction of Claude's entire life that he's never felt like a real person allowed to make decisions of his own. He even compares himself to a puppet at the very beginning of his story. It's made clear that this isn't malicious on his father's part, and that Claude respects and cares for his father, but the overbearing influence is something he's struggled with all his life. All of Claude's visions in the Four Fields are focused on this relationship, with the Field of Love being the most difficult.The tragedy of Claude's story is that just as he begins to finally find his own footing and be confident that he's doing what he truly wants, he loses his father in a way where he feels personally responsible for it. So in a sense he can never truly be free of his father's shadow. Ultimately he becomes his own person by choosing to take the direction that his father also wished for him, and finding his own success instead of wallowing in the idea that he was forced into it. This is love as a difficult relationship between father and son, and courage to accept the legacy of his father as he forges his own path.Mini side essay: Claude's story always really resonated with me personally. While the trappings of his background and the SO2 world are super Western Star Trek-inspired, his story is actually a very familiar Asian inter-familial "child being pushed to live up to parents' expectations/wishes" conflict, and very true for immigrants as well. If I say to you "Your career options are: doctor or lawyer!" and your immediate reaction is "Oof that hit too close to home" you know what I'm talking about.[/READ-MORE]Rena's key relationship [READ-MORE]Mother and daughter. Her desire to make a connection with her real mother is her true reason for going on the journey with Claude at the beginning of the game. She tells Claude that she yearns to understand who she is, where she comes from, and why she's different. She says that finding her birth mother doesn't mean she's going to abandon her adoptive mother Westa, the only one she's ever known and loved. It means that she'll be able to return as a whole person. It just so happens of course that her origins are all tied to the mess of what's happening with the mysterious Sorcery Globe, and ultimately - along with her birth mother's work - also connected to the ability to stop the antagonists and save the universe. Though it turns out that Rena's birth mother, Rhima, actually died a long time ago, Rena's story ends very positively. She returns with answers to all of her questions, and she knows that it was her birth mother's love for her that made her survival and everything else possible. This is love as her relationship with both of her mothers, and courage to confront the past and move on with a clear understanding of the support she had/has from both her blood and adoptive family.Mini side essay: Rena to me is the true protagonist of Star Ocean 2's story. It's obvious the Hero of Light is a symbol for Claude's story, but Rena is instrumental to everything. All the key events of SO2 wouldn't have been possible without her, her powers, her necklace left to her by her Rhima, her entire background. Claude's just an incidental bystander who got caught up in it but took actions to become consequential (which as explained earlier is the point of his story, to make his own decisions and find his own way).[/READ-MORE]Dias' key relationship[READ-MORE]Brother and sister. The killing of Dias' family drove him to seek strength, making him a self-isolating lone wolf of a master swordsman. While technically his entire family is involved, the main expression of the theme in his story is through his connection with his little sister Cecille, passed onto/continued with his surrogate little sister Rena (since she was best friends with Cecille and the three of them grew up together as if they were family). While he remains close to Rena, he largely avoids relationships with others. But after he sees how Claude repeatedly throws everything he has into trying to help people, he realizes strength is meaningless if you can't protect people you care about... and that he's been fighting alone for so long now that he doesn't know if he has the instincts to actually protect anyone.Dias' story turns out slightly differently depending on your protagonist, since he's recruitable for Rena but not for Claude. But in either case, he ends up finding some kind of peace, either through being willing to try letting people back into his life again (joining the party), or being willing to reach out to someone else to help care for the family he still has (asking Claude to protect Rena). For his story, it's love as his loss of his beloved family, and courage to finally open his heart to others - and if we assume his joining the party is the true canonical approach, not letting the loss of his family define his life through isolation.Mini side essay: As mentioned, gameplay wise, Dias is only recruitable in Rena's story. But from a storytelling perspective, he's actually far less important to Rena than he is to Claude. Rena doesn't need Dias at all to progress in her search for her mother and come to terms with her own identity. But Claude absolutely needs Dias to progress in his personal conflict with his father and be able to find his worth as himself. Two of the most important points of Claude's story are 1) when Dias tells him he did a good job at the Tournament of Arms (continued if you pick up Dias' gift to Claude after the tournament, made a million times more obvious since that gift becomes Claude's ultimate weapon) and 2) when Dias deems him good enough to be able to protect Rena. Which makes the Mars Village dialogue, where Claude says they don't need Dias and Rena saying she does, kind of funny since from a meta-perspective it's actually the other way around. So Rena's relationship with Dias is actually what pulls him into Claude's story, and then Dias' presence propels and furthers Claude's story in a way that it doesn't for Rena… which makes Dias' comment at the Front Lines about 'somebody' [Rena] constantly bringing them together can actually be seen as a rather enlightened fourth-wall breaking comment. Hahaha.[/READ-MORE]The truth behind the Sorcery Globe[READ-MORE]The Ten Wise Men's key relationship: Father and daughter. The entire reason we're here a bajillion years later trying to save the universe is because Dr. Lantis went bananas after losing his daughter. Her death drove him to reprogram the Ten Wise Men and upload his own consciousness into one of them, with the goal of destroying the universe because everything was meaningless to him without her. This is love of parent for child, and courage gone completely wrong as it turned into a terrible obsession that almost destroyed all of existence.[/READ-MORE]In conclusion: Star Ocean 2 is a story about how the bonds of family can deeply define who you are and influence what you do in both positive/productive and negative/destructive ways, and it's up to you to transform it into something that helps, instead of hinders!
I can't calculate her Chinese zodiac sign because it takes more math than I have the brain/processing power for to calculate for 699,997,563 B.C.
Based on this:
Ernest (SD 331 / 2417 CE) is an ox
Bowman (SD 339 / 2425) a rooster
Dias (SD 341 / 2427) is a pig
Noel (SD 342 / 2428) is a rat
Celine and Opera (SD 343 / 2429) are ox
Chisato (SD 344 / 2430) is a tiger
Ashton (SD 346 / 2432) is a dragon
Claude (SD 347 / 2433) is a snake, but he's born so close to the end of January that he could actually be the tail of a dragon
Precis (SD 350 / 2436) is a monkey
Leon (SD 354 / 2440) is a rat
Me: *seeing all the Chinese zodiac horoscope articles floating around with Lunar New Year coming up*
My brain: Hey, let's calculate the SO2 characters' Chinese zodiac signs! We can do it since they have actual years in their birth dates that can be converted into our years!
This is based on the Star Ocean timeline shown here: https://starocean.fandom.com/wiki/Series_timeline#2087_A.D._/_S.D._1
Where Space Date 1 = our year of 2087
(Disclaimer: I am bad at math, do not expect accuracy)
The following is a chronological list of events that take place in the universe of the Star Ocean series. History is divided into the anno Domini dating system (B.C and A.D.) and the Space Date method (S.D.) which was adopted by the Pangalactic Federation on the four year anniversary of the development of subspace technology. It also lists the events of Universe-2 and 4D Space, which are both separate dimensions from the Eternal Sphere. In Fourth-Dimensional Space, Luther Lansfeld develops...
To this day, when I hear the audio of PS1 Claude going "uh oh!" this is what immediately forms in my mind's eye.
(Thank you htps://www.spriters-resource.com/ for your service all these years)
Stumbled on this video where a genius took the scene from the Star Ocean EX anime of Dias fighting Claude in the forest (note: this doesn't happen in the game, the anime went rogue in a lot of places, often baffling but sometimes inspired), dubbing over it with the original PS1 English battle lines. I laughed so now I share it with you.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the audio quality, by the way. That's exactly how they sounded on PS1.
Happy birthday to my dear Pangalactic Federation ensign Claude C. Kenni from Star Ocean 2~! Today I posted the end-scene for If/Then, a fic I first started writing in 2005. I cannot believe I got here after 21 years, hahaha.
Claude is 19, so It's officially older than Claude 😂 (Technically Claude is something like minus 388 since he's not born yet according to the series space date, but details. Also, don't trust my math.)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/55955350/chapters/142097458
A tiny tour of the Project LHIA (Little House In Arlia) log cabin so far! Everything is so wee and cute. I'm very happy with the progress - I never thought I'd be able to make miniatures at this scale, much less Dias and Claude's favourite dishes and even their boots. More silly doodles and lots of photos in the post!
maiji
Kewlio: gideo vames?!