Star Ocean The Second Story R: To estimate, based on my experience, I'd say you need to know about 6,000 words to fluently read this game in Spanish. Knowing far fewer words than that, I had to commute to the end of this game on the struggle bus. But I made it! I beat the game. My Spanish reading is noticeably improved.
I was obsessed with this game as a kid, and I was again obsessed with it as an adult. This game holds up for me, and the many Quality of Life additions go a long way. Although, I wouldn't recommend the game, as its appeal is likely quite niche. It's a strange hybrid of an action JRPG and a clicker game's "tech tree" progression. To boil it down, instead of only like 8 stats that level automatically, your characters have around an additional 50 supplementary stats that you must allocate level up points to manually, which then unlock and improve some 30 odd specialities, which you can actual engage in to affect the game.
This ranges from necessary prep work to plow through the game's difficulty spikes, to being able to break the game entirely. You can do things like become a millionaire, world-reknowned book publisher, automate grinding for XP, or picketpocket your own teammates for equipment that you then force them to wear. Why are you carrying around this amazing cuirass in your pockets intead of wearing it, Bruce!? We're due to fight another enormous fire-breathing salamander in 10 minutes, get your head out of your ass and in to the game, Bruce!!
I accidentally made one of my characters immortal and they were able to solo the most difficult super bosses in the game on the highest difficulty. I literally never saw his health bar decrease by a hair, not even a single time. I'm still uncertain of how that happened.
The post-game dungeon is the most well designed dungeon in the game, what the hell? Instead of the bog-standard, traditional hallways with monsters in it design that makes up the game's dungeons: this one has interesting one-off mechanics, cute puzzles and themed floors. Why would the devs have spent so much effort on the dungeon that will be seen by the least players? Also, this gigantic dungeon would have sucked balls with random encounters. I'm glad I didn't know this dungeon existed when I was a kid.
