Star Ocean: The Second Story is a remake of the 1998 second entry in the space-focused role-playing universe of Star Ocean, but despite its many improvements, the basic design of the original game remains almost entirely intact. It features dual protagonists, one of which you must choose as your main character at the beginning of the playthrough. If you’re wondering which one you should pick first, we’ll give you some information below without going too far into spoiler territory.
Should you choose Claude or Rayna first?
Regardless of whether you choose Claude or Rena for your playthrough Star Ocean: The Second Story, the main story of the game will remain the same from beginning to end. However, both characters will see many key events from their own perspectives, giving you some additional insight into how they feel about what’s happening. Additionally, each of them will have access to a specific recruitable character. This means that if you want to see the full story of the two recruitable characters and see what they bring to the table in battle you will have to play the game twice.
Here are three key things to keep in mind when choosing a character for your first playthrough:
- Cloud offers a fuller view of the narrative and will fill in more gaps in the main story, while Rena provides a little more information about the planet and local events.
- Claude is significantly more powerful in combat, focusing on offensive melee, while Ren focuses largely on healing and other magic.
- Ren’s unique recruitable character is arguably superior to Cloud’s playability and is largely considered the strongest character in the game.
Keeping all this in mind our opinion is this Claude makes the best character for early play Their clear approach to the story and overall combat abilities made the first half of the game a little easier. However, if you are biased towards the idea of getting the strongest character in the game or have already seen the role of Cloud, then Rena is also a perfectly viable option. Either way, there are over 80 endings in the game, so there’s plenty of incentive to play the game multiple times with both characters.