Okay, so PSX support is coming to Bizhawk relatively soon, and I promised myself I would contribute everything I possibly could to a TAS of this game, whether it be one I do myself or one someone else starts. I absolutely adore Star Ocean 2, it's by far my favorite game and has been for well over half of my life, and I want to see it TASed more than anything else.
I'm trying to stop myself from absolutely flooding this OP with information (I'm already losing enough sleep as it is), so I'll sum up the game and its potential really quick: SO2 is an RPG with real-time battles that look incredible when done fast. The game can be broken in a number of various, easy ways, including getting the best weapon in the game halfway through the first disc. Random encounters can be skipped entirely and easily, enough so that it's done without any problems in console speedruns.
In lieu of flooding the OP with information, I'm instead flooding the rest of the thread with planning and information, which I'll link to in this first post:
Nico Boss TAS Analysis post 1: Alen-Tax, Azamgil, Harfainx
Nico Boss TAS Analysis post 2: Shin (3) and Synard
Useful items (with explanations and locations)
Radar item pool + Skill Set breakdowns
Here's all the bosses in Rena's story TASed on Nicovideo:
Link to video
Link to video
There are some problems with it, though, and I think a lot of the battles (if not all of them) can be improved. In a future
novel post, I'm going to deeply analyze each of these battles and explain exactly why I think that. For now, it's a good introduction to how the TAS will look. I will say two things right now, though: One of the bosses fought is optional and one of the fighters requires something like a 20-30 minute detour to recruit.
A few more quick notes that I can add horrifying amounts of detail to if needed:
*Rena's story is considered faster and is definitely a lot safer for RTA runs.
*The videos above were done on Universe difficulty, which is the hardest. This difficulty is not unlocked at the start: You need to collect about half of the voice samples in the game (off the top of my head, I wanna say you need around 600-650). To say the least, this may require an insanely long verification file if the hardest difficulty is to be used.
*The Japanese version is faster not just because of text, but because there's item creation involved in the route and item creation happens to be twice as fast in the Japanese version. Also, the voices aren't absolutely dreadful.
*The route may or may not be largely the same as the console route. A lot of testing and work needs to be done to figure out the RNG especially: It seems to only rarely advance when playing the game normally and only changes consistently upon saving and loading. Or at least that's how it was in tests I did a while back. On top of that, testing needs to be done to see which story truly is the faster one for a TAS, since it may be different under frame perfect conditions.
I'll be committing myself to this full time after DTC5, whether I do the run myself or with a team. Expect a boss TAS analysis post from me soon, and expect it to be long and rambly and over-informative.