I played the original on the PS1.

Star Ocean, for those of you that have not played it, heavily borrows from Star Trek. The first game may as well have been called "The City on the Edge of Forever: The Game." So, if you like Star Trek, you'll probably enjoy the story.

SO1's killer feature was it was the first offline computer RPG that had a crafting system, which was so new at the time that the developers called it "item creation." SO2 also has crafting, and it's greatly expanded from the first game. I especially enjoyed playing the Iron Chef mini-game you unlock later on.

The big problem in the original SO2 was the terrible English voice acting + the bad English audio engineering that made the terrible voice acting sound even worse. I don't understand how they took some talented VAs and made them sound both talentless and terrible. I really hope they re-record all the voices from scratch if the remake gets an English localization.

The other big problem was the fire-breathing monsters that could corner and one-shot all your party members in combat, but they fixed that problem in later SO games, so I hope they fix that as well in this remake.