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There are lots of things your characters can get up to in Star Ocean: The Second Story R. Straying from the main storyline for a bit and exploring all the different skills you can acquire reveals many avenues for becoming stronger, manipulating the world around you, and shoring up tons of money.
Star Ocean: The Second Story R – How To Get New Talents
Talents will make your item creation efforts and specialty experimentation more successful in Star Ocean: The Second Story R.
Publishing is an odd skill that you can unlock once enough of your party becomes skilled in the art of writing, and it’s a very useful tool for those hoping to encourage certain character endings or repair broken relationships.
How To Unlock Publication
Publication is a Super Specialty, which means to unlock it, you’ll need to have two characters with four levels in a skill, and one character with one level in a separate skill. For Publication, you’ll need two characters with four levels in Writing and one character with a level in Machinist.
Your Publication level is determined by the sum total Writing levels
of your entire party, so if you want better results, improve your characters’ Writing skill.
You can also gain a bonus to your Publication by acquiring the
Word Processor
key item, which is available through the
Machinist
Specialty when creating Support Items.
Publication allows you to write books – there are two possible books for each character, with the second book requiring a far higher Publication level to reliably produce. When used on a character, these books will set a character’s relationship to either 16 (two full hearts) or 28 (three and a half hearts) with the character that the book is written by.
How To Publish Books
While these books are easy to acquire with a solid source of Fountain Pens, you can also get them published and out in the world! To do this, you’ll need to produce books using the Super Specialty and then sell them to a publisher NPC:
- In the first half of the game, this is an NPC to the right of the entrance to Lacuer City.
- In the second half of the game, once Lacuer is no longer accessible, the publisher you need is found in The Centropolis of Nede, inside the City Hall building.
Books that you have published will be available to purchase from the publisher’s shop in Lacuer, ensuring that you don’t need to create them each time you want to alter relationship values. However, while there is a publisher, there is no publisher shop on Energy Nede once you reach that stage of the game, so you’ll have to create more books instead.
After a period of time has passed after publishing books,
return to the publisher, and you’ll be able to pick up royalties
. These can rack up very quickly and are a wonderfully convenient and easy way to amass a ton of Fol.
