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Claude and his friends fight armored foes in “Star Ocean: Second Evolution.”

As the release of the prequel “Star Ocean: The Last Hope” draws near, Square Enix continues its revival of the series with “Star Ocean: Second Evolution,” an enhanced re-release of the second game, which was the first released in the United States.

The game hasn’t seen nearly the overhaul that the recent American debut of “Star Ocean: First Departure” was given, but it didn’t need one.

The game play is very similar to “First Departure.” The semi-real-time battle system, the skills, specialties and super-specialties, the symbology magic, the item creation and private actions in towns – in which characters wander off and tend to their own affairs instead of staying in a group – are all present. Gamers who liked the first game will find much to enjoy here while those who didn’t, won’t.

But “Second Evolution” has gained voice acting in place of the plain text that accompanies its lengthy exposition sequences. And in addition to the video already in the game, some new animated segments, playable characters and other goodies have been added.

The story picks up 20 years after “First Departure,” with the Earth Federation’s Ronyx Kenny (a hero of the first game) supervising his son Claude, a Federation ensign, on his first planetary mission. As Claude is investigating a strange energy field, he’s suddenly transported to a different planet, one unknown to him or the father and shipmates he left behind.

Awakening in a forest, he quickly rescues a local girl named Rena from an ape monster, and with her begins to figure out this new world and his place in it while he hopes for a rescue.

Actually, that’s just one way to play the game; “Second Evolution” offers the choice of Claude or Rena as the main character at the outset, though both choices have them journey together.

Events are largely the same from both perspectives, but players will see different aspects of them unfold.

Choose Rena and the beginning of the tale is quite different, as the events above are not seen. Instead, Claude simply arrives to save the day, and she takes him for a prophesied warrior who wields a Sword of Light and will save the world from the mysterious Sorcery Globe that is wreaking havoc across the land.

Another early scene involves Rena being kidnapped by a deranged suitor. Playing as Claude allows the player to break through to where she’s being held, while playing as Rena follows her adventures leading up to the moment Claude arrives.

The story isn’t the only thing that varies between the two characters. Certain allies can only be gained if one or the other characters is chosen, and other characters are exclusive of each other.

A warrior surveys the action on the Pelennor Fields in “Lord of the Rings: Conquest.”

Pandemic, the developer behind the “Star Wars: Battlefront” games, tries its hand here at applying the same formula to Peter Jackson’s films of the J.R.R. Tolkien classic fantasy trilogy.

Experienced “Battlefront” players will find immediate similarities here, from the control-point-centric game play to the option of controlling powerful hero characters when the right conditions are met.

But most of the time, players will be in charge of one of the four main character classes, the same ones for both good and evil sides.

The Mage class stretches the fiction a bit (magic users are exceedingly rare in Tolkien’s world). Even so, the collection of character types is rather thin. The heroes, such as Aragorn or Saruman, tend to be pumped-up versions of the class they most resemble, though their moves come with more variety.

Each class is useful and has an array of unique skills. The Warrior can employ powerful sword attacks and activate mystical flames on his blade (stretching the fiction, again). The Scout can turn invisible and then kill foes with a single hit, among other tricks.

The Mage tosses lightning bolts, heals comrades, employs magical blasts and flames, and can raise a defensive shield. And the Archer can use special explosive or poisonous arrows on foes.

The game’s campaign mode suffers from the same problems as those in the “Battlefront” games – without human opponents, games designed for online play don’t hold up very well. There’s a good campaign, which roughly follows the events of the movies (with some embellishment), and an evil campaign, which is locked until the good one is completed, and follows events as they might be if Sauron had regained his ring of power and used it to sweep across Middle-earth from Osgiliath to the Shire.

It’s interesting to run around virtual scale models of portions of Gondor, the Mines of Moria, Helm’s Deep and so on, but the standard character models are rather plain. Some of the heroes, such as Sauron himself, look great as they tower above the common fighters; others, like Aragorn, don’t impress so much.

The online modes are standard kinds such as team deathmatch; conquest, in which control points must be captured and held; and two versions of capture the flag. Sixteen players may battle at once, which is on the low end of the standard for multiplayer games these days.

The graphics are decent but not exceptional, and much of the audio is taken from the movies themselves, so the game sounds authentic.

Picks and Pans

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

3 stars

Unlike the “Mario”-like adventures of “Banjo-Kazooie’s” past, “Nuts & Bolts” has the title duo tool around on player-customized vehicles for the most part, though they can still get out of their cars and jump around a bit, and swing a wrench to attack.

The wrench can also be used to pick up items and carry them around.

The many challenges that face the duo in the game’s new set of worlds largely revolve around driving. The challenges are pretty simple – win a race, reach a point before time runs out, drag those smoking lava rocks into the water before they can stink up the air – and swiftly completed.

Each has several levels of reward, and trying to beat each one in the best way provides much of the game’s replay value.

Some things remain the same – the pair is still working to collect jigsaw pieces that open up further areas of the game, and they’re still set against the evil witch Gruntilda, or what’s left of her.

Microsoft Xbox 360; $59.99 Age rating: 10-plus

Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories

2 1/2 stars

“Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories” is a remake of the Game Boy Advance game that bridged the gap between the two main “Kingdom Hearts” games, the series that combines the Square Enix and Disney universes.

The GBA version was a 2-D adventure – this edition was made using the same 3-D engine as the other games. It works well. The GBA game’s isometric perspective translates well into three dimensions, and the card-based combat system is fully intact, though it may confuse players who pick up the game expecting the series’ usual hack-and-slash fighting.

The entire game revolves around cards – they’re used to open doors and determine what’s on the other side, and they govern every aspect of combat. It’s an easy-to-grasp system with interesting complexities.

Sony PlayStation 2; $29.99

Age rating: 10-plus

Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse

3 1/2 stars

The game-play is old-school “Castlevania,” challenging and unforgiving, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still fun. Players are given frequent choices to take one path or another before a stage. Different levels offer different rewards – and different routes lead to different companions.

Nintendo Wii (Virtual Console download); $5 (500 Nintendo Points)

Age rating: Everyone

– Justin Hoeger

The hero battles a group of enemies in the role-playing game “Star Ocean: The First Departure.”

“Star Ocean” is a Japanese RPG series whose first game wasn’t released in the United States until now. And now that it’s here, it stands as one of the better role-playing games on the PSP.

“Star Ocean: The Second Story” was the series’ debut in America; “Star Ocean: First Departure” is a remake of the original Super Nintendo game, which is set 20 years before “The Second Story.”

But that’s getting ahead of things. The game begins on the planet Roak, a relatively primitive world whose inhabitants appear mostly human, except for the tails and pointy ears.

Roak seems peaceful – one of the game’s young heroes, Roddick, even laments the boredom to be had even as a member of the defense force for the town of Kratus.

Roddick and his friends Millie and Dorne find more excitement than they bargained for when they encounter two strange beings who appear in a flash of light. These beings turn out to be Ronyx Kenny and Ilia Silvestri, humans from Earth who belong to a “Star Trek” Federation-like alliance that has a policy of noninterference with undeveloped worlds.

But Ronyx and Ilia are bending the rules because a petrifying contagion sweeping through Roak was introduced by a rival faction of humans.

They offer to help, and the group soon learns that the origins of this disease and its cure lie in Roak’s past, and so they head to an ancient time gate to travel back and wrest the cure from the body of a legendary evil. But they have to leave behind their advanced equipment, and then something goes awry in the time trip.

Other “Star Ocean” games have had a similar mix of futuristic high technology with common fantasy tropes such as monsters and magic (called symbology here). It’s a combination that has served the series well.

Battles are played out in real time. The player can have up to four characters in the party and can switch control between them at will. When controlling a character, the player can hammer on the X button to keep up a series of combo attacks, use the shoulder buttons to execute pre-chosen special attacks or pause the action to select items and magic. The fighting is fast-paced and can be pretty tough.

The overhaul “First Departure” has received is considerable. The graphics are the most obvious improvement: Where the original game had sprite artwork, here the characters and monsters are redrawn in high resolution, and pre-rendered backdrops take the place of the old tile-based locations.

The Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria

3 stars

“Persona 4″ is a heck of a lot like “Persona 3,” for better or worse.

Players who liked that game’s randomly generated dungeons and virtual-socializing aspects will find more of those to enjoy here, while players who didn’t won’t find much to interest them this time around.

But for newcomers, there’s a lot of potential here. (It’s also worth noting that years after the PS2 was rendered technologically obsolete, great games are still being released for it, even if this is likely among the last of them.)

As its predecessor did, “Persona 4″ revolves around a group of students at a Japanese high school. But unlike “Persona 3’s” secret campus group dedicated to exploring the great labyrinth that rose from the campus each night, these kids have no idea what they’re about to get sucked into.

And they really are sucked into it: While watching TV one rainy night for a glimpse of the rumored Midnight Channel, the player-named protagonist sees a strange image and then nearly gets pulled through the screen to another world.

Finding out the next day that his friends at school saw the same images, he experiments with a larger television at a department store, and this time he and his friends Yosuke and Chie fall through the screen into a strange, foggy world inhabited by a bizarre hollow clown-bear creature and the series’ perennial monsters, the Shadows.

The hero and his friends decide to continue entering the Midnight Channel after they find a link to a series of local murders and vow to end them. And the way they survive against the Shadows is with the power of Persona.

Most characters have only one Persona, which increases in strength over time. The hero can have many – new ones can be found through battle or be born from the combination of multiple Personas – and can switch between them at will.

The battle system places emphasis on exploiting enemies’ weaknesses so that they’re stunned and left open to more attacks, but Shadows can play the same game. Enemies are encountered throughout the game’s randomly generated dungeons, which fit a theme according to the person the heroes are trying to save from death.

The game has a long, slow ramp-up to all this good stuff – too long. It can take an hour or more after starting the game before a player is finally given a few proper battles to fight, and even longer before he or she is allowed to explore dungeon levels or choose destinations during the day. The game is very talky and demands patience, but it’s interesting and fun enough to be worth the trouble.

Teenagers explore a dangerous world inside the Midnight Channel of a big-screen TV in “Persona 4.”