*Please remember to comment/rate and let me know what you think. Thanks!*

This part is mostly just cutscenes/dialogue, so not much to discuss in terms of strategy.

I will recommend restarting/reloading to get/not get certain Talents on Rena and Claude. You'll get a nice head start before Lacour if Claude doesn't have Sense of Design, and Rena doesn't have Sense of Taste, as those Talents are easy enough to unlock, and only require skills available on the Cross continent.

In addition, having your main character start with Dexterity will allow you to pickpocket a unique accessory in Clik (there are some other good accessories you can steal in Clik, as well, but you can get those with another character, if need be). It's not absolutely necessary, but you can get some decent items from it.

Now, neither Rena nor Claude's Talents were as I wanted them, but rather than take extra time here restarting/reloading until I got what I wanted, I prepared a save beforehand where I have them (as well as Celine) set up as I want them. I'll keep playing on this file normally, then switch over to the pre-prepared save when I reach that point.

Finally, I'll also say that I think Rena has a lot of little advantages in her scenario over Claude's, such that I'd recommend hers over his, especially on Universe. As far as this part is concerned, the main advantage would be in the "resetting/reloading for certain Talents" aspect.

As far as your main character is concerned, there isn't a huge disparity either way. Rena's opening cutscene is a bit shorter than Claude's (meaning you can access the status screen faster), and Rena has a slightly better chance at starting with Dexterity, but she also has a significantly higher chance of starting with Sense of Taste than Claude does Sense of Design.

However, in terms of reloading for the 2nd character's Talents, Rena's scenario definitely has an edge, both in terms of time taken to get from the 1st save point to being able to view the 2nd character's status screen, and in the fact that--again--Rena has a much higher chance of starting with Sense of Taste than Claude does Sense of Design.
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Game: Star Ocean: The Second Story
Platform: PSX
Developer: tri-Ace
Publisher: Enix Corporation

Rena's Story
Universe Difficulty

Played on ePSXe 1.9.0 emulator

VIDEO: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9
Resolution & Colors
- Fullscreen mode 1920x1080 32 Bit
- Internal X res: 2
- Internal Y res: 3
- Stretching mode: 0
- Render mode: 0

Textures
- Texture filtering: 2
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- Gfx card vram: 0 (Autodetect)

Framerate
- "Use FPS limit" checked
- "Auto-detect FPS/Frame skipping limit" checked

Compatibility
- Off-Screen drawing: 1
- Framebuffer effects: 2
- Framebuffer upload: 1

Full screen filters
- "Screen filtering" checked
- Shader effects ➜ Fullscreen Smoothing ➜ 2

Misc
- "MDEC filter" checked

AUDIO: ePSXe SPU Core 1.9.0

Specs:
i5-2500k @4.5GHz
GTX 670 FTW

Recorded with StarTech USB3HDCAP

Gameplay and Editing By: Wolfwood824
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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