I’m still enjoying Star Ocean: The Last Hope International, but it is clearly a family (and player) unfriendly game because of its stupid save system. In order to save, you need to find a save point, which is a pink/purple glowing floating sphere thingy. From there, you can save into one of 20 save slots, overwriting as needed. I’m sure this sort of thing evolved back when consoles had no built-in storage and users had to buy overpriced memory cards to save their games. Now we all have big hard drives in our consoles (except for the crazy Xbox 360 Microsoft is coming out with with only 4GB of Flash memory), so let us save whenever we want! Anyway, the problem is that some areas don’t have any handy save points, so it could be hours before a save is possible. This means things like eating dinner and going to bed are problematic if you can’t get away to do them. I’ve had to leave the game paused during dinner because I couldn’t save when I needed to. Bloody annoying.
On the other hand, the game has a huge amount of content. I have clearly gotten my money’s worth, particularly since I only paid $30 for the game from Amazon. The game has so many aspects that I haven’t really explored yet, like crafting. It is funny to see the Japanese influence (it is a JRPG, after all), with all the Japanese food items rather than pizza and burgers. It’s a bit incongruous that the voices are all Americanized (at least the English voices are). And, yes, the voice acting is as bad as you would expect, but that’s okay, because the game is fun.
Oh yeah, another annoying save issue: after you save, it writes “system data” (whatever that means), then it asks you if you want to continue saving, at which point you can save again. But I just saved, why do I want to save again? Seems crazy, so I always say “no,” but surely the developers had something in mind…