Since the Final Fantasy 7 era JRPG's have been multi-disk affairs, normally with the game evenly split up between 2-4 units of media to accommodate the view of the producers. If you're looking for a reason to use Blu-Ray, this is it.
In the past I was fine with swapping disks every 20 hours or so when playing JRPG style games because it wasn't an inconvenience, it was a milestone. I had accomplished something and moved to the next part of the game allowing me to feel progress in both storyline and media content. That disk swapping screen was (and still is) akin to the rush felt when unlocking an achievement. I reveled in it.
Enter Star Ocean: The Last Hope.
Let me preface this by saying that if you are not a completionist, you will have no problem here. You'll go from Disk-1 to Disk-3 normally and everything will look fine as long as you give up playing this title at this point. The transition from disk-1 to disk-2 happened when you changed from one field to another. The transition from disk-2 to disk-3 was phased a bit better... but not by much. This was a bit aggravating but not a deal breaker.
Once you're on the last planet however, you receive the option of warping back to most of the other planet you visited previously (There are five in total that can be revisited). This gives you more freedom to return to old areas, it is a JRPG after all and most games in this genre require a little trek to past areas. The problem?
Three of those planets are on disk-2 while the last three planets and your Item Creation station are on disk-3. So what happens if you want to warp from planet one to planet four? The "warp out" animation will play out followed by a disk swap prompt. That's right people: you get to swap disks back and forth depending on which planet you're on and where you have chosen to go.
In a matter of moments you're finding yourself in a situation of swapping disks as frequently as every 5-minutes because your gather-item creation components are found on different planets or you may have simply forgotten something on one planet before warping to the later areas. Traveling around the universe has never been so complicated.
Most ironic of all, this game is exclusive to the Xbox 360. One of the rare titles that would’ve made great use of Blu-Ray disk space technology, but it isn’t even available on the PlayStation 3. If there is any argument to high density media, a game of this genre and scale would be your first example.
Shame on Microsoft, Square-Enix and Tri-Ace, you’re really testing a fans patience with these shenanigans. Your overly-strict security levels make playing a game like this a chore more than a work of entertainment, perhaps a full hard disk install would help?
Microsoft, please change security on multi-disk games so you can play games with only one piece of media in the drive. Star Ocean should allow people the option of installing all three disks while requiring only disk-1 in the machine to play the game. The optional single-install feature would allow gamers with larger hard drives to play the game seamlessly and only bring headaches to those that choose to roll with the diskless 360, the minority of gamers. Most gamers playing a JRPG would be prepared for a larger install and probably do not fit the demographic of a memory card based 360 gamer.
