Perhaps you recall that one cutscene that was posted here a week ago from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. It was a beastly thing from the darkest depths of the uncanny valley, writhing grotesquely in vibrant 720p. Well, it’s even worse in English—I have embedded that version after the jump, and if you think that I did that because I hate you that is completely fair.
I’m playing the game for a forthcoming 61FPS Review, and thirty hours in the good news is that so far this wins the battle for the “Worst Cutscene in Star Ocean: The Last Hope Award”. The bad news is that the battle for that award is titanic in scale—this game is packed densely with cutscenes, many of them twenty minutes long., and eventually they all combine into a single Lovecraftian horror of wild gesticulation and ear-wrenching voice acting. The producer of the game recently talked about games surpassing film as a storytelling medium. I hope he was speaking in general terms, because his team sure can’t do it alone.
I’m off topic. “Make sure your cutscenes are consistent in their ability to cause pain” is not the lesson the industry should take from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Instead, it’s the elegant way the game lets you skip them.
It’s just a little thing, really, but I’m completely amazed I’ve never seen its like before. See, you can skip the cutscenes in The Last Hope. But instead of just leaving you adrift without a story compass like way too many games do, this one replaces the scene with a paragraph of summarization as to what you just chose to miss. As the parts of the game that you don’t watch can actually be rather pleasant, this is the kind of boon I wish I had known about, oh, thirty hours ago (though I’ll still be watching them, actually: due diligence and all that).
I don’t know if Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the first game to do this. It’s a simple idea, so I can’t imagine it is. That’s not what I’m really talking about here. What I am saying is that, for games where story doesn’t want to be there but for some reason has to be (and Star Ocean: The Last Hope is very much one of those games), there’s no reason to not do this. So why isn’t everyone doing it?
Related Links:
Star Ocean: The Last Hope Is Creepy as Hell
Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
JRPG Stories: Awful