Earlier this year I was thoroughly engrossed in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Horrible voice acting and cliché characters aside, it was a great game. In the game, you have both save spheres and HP/MP recovery spheres, but you never have them combined into one graphic, they’re always separate. Right before the first boss in the game, I stumbled upon an odd occurrence: there was a save sphere right around the corner from a recovery sphere, with a single enemy between them. This boggled me. Why would they even bother putting them that close to each other and not combining them into the same graphic, or at least just place the graphics right next to each other? In this case, you would recover your health and most likely have to fight through one more battle, possibly losing some HP and MP, then you could save and head down to the boss. What’s the point? The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that pre-defined save points seem to be an outdated mechanic.

Upon examining most Western RPGs, you’ll notice that you’re given the option to save almost anytime and anywhere you want. There are a few exceptions, but, for the most part, you have total freedom when it comes to saving your game. I like this for a couple reasons: 1) set save points sometimes tend to be few and far between and things come up in the real world where you don’t have time to make it to the next one, and 2) you can’t always anticipate when you will get raped by any given enemy, so I like to save as frequently as I deem necessary, not when the game tells me I should. I also can’t shake the feeling that some developers use the distance between save points as some kind of indicator to artificially raise the difficulty level as you progress through the game. More than once, as I neared the mid-point of a JRPG and pushed on toward the end, the distance between save points in dungeons mysteriously increases. This is usually coupled with a bunch of hard groups of enemies or mini-bosses between the points.

At the heart of the matter, the difference between these two save mechanics is in the origin of the games themselves. It seems that the pre-defined save point originated with Japanese developed console games, while the “save anywhere” mechanic seems to be derived from Western developed PC games. It should be noted that, while I focus on RPGs a lot when it comes to this topic, the save point issue is definitely not limited to that genre. Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid and many other non-RPGs of the past also made use of a save point mechanic.

So, now I’ve railed on pre-defined save points for a bit. But, you may ask, is there any legitimate use for them? Sure! In more than a few games the manner of saving your game is built into the story of the game itself. In Xenogears, for example, characters record their memories at save points, and this is used as a plot device later in the game. This also makes sense throughout the game. You’ve heard of people keeping journals as they travel, or of their day-to-day lives. I would assume the characters in these games might do the same.

In various ways, save points might be used for some other purposes within the game, but not necessarily related to the story or used to advance the plot. You see moogles as save points in certain Final Fantasy titles and, while they may be related to certain side quests at times, for all intents and purposes their job is only to save your game.

In many RPGs, there are story sequences that allow for saving before them and right after them, but not during them. This is likely because if you enter these sequences – whether they be cut scenes or a sequence of steps you have to go through to progress the story – you may find the challenges too difficult for your party at that moment and have to revert to an earlier save (presumably the save point right before those events started) to level up a bit. In an instance like this, a pre-defined save point could be used as a fail safe. Still, I’ve seen games that warn you when saving that you’d be wise to save to a new slot instead of over your previously saved games while in a situation like this. That can easily be done if you try saving anywhere inside one of these events, as well. While I do understand these uses for save points, I still think these aspects of the game can still be accomplished without the need to use pre-defined points.

Now, I ask once more, are these pre-defined save points necessary? Why haven’t Japanese RPG developers progressed beyond the need for save points? Obviously the technology we have supports it. Perhaps it’s a holdover from the days of cartridge-based games, maybe it was needed before we had on-board memory or hard drives on our systems, or perhaps it’s “tradition” – I don’t care what the reason is. It’s the humble opinion of this writer that they should be eliminated as swiftly and painlessly as possible. Here’s looking at you Square-Enix, Namco Bandai, Atlus and whoever else is building a new RPG – give us a “save anywhere” mechanic and do away with pre-defined save points.