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 The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that pre-defined save points seem to be an outdated mechanic.
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