http://previews.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/2 ... t-Hope/p2/Interview with Producer Yoshinori Yamagishi
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With the game coming to Xbox 360, it’s being introduced to a new audience. What were the challenges of bringing it to a new platform and a new audience of players? Yoshinori Yamagishi:
Star Ocean 1 through 3 have been released in the States and they’ve been received well by fans—there’s a following and a fan base there. And then, obviously, Xbox 360 is a platform that’s heavily used by U.S. users, so this will be a great opportunity for fans to play this game on a more familiar platform and it’ll be a chance to get to know the game better.
tri-Ace is also a developer that’s constantly trying new platforms and challenging themselves—with the PlayStation 2 previously, and now the Xbox 360 is a brand-new platform for them, so this is an important milestone for tri-Ace as well in going to a brand-new platform.
This Star Ocean game is more steeped in a science-fiction setting than the previous, more fantasy-oriented games. Can you tell about your inspirations as far as science fiction and the idea of sailing through the stars in a two-person rocket ship, and whether there are any movie or science-fiction novels that had to do with deciding on the setting? Yoshinori Yamagishi: This is something that can be said for the entire series, starting with Star Ocean 1, but the president at tri-Ace, Mr. Gotanda, is a big science-fiction fan—and a Trekkie, actually—and he’s obviously been influenced by the Star Trek series. It’s something that’s reflected in the Star Ocean series…especially Star Ocean 3, which has a kind of a philosophical ending to it. There are differences…it doesn’t exactly reflect the world of Star Trek, but there are definitely influences there—and from American sci-fi films as well.
Star Ocean 1 through 3 seems pretty complete, and Star Ocean 4 is very graphically different and advanced, but story-wise and content-wise, how has the series evolved? Yoshinori Yamagishi: Story-wise, the Star Ocean series can be seen as a complete set—1, 2 and 3 is a complete trilogy. Star Ocean 4 takes place before Star Ocean 1, so you could almost say that Star Ocean 4 is a tale that depicts how Star Ocean came to be and how the world came to be. That’s one of the major themes we’ve taken into accomplishing for Star Ocean 4.
System-wise, tri-Ace has always been a developer that constantly develops games to test the limits to each hardware, but they make sure not to do anything that the hardware can’t handle. They use the hardware to its fullest capabilities, but they make sure that the game itself functions well and looks good as well.
In this sense, Star Ocean for PS1 only had 2-D characters. For the PS2, the characters were made in 3-D, because the hardware enabled it to evolve in that way. For the Xbox 360, this is next-generation hardware and brand-new technology, and new abilities that can be put into the game that tri-Ace has held off on prior because the hardware wasn’t able to handle it. Star Ocean 4 has become very realistic looking just because the hardware has enabled it to function this way.
Is this an Xbox 360 exclusive? Yoshinori Yamagishi: I believe your question translates into,
would it be coming out on PS3 as well. The answer to that is, there are no plans, nothing set in stone at the moment—we can’t say right now that it will come out or it won’t come out for sure, so it could go either way. The only thing that’s confirmed right now is that it’s coming out on Xbox 360.
Since Star Ocean 1 through 3 were on the PSP, why the Xbox 360 for Star Ocean 4? And why call this Star Ocean 4 when it’s actually a prequel in a sense to Star Ocean, the series. Why not Star Ocean Zero? Is there a new direction that you’re heading in with the Star Ocean series in general? Yoshinori Yamagishi: In terms of why the name Star Ocean 4, the development code for the title was actually “Zero,” since it is the origin of the Star Ocean series, but calling it “Zero” in the actual title, that title has such a negative connotations. We wanted to bring an actual numbered title, and that’s how we arrived at Star Ocean 4.
In terms of why Xbox 360…the simple answer to this is just that, when we started development on it, the Xbox 360 hardware was the only one that was ready to begin. The PS3 was not fully available at the moment to start development. That’s the honest answer to that. ![[Alaa!]](/images/smilies/nuevos/sorprendido_ani2.gif "Ala!")
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