Star Ocean The Last Hope for PS3
Published on September 22nd, 2009.
Its official. Star Ocean The Last Hope or SO4 will be heading to the Playstation 3 on February 4th, 2010. The title which used to be an Xbox 360 exclusive will feature several improvements in the upcoming PS3 release.
The version being released for the PS3 next year is known as Star Ocean The Last Hope International and will have some exclusive features for the exclusive PS3 release. First of all is dual audio (voice over in Japanese or English). At least they put the capacity of a Blu-ray disc to good use! xD . Other than that, there will be a choice for Japanese, English together with German, French and Spanish subtitles.
The game will also have some changes to the menu and battle system.
Screenshot of the game though this is from the Xbox 360 version. Best of all, the US version will go on sale at the same time as the Japanese release so you don't have to wait for the different region versions.
Source of info from Kotaku.
On a side note, I found an interesting article related to JRPG development for current generation of consoles.
Rumor: Microsoft exclusivity deals funding PS3 development in Japan
What do Vampire Rain, Tales of Vesperia, Lost Planet, Eternal Sonata and Enchanted Arms all have in common? Aside from being developed in Japan, every one of them landed on the Xbox 360 "exclusively" first, only getting ported (sometimes with additional content) to the PlayStation 3 a year or so later. One Japanese developer claims the exclusivity agreements are being used in lieu of financial help from Sony for game development -- essentially saying that Japanese developers are using Microsoft's capital to develop temporarily exclusive 360 games with the intention of inexpensively porting the games to PS3 later on.
"It was easier developing for the Xbox 360 ... if you sign an exclusive contract with Microsoft (you won't release it on other hardware for a year or similar), they will give you a lot of cash for development," read a Japanese developer's post (the original post has since been removed), translated by Sankaku Complex (site NSFW). "As a result, first you develop for the Xbox, reducing development costs. But the Xbox version won't sell [in Japan]. So they port it to the PS3 ... it's cheaper as you already have the game done."
Though they didn't work on it, the developer claims to have seen this policy in practice with Tales of Vesperia. As Kotaku points out, it's quite possible that the dev did see such a practice on Vampire Rain, a game the mystery developer says they worked on.
Source : Joystiq
More information can be found on the game's official site here (in Japanese). Official Star Ocean 4 US site here though it seems that they have not updated it yet.
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