Disk swapping.

My early memories of disk swapping came from installing a multi-floppy disk game to my computer years ago. Barely old enough to have cognitive functions to be considered a child by definition, poping each floppy the computer asked me too.

With the advent of CD's this swapping process initially became more prominent. I remember the five disks that came with Riven, without a full install you were constantly popping each of those disks into the machine for just about each island you would traverse too. It came in a really awesome disk box with sleeves for each disk that had really cool artwork on each one. I saw it the other day at Half Price Books, and my memory of how cool the packaging was for Riven was completely legitimized.

What the hell does this have to do with Star Ocean 4?
I'm trying to paint the picture: that I've known disk swapping for a while. I haven't even spoken about the four disk Playstation Final Fantasy's, disk swapping is nothing new to gaming and completely legit. 
But something happened between CD's and DVD's, HD-DVD's and BluRays. The size of memory drastically increased, as well as compression. Multi-DVD games were hard to come by during the Ps2 generation, usually only spanning around two disks in the most extreme cases.

Lost Odyssey last year was shipped on the 360 on four disks. There were two reasons that were immediate for why they were released on four disks, the main reason was an attempt to rekindal fond memories of JRPG's on the original Playstation generation, which it most certanly did. The second reason is a bit more debatable, the game shipped with an amazing five language options. Add in a large amount of uncompressed HD video versus in-game cutscenes and four disks becomes a bit more understadable.

Star Ocean 4 will be shipping on three disks, an issue I initially had little annoyance over. Why would I? The concept of having to get off your couch every ten hours to swap a disk is a hinderance to you is pretty rediculous. But these two quotes from the recent IGN review really blew me away:

"There are no obvious compression artifacts and one of the climactic cutscenes at the end is downright awesome. However, the last disc is so packed with end-game cinemas that there isn't enough room for the universe worth of content. That means if you want to go back to a planet from the beginning of the game to complete a side quest, grab an item for synthesis, or look for bonus bosses and dungeons, you'll be prompted to insert one of the previous discs."

...

"There is no original Japanese voice track included. Again, these aren't game killing oversights, but they're still oversights.

It's truly a shame that the Japanese voice work didn't make it into the US release. The lip synching in cutscenes is painfully bad with English dialogue and the voice work itself is not good. Some of the characters are just plain annoying to listen to."

That's right. Certain locations are only on certain disks. The only thing that I can remember that is closley relatable was Riven. And that was over a decade ago.
But no Japanese voice track? You have three disks but having two voice options is too much?
I love cutscenes, but: My god, how many cutscenes are in this game?

The whole situation has rubbed me the wrong way. It's hard to nod your head in agreement when games like Mass Effect roam store shelves, brimming to sides of theier disks with audio. Perhaps someone here knows the technicalities to all this and can easily explain to me why this game had to revert to a decade old way of playing, making me have to pop a new disk in when I want to vist an earlier location. While me and my 160gb hard drive can easily hold all of those disks, most 360 owners I know still have 20-60gb drives. I'm more confused, and interested at the technicalities versus this being a "bad thing".

...Not having a Japanese voice track...is something else...(holds anger back.)

I want to hear your opinions.