Well, lesson learned. Neither the indie scene nor the video game commentary scene is particularly ripe with professionalism.

Missed a pair of JRPGs incoming yet this year. We've got another Etrian Odyssey, which is gonna be pretty niche but quality. And we've got Pokemon, which is gonna be pretty gigantic... and quality. Those two are really safe bets for excellence.

There's this big trend of making games open world. You guys commented on it with this E3, it's the year of everything being open world. Tomb Raider, Castlevania, heck even Final Fantasy XIII is making an open world entry now.

Nah, it's a Platinum game, it's a new IP, and it's on a Nintendo console that has a tiny install base. It also looks pretty different from anything else on the market.

They did. That was Wind Waker. I would say that ever since then the franchise has been in a state of backtrack/stasis. The negative backlash to that game scared Nintendo kinda silly, afraid that Zelda could actually lose it's place in gamers' hearts and minds.

I've read a couple people having this burnout issue. I think it's pretty universal amongst the people who played a ton of the game when it released. I'm not having any such issues, but that's because I had played an Animal Crossing game before so I understood that it's designed to last forever so I rarely put in…

Man, Konami just bent over backwards to touch up a release that was niche at best. I can't think of another company spending this much money on a game already out aside from a real disaster like FF XIV. You should be grateful that rather than have unhappy fans, Konami poured more money into this game despite the…

Here's a question: would Insomniac games be a better fit for the Mega Man IP... or Starfox? I feel like they could revitalize either of those in a really big way.

Dota 2 is a better game if you can get into it and play at a sort of high level (basically, if you get to the point where you know how all 100+ characters and all of their abilities work). But getting to that point is HELL, and they keep adding tutorial content but it's never enough. So League is better for the…

I'm pretty okay with how they broke down the design of the game. Intro has a lot of menus, but you can tell they did that on purpose so that they could open up and say "Nope, this is a real SMT game" when you get to Tokyo.

Great. And they've been releasing more niche anime video games. So you're bitching about a company's anime division in a discussion of their game division. And the two divisions are doing two different things.

I dunno. I'm not an anime guy. And we're not talking about localizing an anime. So I don't know the answer and I don't think the answer's relevant.

When was the last time Digimon was airing outside Japan? I know it's one of those giant manga/anime franchises in Japan that just goes on forever, but as best I can tell it's been out of circulation elsewhere for years now.

I'm not sure that's fair. Namco-Bandai has been doing quite a bit of niche localizing of late. Does anyone really think that Tales is gonna do well outside Japan? Or Project X Zone? Or Ni No Kuni?

It's a direct sequel to the gamecube game. BUT: The Wii plays gamecube games. And the gamecube version was a little bit better anyway. Go ahead and track down Path of Radiance for the gamecube.

My impression of SMT IV's writing has kinda been the opposite. I feel like the localization is pretty great but the writing is lacking. The vocabulary is broad and appropriate, the voices are okay and very rarely bring down a line that wasn't already bad, and the characters are given reactive dialogue such that they…

There were Fire Emblem releases on both the Gamecube and Wii. So with the exception of the Nintendo console that nobody owns, if you've got a Nintendo console you can have a console Fire Emblem.

Yeah, you wanna read Jeremy Parish's review over at US gamer. He's a fan of the main series and I believe comparisons he draws are to Etrian Odyssey and SMT Strange Journey. You know, games with significant similarities of substance to SMT IV.

I would respond to the statement: "the year has indeed been rough for traditional, turn-based, JRPGish JRPGs."

Nope. 3 characters, no Olimar. I think it's his family members now.