The developer cut everything from gameplay to improve the story of XIII, and XIII still ended up having the worst story since FF freakin' II on the NES.

Why aren't they releasing that higher-res version of Final Fantasy III in America on something with physical buttons (besides Ouya)? People who've imported the PSP version say it has full English text support, so I don't know why they aren't as speedy releasing it onto the PSN as they are on Android and iOS.

I honestly didn't know that. Noted.

For the most part I dislike the Apple brand, but this just seems unapologetically thieving and acting like a parasite off of America's arguably most popular worldwide export (and one of our very few at that).

If Apple can sue Samsung and win, they won't have much trouble with this.

So are all Chinese companies, like, evil until proven otherwise or what's going on with that?

I'm getting the impression that between these monster discounts and bajillion pre-order incentives that Borderlands 2 will be $30 brand new by the end of the year. I don't know how I feel about that.

Is it me or did Phoenix somehow get buff between games or something? Something's different in his design here at any rate.

Some of those reviews for Nintendo of America may be why they never released more than a single Earthbound game in English (on an expensive SNES cart, released only once back in 1995, with no ports or remakes since). I'm getting the impression the younger employees wanted to do stuff like bringing Mother 3 over here,…

It would be nice for Japan to be more inclusive in regards to the demographics they cater to. 50 less shows like Strike Witches and 5 more Princess Jellyfishes or Wandering Sons on the air at any one time would be a heck of a lot better for the status quo, I would personally say.

When I said "triple-A" I was more referring to a game with a highly promoted console release as not all Valve games leave the PC platform.

Valve hasn't announced a triple-A game on the scale of Left 4 Dead or Portal for a while now. With their arguably last major release being back in early 2011, maybe they'll be making an announcement by the end of the year?

It seems like in many of these types of games it's almost always a female who has to be shepherded to safety.

Square-Enix seems to think that for a Final Fantasy to "feel" like a Final Fantasy means never abolishing command menus or other gameplay elements like that. I worry that they do not honestly realize that we liked the characters and stories equally or sometimes more so than their respective gameplay systems, and…

I hope this doesn't turn into another Six Days in Fallujah, or that the uncomfortable situations and narrative in Patriots get neutered into Yet Another Military FPS.

Just my view on it, not an absolute truth.

So are they actually that stupid over there at Square-Enix HQ or are they just all massively unbearable tools?

Has any other Japanese game company or figure of the industry ever publicly criticized Square-Enix, or is it just constant beating around the bush over there? I feel as if no one with influence has the balls to be the Gary Kurtz to Square-Enix's George Lucas.

I wish Square-Enix was less awful in everything that they do.

Looks like they're soullessly marking off the checklist of game features that are popular or common without asking *why* they are popular. When developing XIII-2 and gathering feedback on the last game, they only chose to hear "give us gameplay variety and anything except straight lines" and ended up linking every…