At some point in your life, the time you save not playing 30 additional hours of pointless side quests tacked on to a 10 hour complete experience will become far far more valuable to you than the $30 or however much you feel this game is overpriced.

Interestingly, Gameological had almost the exact same problem of gameplay and presentation being at odds with each other in 17-bit's last game, Skulls of the Shogun. I didn't quite buy it in the case of Skulls, looking forward to playing this game sometime to see what I think here.

I played a decent amount of 3, but it didn't really grab me in the same way and I never finished it. And I think a lot of it was because all of those gaps that drew me in to the original game had already been filled in. And while, to be fair, really nothing could live up to the game I'd built up inside my head playing…

I had a similar experience to Genevive in that the incomplete, altered nature of a piece of Japanese media localized for America encouraged me to dig deeper and embrace it as my own. In 1996 Revelations: Persona was released for the PlayStation, a RPG with an atypical (at the time) modern day high school setting. In…

Uh oh, is Rooster one of those Alice in Chains songs? Because I may have been known to rock that out on occasion.

Dark Souls does get a great deal easier, though it still has that initial spike in difficulty that drives people away. But I've been watching some Twitch playthroughs of Dark Souls by people new to the game, and it's clear that you can get far without a very deep of an understanding of the combat pacing. The game is…

Besides the mechanics of sticking a third-person camera kind of close behind the back of your character, there's really not much to compare between RE4 and Gears of War. It still has the old RE atmosphere.

Sure, every language will borrow from others, but I do think the extent to which it happens in Japanese is interesting. There's even a separate character set they use specifically for foreign words.

So, tabletop RPG player, were ya? Bet you had a really skilled dungeon master? Did you agonize for hours over coming up with a believable character backstory? DM transported you into a land of wonder using only his colorful descriptions and the power of your imagination? Maybe you rolled a d20 to see if you hit that…

FFIII as well! Square had that whole even-odd thing going on in the 8- and 16-bit days, where even-numbered Final Fantasies would focus on story and characters, while odd-numbered Final Fantasies would focus on the job system.

Well, I do know Japanese actually, not that it matters in this case. The Japanese title is ブレイブリーデフォルト, which isn't a Japanese word at all, but the two English words "bravely" and "default" mashed into the Japanese phonetic system, something like "bureiburii deforuto." It's a pretty common practice in Japanese, where…

Has anyone made the joke yet that the name of the town where the olympics are currently being held sounds like "over there" in Japanese

I can follow for the general plot outline you've got there, but it falls apart once you get past Kefka/Sephiroth and Celes/Cloud. Even there, Kefka isn't really a warrior, Celes isn't really an inferior doppelganger of Kefka, she's more like a successful version of what they were trying to do to Kefka.

I say they should have renamed it Final Fantasy Adventure. Or Legend. Or something.

Meh. I mean I get where they were coming from, it's just that any time I hear something like this from a Japanese game developer I bravely default to "person who thought of the title lacks a basic understanding of the English language" rather than "person who thought of the title came up with a clever little play on…

It doesn't make sense as the name of a mechanic either.

I think the expanded capabilities that came with the move from cartridges on the SNES to CDs on the PlayStation was just giving Squaresoft more rope to hang itself with. Even if the Squaresoft artists of the 1990s wanted to give Terra and Cecil hopelessly ornate weapons twice the size of an adult human that would…

Half Minute Hero was great. I would also agree with Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. Hmm, actually most of the games I liked on the PSP were ports. But TO and FFT were both massively improved over the originals. You can go even older and download Final Fantasy VI too.

My bad! Your reference was quite apt and humorous, and I should have expected that you actually knew the definition of such a common word!

? Infamous is "well known for evil" or something to that effect, not "more than famous." It's just being famous for doing something bad, which is certainly applicable to Zimmerman.