Real football would make for a very dry RPG. Inazuma Eleven's ridiculous meteor shots from the halfway line are far more appealing, mmm.

Now if only we could get Go! in the West

Smash Bros Brawl at least was made by the Kirby bunch - the same lead director and a lot of the team from HAL iirc.

Ah, the only version I reached the end in was P3P, so perhaps that's where our experiences differ.

I've talked to people who've beat it and basically say that Chapters 5-9 of the story can be skipped if you just want to fight the final boss right away. Basically, it's like a ton of post-game content, only all the content is repetitive yet adds to/continues the story before the final battle.

So... if you get bored…

Yes you can. You can max out opposite sex social links and then deny the romantic cue. There's usually some extra question that turns on or off the romantic aspect, late into the social link.

I dunno, maybe I hang around with people who are way too into it. If it's not obscure radio plays or lost episodes we only have partial scripts for, it just doesn't seem nerdy to me anymore. WHAT HAVE I BECOME

S'not that obscure to a British dude over 30. Dr Who has been a cultural touchstone here for decades before it became relevant in the US, so that kind of knowledge is fairly common.

Etrian Odyssey 4 gave you the first, what, 8 hours of the game? I know the full game is closer to 100, but still, it felt incredibly generous.

I didn't play the FE demo because I just straight up bought it the moment I got a 3DS, haha.

Yeah, opt-in random battles are pretty neat (though some people will inevitably abuse them and then find the game too difficult, and so have to resort to grinding, haha), but the reason low level enemies stick around are for drops and for training up lower level job classes.

The only mechanic that'd round it out…

The demo is pretty tame, yeah - it's just a sequence of sidequests, boss fights or collectathons. It's really just there to give you a taste of what it'll look like, sound like, and both how the Brave-Default system will work, and how some of the jobs will.

Man, if that's all you do in the full game you're going to have to do a lot of grinding in order to make it work.

...Plus, it makes random battles once you're a little bit stronger so much more convenient to blast through, just using 4 turns with everyone at the start (and you can press right to fast-forward the…

As Squeezit said, the demo is not the first part of the game, or any part of the full game. It's a seperate scenario that lets you try out some compressed versions of some jobs (only 4 levels instead of 14, with abilities from later levels instead of the first 4 abilities) and to get to grips with some of the…

FFTA2 was... yeesh, what a trainwreck.

The class balance was kind artificial considering they just aimed for as many classes as possible, leaving each class basically just able to do one thing (rather than each having a deep and multi-faceted role like in FFT). They were less like classes and more like one equippable…

I love how many people are chiming in to laugh at your silliness two years ago. The 3DS ended up being the same story as the DS - shaky start that turned into a triumph. Also, the Vita... I own one and like it, but it's not even in the same ballpark as the 3DS at this point.

MacDonalds 24 hour delivery is deadly, especially when I have an odd sleeping pattern and get hungry in the small hours of the morning. BK's probably about a ten minute walk from me too, so yeah, convenience wins out there too. Buuut I'm avoiding burgers lately, since I've been putting on a little too much winter…

And I just had curly fries at McDonalds in Beijing yesterday! Decently nice. And yeah, totally agreed on BK in China vs back home in the UK. I guess it's closer to American BK or something, because it's delicious over here! Price tag definitely makes it a 'treat myself' sort of thing though, yeah.

Mashed Potato Burgers are pretty commonly the special of the month, but they often have something else in there too to add to the 'interesting' factor (Shrimp + Mash was one from a few months ago up here).

And yeah, those're Shake Shake Fries. They cycle in and out in HK. Honestly, since BK upped its fries game, I…

Really? I've not seen them offered in Beijing yet. I see all sorts of special stuff go on in HK MacDonalds though (Shake-Shake Fries are pretty awesome).

2013 on the 3DS alone was a ridiculously incredible year. I know no-one who's cleared their backlog yet.

Not really, considering I also read the bit where he mentions that the 16 are only the ones released THIS year, and that he also spent shitloads of time playing his own, unreleased game.