I never had to grind in FFX.  I'm also pretty sure I played through the whole game without dying a single time.  That game was difficult how exactly?

That list is a perfect example of why democracy doesn't work ;)

Wow, that article was so pretentious I couldn't even finish it (and I've read a lot of pretentious crap in my time).  I tried to skim ahead to see when he would actually connect what he was saying to Dziga Vertov's theory of film-making, but he doesn't seem to ever do that.  In fact, the whole intro to the article doesn't appear to have anything to do with the rest of it...

I don't buy that argument.  It doesn't seriously take you 30 hours to read a book, does it?  Besides, with a game you can present things with more than just text, which is often more economical timewise.  It's easier to look at a picture than to describe it.

Switching gears, I would probably play handheld games during my commute if I didn't commute on a bicycle ;)

I am definitely in the 'RPGs are too long' boat.  I look at my backlog and all the games I plan I purchasing and realize the backlog is only going to get bigger...actually playing through an RPG a second time seems like a pipe dream (which can make games with multiple kind of annoying, actually).

Still, I love my RPGs.  Action games might have the virtue of being more finishable (is that a word...) and there are certainly a few action titles that I have enjoyed, but for the most part I really can't get into them the same way I do with RPGs.  It's more the style of play than anything.  Even when I was a kid I wasn't much of a twitch gamer and that's even more true now.  I like a slower paced, thoughtful experience like you find in turn-based games, though of course even in RPGs turn-based has become the exception instead of the rule.

I would love it if more RPGs could be beaten in 20-30 hours.  Let's face it, there's a lot of filler in most of these games.  There was a time--when I was younger, poorer, and had a lot more free time--that I considered a higher estimated play time for a game to be an automatic virtue, but these days I realize how trivial it is to make games longer (just throw a few more enemies at the player, etc) and how little this actually adds to the experience.  I wish RPGs would keep the same amount of core content and just lose the filler and grind.

Archendrus, since you say you have a PSP but you haven't been paying attention to what's available for it I think you should check out this thread.

The PSP is in a minor RPG renaissance right now.

I'm sure I could, I just wasn't expecting it to lock up.  It only happend to me once, but I lost enough progress that I don't feel like repeating it right now.  I'm sure we've all had that feeling at some point.

Time to finish VC2...

Thanks to the constant pressure from the time constraints I find myself not saving very often when I play this game.  I guess it's because I want to be sure that I have enough time to do everything I'm planning on doing  before saving.

This is a baaaaad thing when the game locks up on you...

I haven't bought a Wii yet and my purchase of one is basically contingent on the localization of these two games.

We'll see.

Sam Bishop was one of the only names I trusted at IGN for JRPG reviews but he doesn't seem to do work for them anymore (he was a freelancer, anyway).

Ryan Clements claims to like JRPGs, but in practice seems to dump on anything that doesn't have 'Final Fantasy' or 'Kingdom Hearts' in the title.

It's true that the result depends a lot on who is actually doing the reviewing, but you'd think a site as big as IGN could have somebody on staff who actually likes JRPGs.

Wow, I just read IGN's 'review' of this game and it's pretty awful.  I don't just mean the score they gave it (hey, it's not a game for everyone), but somehow the reviewer wrote an entire review without discussing the gameplay mechanics, story, graphics, etc.  About the only content in that review was that the reviewer doesn't like the English voice acting and apparently thinks anyone who listens to the Japanese voice acting is a weeabo.

I am completely addicted to Valkyria Chronicles 2 right now.  Yeah, the story has issues but the gameplay is fantastic, and I think it's a real improvement over the original (and I loved the original too).  I'm not even sure how many hours I've put into it at this point.  I'm sure if I was playing normally I would have beat it already but I'm doing every single side mission and character mission and trying to get A rank on everything.

I meant I didn't understand the reasoning behind it.  It's not just used for Metroid-like Castlevania games.  It's used as a generic term any game of that style, even though there are plenty of examples that have been doing it before Castlevania hopped on the bandwagon.

Maybe it was originally used to describe the Metroid-like Castlevania games and then people co-opted it.  That would make sense, actually.

I don't even understand the term 'Metroidvania'.  The Metroid part, certainly, but for me that's never been what Castlevania was about.  When was that term coined? 

Neptune isn't in English, and probably never will be...

Of course, if that's not an issue there are other things I would get before it.  But then, there are plenty of games I would have gotten before Trinity Universe or Cross Edge, too...