Uh...why?

Is there seriously a market in Japan for Japanese games that have been redubbed in English?

I put about 10 hours into the game before I realized I wasn't having even a spec of fun playing it so I stopped.  Maybe it does get good after a hundred hours, but I don't give a shit.  That's like the FFXIII argument only even worse.  Why should I play a game in which I have to spend that kind of time slogging through tedium before it gets good?  Frankly speaking, I want my 10 hours back.

Your two statements are incompatible.  Maybe turning up the difficulty makes fighting weaker enemies more challenging, but that's not my main issue.  What I hated was how fighting enemies more than a couple of levels above your own was virtually impossible.  For starters I'm pretty sure the AI starts cheating when there is a level gap like that since they will just perfectly dodge and counter everything you throw at them (which is not the case when you fight the same opponent after you've level-up'ed a few times), however that can be overcome to some degree.  You will never hit with your first attack but if you chain attacks just right you can hit with subsequent ones.  But even then there is such a massive discrepency in the damage done that there is little hope of ever winning.  I remember attempting such a fight more than once where I was able to slowly wittle away at my opponents health--doing like 1% damage with each hit--for several minutes before a single slip-up let them counterattack and kill me in literally one or two hits.

To top this all off the game has an experience system that offers no reward for taking on a difficult opponent.  Most of the experience you get comes from bonuses for doing things like finishing the fight quickly or without getting hit and not from the quality of your opponent, actively encouraging you to spend all your time beating up weaker enemies rather than challenging yourself.  And if you want to get all the treasures and crap scattering around the boards then again you have to play throw the same scenarios again and again and completely dominate your opponents, which is only really possible if you are over-leveled for them.  That's just poor game design.

I hated the first game.  Awful story aside (it's a cross-over, what did you expect?), I felt like the combat system combined the absolute worst aspects of both RPGs and fighting games with none of the positive aspects.  It was a pointless grindfest where the outcome of fights was determined far more by your level than your skill, only you were fighting the same handful of opponents over and over so there wasn't even any variety there.

Seriously, WTH do people see in this game?

I had some hands-on time with DA2 at PAX and I came away pretty impressed.  I will say, though, that there is a definite console focus this time around.  In fact, it was playable on both PS3s and 360s but wasn't even shown on the PC.  If you've played a console version of the original then the combat should be pretty familiar, actually.  You can still pause the action and assign commands with the radial menu.  The biggest difference is just the pace of the combat.  In the first game if you pressed the attack button you first wander up to the selected enemy, do your attack animation (which was usually pretty slow), and then damage was recorded.  The big difference in this game is that the response to button presses is much faster, and furthermore repeatedly pressing it results in combos with varied attack animations.  So there is a little bit of the action game aspect to it,  but not in an intrusive way.  The faster pace and instant response to button presses seems well-suited to playing with a controller, but I'm not entirely sure how well it will work on the PC.

Oh, and the graphics and framerate are both significantly improved compared to the console versions of DA:O.

The framed narrative approach to the story is interesting and I think potentially a good thing, but I didn't spend enough time with the game to really see how it will all work.  The claim is that this way they can tell a more involved story that spans 10 years of time by jumping just to the interesting and important events, which I suppose is true but I'm a little afraid that this will mean sacrificing exploration and side quests aspects that I actually do enjoy.  Anyway, I am by no means sure of that.  We'll have to wait and see.

I am completely addicted to this game.  I decided to play just a little bit before going to sleep last night and before I knew it, it was 3am...

I do have one major critcism about the combat, and that's the fact that it's too easy to take enemy camps and then start spawning new units from them.  In the first game that could be a valid tactic, but it was not without risks.  You had to spend a CP to request the reinforcements, wait a turn, and then you got to use that unit (if you spend additional CP to command it).  If the enemy retook the camp before the turn was up your CP was just wasted.  In VC2 if you control a camp you can bring in new units and start commanding them right away by only spending a single CP.  With the way the maps are broken into pieces it's sort of necessary so I understand the decision, but in practice this means that I start every single mission with the minimum number of troops I think I can get away with under the assumption that I'll just grab camps and insta-spawn new troops further into enemy lines.  It also means that there is essentially no penalty for withdrawing a troop (if they're near a camp, anyway) so you can cycle through troops as they get wounded, and they heal super-fast if they're not deployed.

PAX report!

First, some general comments.  There were not many traditional RPGs at the show at all.  Actually, besides Dragon Age 2 (more on that below) and a couple things on handhelds I can't think of any.  There were a ton of MMORPGs, though.  I thought that was interesting since if history is any guide 90% of them will probably flop.  But anyway, I don't really play MMORPGs and they're big time sinks on the show floor (you still have to make a character and stuff first) so I didn't play any.

The Duke Nukem Forever line was amazing.  Too amazing for me to actually try the game.  I went to check it out at around 11:30 am or so (doors opened at 10) and found a gigantic line that I struggled to figure out where the end is.  Finally I asked somebody who looked like he worked there and he told me it was a 7 or 8 hour wait but they weren't letting anyone else in line.  Yeesh.

Playing Dragon Age 2 was largely assuaged my fears about the game.  It's definitely faster paced than the original but it's still Dragon Age.  Actually, I have to admit that it was a lot of fun.  It is interesting, though, that there is a definite focus on consoles this time around.  They were showing the game on PS3s and 360s but there wasn't a PC in sight.  I'll probably talk more about it later in its thread.

Deus Ex Human Revolution wins my best nonplayable demo of the show award.  I mean, they were just showing a recorded demo (of actual gameplay, though) with a person doing commentary but if they manage to pull off even half of what they say they're doing then that game is going to be absolutely amazing.

Sega clearly still has no clue how to market Yakuza games.  Yakuza 4 was there without much space devoted to it (not too surprising), but what really gets me is that the demo they were showing just had you jump straight into combat.  Just pure fighting, no story, not even a cinematic opening to the fight.  Combat is not this series' strong point.  If they just had a translated version of the demo on the Japanese PSN that would have been so much better.

Infamous 2 was quite solid and in terms of gameplay it played a lot like the first one.  In terms of looks even with the new character model I still don't think that's Cole.  The more destructable environments were cool, though, but there's still a limit to it.  One interesting difference in the game was that there did not appear to be anything like the internal battery you had in the first game limiting your stronger powers.  You could just use them at will.  I'm not sure if that's a real change or if it was just for the demo, though.

I played Killzone 3 in 3D.  The effect was pretty cool at first, but after a while I was having a lot of difficulty focusing on things and everything got blurry.  I also felt some serious eye strain afterwards.  I don't think I would use this technology if it were free, let alone pay thousands of dollars for it.  I don't know why Sony is pushing it so much.  It is not ready for the living room.

OK, that's a lie.  I know why: they want to sell expensive TVs.

I also played a bit with Playstation Move.  It seemed to work well enough, but there isn't any software for it yet that's very compelling.  I was surprised that Kinect didn't have more of a presence at this show since it's right in MS's back yard.  I only saw a couple of kinect units and they seemed to just be playing stupid dancing games.  I have no interest in stupid dancing games so I did not try it out.

Speaking of stupid dancing games, Just Dance 2 had a huge booth...yeah, nothing more to say there...

Valve was doing a demo of the co-op aspects of Portal 2.  Looks super fun, but I don't know what else to say about it.  It's Portal...with co-op.  Each player controls their own set of portals and you can do some fun things like starting somebody off in the classic infinite fall (portals on the floor and ceiling) and then change the location of the ceiling portal so they go shooting off at high speeds.

I played some Birth by Sleep.  The combat is pretty decent but I didn't spend enough time with it to say much more than that.

I also played a whole lot of Valkyria Chronicles 2 while waiting in various lines ;)

I was given the opportunity to actually play this (which is only being shown being closed doors at PAX) and I turned it down...

Let me smack myself a few more times...

DN3D was a very solid game.  It's not just about cheesy one-liners.  The multiplayer was a blast, too, thanks to all the cool toys at your disposal.

The DNF of today has nothing to do with the DNF of a decade ago.  One of the reasons it is so delayed is because the whole thing has been rewritten from scratch several times.

Which is not to say that it will necessarily be a good game, but it doesn't have to suck either.

It's supposably playable at PAX but I'm not clear on whether that's just for press or open to the public.  Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Telling dialogue with 2D stills is certainly nothing new in Japanese games, but I'll agree with you that the ones in VC2 seem particularly poor.  I think it's a combination of the limited number of (sometimes very exaggerated) poses, poor transitions, and lack of animation.  It's a shame because VC1 had similarly styled sequences only using fully animated 3D models which looked great.  Is disc space the culprit?  I have a hard time believing that.  Once you have the 3D models themselves it doesn't require much space to animate them.  They weren't using pre-rendered movies.  Maybe it's because they were worried that the 3D models on the PSP wouldn't look nearly as good up close and personal so they went with the 2D stills to show the characters in more detail.

At least the gameplay is solid.

Interesting.  Must be from all the people like me who cancelled their orders after seeing that ;)

I actually have two copies of the game now.  I bought one this morning and I just won one at the pre-PAX IGN/PS Blog even tonight!  They were having a competition to get the best time on a certain mission in the game and I won it, which was pretty fun.

Amazon has completely failed me this time.  I got an email this morning saying it wouldn't even ship until September 8th.  This is when I had it preordered...so I went to Gamestop and picked up a copy.

There is some kind of pre-PAX IGN/PS Blog meet and greet tonight that mentioned the possibility of some VC2 multiplayer action.  Since I haven't even cracked the shrinkwrap yet I obviously haven't tried single-player so I'm not exactly sure how well that will work out but I think I will try to attend.