So I've heard multiple people claim that getting the true ending in this game is challenging.  Either I'm missing something or I'm actually totally awesome at this game...

I'm still on my first playthrough and am currently most of the way through finishing request #5, so I'm still less than half way through the game.  And yet my popularity rating is already at 74%.  I've also gotten 3 stars on every assignment except for one early on when I still wasn't clear how the evaluation worked.  I know what I'm doing now so unless there is a big difficulty spike later on I'm pretty confident I can keep getting 3 stars.

I have been doing side-jobs for characters as well, though maybe not at quite the rate of the normal jobs.  Since I don't seem to have any trouble keeping my popularity up I think I'm going to spen shift priorities a bit for the second half of the game.

Oh yeah, and since I've been doing so many jobs I'm totally loaded.  I have way more money than I even know what to do with.

I played it when it came out on the SNES.  That shouldn't be unusual, I think it sold pretty well.  And I've always seen emulators as a pretty fringe thing.

Wait, what?

Am I the only one who feels that the while book thing, while novel, is really stupid for a portable game?  It effectively makes it a lot less...portable.  For the PS3 version it would make more sense...

See, now we're going full circle but I'm at the point where a game being 'only' 8-10 hours seems like a feature to me.  I'm definitely going to pick up Oath in Felghana.

That's the rumour, anyway, but there certainly hasn't been anything official said about a PSP2 yet.

On the subject of time limits, I would like to note that I have never once felt 'rushed' when playing this game.  Yes, time definitely matters but there is no ticking clock in the corner.  Whenever you do something that will require time the game tells you exactly how much time it will take upfront.  You are forced to make choices in how you spend your time as it really isn't possible to do everything, but time is more like a resource than anything.  It's like going into a store and not having enough money to buy everything so you have to carefully choose what to get.  I think that's a subtle but important distinction from being rushed.

And to Prime Mover:  This game is completely different from Ar Tonelico.

I suffer from a severe case of collectoritis.  I don't sell or trade in anything.  I even keep games I hated...

Way back in the day when I was much younger and strapped for cash I sold some of my Super Nintendo games (some really good ones, like Final Fantasy III and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past) and I have never forgiven myself.  Seriously, it haunts me to this day.

It's true that it's not an RPG, but they certainly have shown in-engine scenes.  They were still in-engine cutscenes, not really gameplay, but there's a pretty obvious visual difference between those scenes and the full-blown anime scenes.  The game does looks nice, though.

I did try to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, actually.  It was kind of painful.  The problem isn't really the length, though, as I don't think it's really any longer than something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I had no trouble finishing that.  The problem with Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the writing style and all the constant name-dropping.  The entire book consists of passages like:

"So-and-so's army met such-and-such's army at someplace.  So-and-so challenged such-and-such and exchanged n blows, after which so-and-so was victorious.  Then so-and-so continued on to someotherplace."

Imagine repeating that over and over for 1500 pages and you have a pretty good idea of what the book is like...

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 ;)