Solatorobo's story structure is kind of strange. The best way to describe it is that it's like CyberConnect2 wanted to make a couple games out of it, but then decided to mash them together, complete with a credits roll halfway through.

I agree. While the execution tends to be kind of...off, but there is so much creativity in the world design. Skies of Arcadia, Ar Tonelico, any Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei and so on. There's even a jRPG about the console wars! Even Xenoblade, which has been hailed as the best of East and West combined has a fantastically unique world. I've found that on average, even the most bog-standard jRPG has a much more unique world than the average wRPG. Mass Effect is great, but there's no moment like Star Ocean 3's big twist (I thought it was kind of stupid, but I didn't expect it and it was a good idea, just badly executed). Fallout 3 is good, but it doesn't do the atmosphere nearly as well as Nocturne or Digital Devil Saga (which I hold up as some of the best post-apocalyptic games ever).

Both Japanese and American developers try to play it safe, but safe for a jRPG is so much more interesting (and colourful most of the time) than a wRPG. That's not putting wRPGs down, that's just my opinion.

With Wild Arms at least, I don't really want to know what the story would end up like. The first three had great stories, then the fourth had an odd 'Adults vs Children' thing that seemed really strange, and 5 fell apart at the ending. Did they change writers or something between 3 and 4?

To a point, their policies make sense, to prevent lazy ports, but when their policies affect something that never had the original release here cough*Devil Summoner*cough, they're being far to picky about it. They should make exceptions for things that are out of print or otherwise very difficult to get as well.

This is NISA though. They have a history of supporting the PS2 to a pretty ridiculous degree.

Actually, if they are leading up to III, this isn't a bad idea. Think about it. The series is on like four different consoles, and they're all important to the story, so this way, it would be possible to play (or watch) all of them on one console.

The closest (not identical) battle system I've seen is Valkyrie Profile's actually. Combine that with locations based on where the current party leader is placed and you basically have it. It's not quite as refined, but that's the general gist of it.

The HD Animation RPG thing refers to traditional animation. Studio 4C provided the animation for pretty much the entire game, so the game is intended to look like you're playing an anime. Not a cel-shaded game with an anime art style, an actual anime.

And we're all kind of confused about the thing with the prince too.

So, Tokitowa has been sorta-kinda confirmed for an English translation.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2012-08-13/tokitowa-producer/game-has-english-release-plans

Oddly, it's brought up that there are absolutely no plans for any other language.

The EBGames around here still stock them, but there haven't been any new ones for months now (like Gungnir). I think they're just trying to sell them off.

Image Epoch themselves seem to want it localized, and that helps a lot, and the chances are otherwise pretty high, since it's a PS3 game. I did mention that it reminded me of Thousand Arms, but that was solely because of the visual style.

Framerate seems kind of low, but that's to be expected. Although the battle system looks a little like the one from Thousand Arms. Actually, a lot of stuff from this reminds me of Thousand Arms and I'm not really sure why.

Oh, I meant the character models. I will agree that the backgrounds are amazing. Tales of Legendia is kind of the weird one out though. You can tell that was mostly made by a different team than most of the others. I liked it, but it had a really different feel from the rest of the series.

Tales of Legendia is the one that looks like a PS1 game, and even it doesn't look that bad. It just looks really budget. The only real way in which Abyss is a step back is that it doesn't have cel shading. That's it. Graces looks kind of blah for a PS3 game, especially considering Eternal Sonata, but it's a remake of a Wii game, so I'll give it some slack.

No, but the final dungeon is an massive tower. Massive by video game standards.