I'm pretty disappointed with the difficulty level in Dark Souls. It isn't as challenging as the first. There just seems to be more cheap ways you can die.

I think this will be quite funn...

O hai Yggdrasil!

Compared to other anime it was done well. I actually do like the voices for Abelia and Hamdo especially in the English dub. My main problem with the English dub is Shuzo's voice. It's way too old sounding for his character.

Needless to say the English dub on Hulu takes away from the enjoyability some since the voices don't really fit the characters - at least not nearly as well as they do in the original dub.

But it's still good regardless. I think youtube has the Japanese dub on it.

I agree with this.

Legaia would be a great action RPG though, what with all the martial-arts aspects to it.

This has been my absolute favorite anime series ever since I was 12-years-old. It's about 13 episodes long. Has anyone else seen it? The art is pretty basic. It isn't awful or anything, but it isn't extravagantly detailed. However, the reason why I love it is because of the way the story is told and the subject matter it deals with.

Here's a basic rundown of the plot (copied/pasted from wiki):

While walking home "Shu", the main protagonist sees a person on top of a smoke stack in an industrial park where he used to hang out as a young child, Shuzo tries numerous attempts to communicate with the young girl but she is rather emotionless and quiet. After decoding her name from her lips (Lala Ru) the only other piece of information he finds out about her is her love of watching sunsets. Suddenly there is an explosion and time stops, he finds himself defending Lala Ru from abductors. He is caught in the transportation to another world after attempting to defend the unknown girl. Lala-Ru possesses a pendant containing (somehow) a vast reservoir of water and she has the ability to control that water. Shu discovers the new world, a harsh and deserted landscape and he is beaten and interrogated inside the war ship ordered by the ruthless, psycotic dictator, Hamdo. While in prison he also meets another abducted person called Sara Ringwalt who came from America and was mistaken for Lala Ru. Sara goes through extremely horrific experiences and eventually becomes on edge frightened with fear. Shu is forced to join an army of children and pillage join the soldiers kidnapping villagers for breeding, and conscription into the ever dwindling ranks of Hamdo's army. Shu wishes to return home as well as rescuing the mysterious girl whom he tried to protect.

It's a very adult story, dealing with child soldiers and the brutality of war. The main character Shuzo is very likable and charming, and the evil dictator Hamdo makes for one of the creepiest villains ever.

Has anyone else seen this? What were your thoughts about it? (Positive and negative opinions welcome).

Not to be a buzz kill here, but if your only reason for wanting to learn Japanese is to be able to understand anime/read manga, then learning it is going to be especially difficult. Any language, especially East Asian languages are very difficult for speakers with a Euro-based language as their first. Something like Japanese takes a ton of dedication and you need more than an interest in a section of its culture in order to keep that dedication alive. Now I'm not saying it's impossible, but while I was learning Mandarin for my Asian Studies concentration in college I saw so many students in the Japanese concentration drop out because their only reason for learning it in the first place was because of an interest in anime/manga.

Just make sure learning Japanese is something you're absolutely sure is worth your time and effort. It's a large undertaking. Mandarin Chinese took up about 80% of my time daily and from what I understand Japanese is even more difficult to learn.

Best of luck to you.

They're most likely working on other projects or doing their own thing. Prokion/Contrail got dismantled by Sony. It's sad, too. The first Legaia was a fairly big hit in Japan - it was even re-released on Playstation: The Best, which was Japan's version of our Greatest Hits label. And it sold about 300,000 copies in the USA. That success enabled a sequel, though with the sequel's flop it's obvious why the trademark wasn't restarted. Sony obviously sees that another Legaia game wouldn't make them money. I do wish they'd buy the trademark again just so they could put it on PSN, though.


He also did some work on Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.

If a company is going to release DLC it has to offer a lot to be worth me spending money, not just a theme or a weapons pack or something like that. But if its entirely new levels or quests then I'm okay with it.

But then when they come out with later editions of a game that includes the DLC already in it for the same price as the original game...that ticks me off (i.e. Fallout 3 GOTY Edition has all the DLC included on it for no extra charge)

I'm no attorney, but I'm pretty sure if an independent developer wanted to get the rights to the Legaia name then they'd be able to purchase it since the trademark has been considered abandoned.

Well the graphics outside of battle were meh, but at least the characters, while deformed, were still better than the super-deformed characters in FF7.

The in-battle graphics and the few CGI movies it had were great, though.

EDIT: Here's a behind the scenes video of legend of legaia that I found where you get to see some of the staff who worked on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LaHaGSiNLY

Out of any MMORPG or single-player RPG, what's your favorite battle armor? It can be from your main character(s) or an NPC.

My favorite battle armor belongs to the 61-year-old man Gaxhell (Gaza) from LoL. Why? Because it's made from the bodies of his fallen Seru enemies. Wearing your enemy's hide is just all sorts of awesome. The dual Astral Sword is also a pretty sick weapon of choice.





Your turn.

Maybe it's just me with my tinfoil hat being a conspiracy theorist and all, but I sometimes get the feeling that mainstream websites like Gamespot, Neoseeker, and IGN along with gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, Gamepro, Playstation Magazine, etc don't always post entirely honest reviews. As an example, I recall when most gaming magazines and websites published reviews by critics giving perfect 10 scores for Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4. Or even more recently, multiple gaming sites giving FFXIII a score of 9 or above. Yet these games were typically said by gamers to be less than perfect and not really 10/10 material or even just bad in general (FFXIII).

I think reviewers for game websites/magazines might at times be encouraged to boost the scores of games that have enormous advertising supporting it. My speculations about this were raised even higher after Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot after his review bashing Kane and Lynch 2, which gamespot was advertising all over its site at the time - Link to review that got him fired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBD0cUeeEQc

So do you think some dishonesty goes on behind the scenes? Do you think bribery sometimes comes into play by game developers to have publishers only publish the very positive reviews? Or maybe even for publishers to bash and lower the scores of a developer's competition?

What's your take on this?

Yeah, it's about average length for an RPG. 40+ hrs for a full play through, I think. I'm surprised they managed to fit it all on one disc, actually. Legend of Legaia was easy-peasy as far as mazes/puzzles are concerned, but there are some bosses in the game that seriously tick a load of people off and are infamous on message boards. Most notably the plant monster in the Jeremi sky gardens (Berserker), the bull/minotaur in the volcano (Xain) and that goddamn Che Delilas and his stupid hammer lol.


Hahaha, Noa drop kicking Grantes into the bar because "pimps are bad" was a classic.

World map speed didn't bother me too much. But, although I love the first Legaia (Duel Saga was okay I guess, not anything special though) If I had to choose one aspect of the game that annoyed me it's that everyone joins the party at level 1. It's not an issue when you receive your second party member since you start her playing solo, but when you have Gala join the party and he's at level 1 while the others are at level 7-9 and you have to go through the forests and fight more difficult enemies as well as a tough boss fight later, it's quite irritating. Especially since Gala can't do any arts without spiriting at that point since he only has 2 art blocks at level one and the most basic arts require 3.

At the time of its release I don't think it was criticized for having a bad soundtrack exactly. I think it was criticized for its somewhat small number of tracks compared to other RPGs, meaning the same melodies were reused more often than they should have. But there were about 4 different boss themes, so it's more varied than other RPGs as far as boss music is concerned :D

The songs that were in Legaia are really good, imo, so lack of song #s don't really bother me much. It's got a really different type of style/sound compared to most other RPGs and the songs are filled with lots of bass, percussion, flutes and synth.

Legaia 2: Duel Saga had good music too, but I think it not having any orchestra pieces in either Legaia game may have upset some people who are used to getting that from Squaresoft.