Just finished this this evening. For me it sort of jumped the shark after the last few missions.

Probably that the collection includes the interquels/midquels between the first and second KH games.

This game's gonna suck.

Kidding, it'll be interesting to see how they handle Lightning solo, I think it could be like Parasite Eve, which I enjoyed.

I've been largely enjoying the game except for that stupid fucking sidequest where you have to escort the braindead merchant to your town, which is too easy to fail.

I'm always skeptical of open-world games since they tend to do a shitty job telling you how to advance the main storyline, and I personally think non-linearity is vastly overrated, and that linear titles tend to have better plots.

Yes, since it's supposedly one of the best of the series and we're actually seeing it in English.

Quoted for truth. The sites you had to unlock with Virus Cores definitely qualified as needless padding.

I wasn't particularly fond of the first .hack series, since you're basically paying full price four times for what could have very easily been one game. I heard the //GU series is better, though, but I haven't played them.

Beat this recently, and I don't really understand people's complaints about the ending.

The Shining Force GBA remake provides more story as incentive for using certain characters in battle, and in a game with a large playable cast, that's a definite appeal for changing up your party makeup often.

A bad story does not necessarily a bad game make.

Even if Xillia is Europe-only at least the PS3 isn't region-coded for PS3 games. I do hope they don't pull a Tales of Destiny and deny us part two of the story in Englsih.

I think the voice acting was more an issue with writing than acting, particularly during the "laughing scene." You could hire Patrick Stewart for that part and it still wouldn't have sounded any better. If I were in charge of localization, I would have just probably cut that scene out. Death to all who insult FFX's gameplay, though.

In Wild ARMs 2, I try maxing every character's skill that recovers HP whenever their Force Points go up, which made enemy attacks actually heal my characters.

You can also break Phantom Brave by creating high-level random dungeons and giving them the Failure title to make them easy to go through and level up.

I typically only replay RPGs to get an updated opinion on them so I can rewrite previous reviews I did for them, although there are rare instances in which I'll actually go through a game again, for instance, recently with Ys Origin or Valkyrie Profile DS so I could see all the endings.