JB0

I suppose it's a little late, but Fry's Electronics/www.outpsot.com has the game for 10$.

He has a name. Everyone COULD say "the 3th brownie to bite it in episode 17", but Kakizaki is far easier.

Ooops. Read that as Metal Gear Solid 1 and Metal Gear Solid 2. My mistake.

It doesn't take much to handle a sword. If you kill about 1000 monsters in 10 minutes.... by the 11 minute you will be much better at the sword then you were when you started. Human blender, here we come! Don't tell me you didn't enjoy watching that useless blonde freak get hammered by lv 1 monsters. But of course. Can't argue with that..... don't forget Star Ocean too! B) Also good. But Tales of Destiny is about the epitome of engaging battles. ... Especially if you get the accessory that lets you enable "manual" control. Makes it control like a street fighter.

Now THAT is a good plot for a game!

Can we get the OTHER 3 games done, too? (Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and Metal Gear: Ghost Babel) You know, so people can get a COMPLETE story.

I never said that. I said I prefered when I was able to costumize the party, instead of recieving pre-made characters right off the bat. Well.... so what it takes years? Its an RPG not real life. If you would follow that trail of thought.... RPGs just wouldn't be possible, otherwise learning spells without anyone teaching is idiotic. And besides... while it might take years to learn something.... pratice makes perfection. If you hold a sword and go around killing animals, of course you will learn how to use a sword. If kill about 1000 animals a day, you will be more proficient with it after a year then you would if you kill 5 animals per year for 50. *sigh* Which is why MOST RPGs give you characters that've already had the training. They want to maintain some semblance of credibility. The practice makes perfect argument is for FF2. 'Sides, it's not like game time = real time. Phantasy Star 3 was multiple generations, if I recall. But Square just figures "Well, they're wearing the hat, so they can do the job". ... Though to be fair, they're wearing magic hats. Yeah... and having the best jobs was part of beating crap up. But no one character class was really best. A team of 4 fighters'll die as fast as a team of 4 white mages. Even the thief had it's uses(running being a big one. my thief saved me more than once when I was in bad shape with no supplies) I liked it myself.... but I was kind of looking at it from the point of view of an average RPGer. Sadly, the average RPGer seems to be "DOOD THIS GAEM SUX ITZ GOT NO FMVS!1111" But then again.... the characters and story were better. Heh. I think that one was actually rather balanced. Neither gameplay nor story ever overrode each other. . Yeah... but it was the characters that made watching those useless classes getting whopped after 1 hit entertaining. Nah. coming into battle with a harp and singing them to death is inherently funny. Hmmmm... Bards charge into battle and sing . Basara charges into battle and sings. I may be onto something here. Its actually... alot of spare time and patience. Everysingle boss had a 1 hit spell weakness or some strategy that allowed the player to beat him without taking damage. VANISH/DOOM! ... Except that didn't work in that one. I wouldn't really call that deep gameplay..... use Sabins Boom Rush, Edgards Chainsaw, Celes with the Ultimate sword, and Cyan with sword Tech 4 and the game was beat. Of course... you could always change Celes for Gogo and have him mimic Sabin or Edgard. The chainsaw is too variable for my tastes. I got more use from the debilitator and drill. Bah! Opinion is like ass.... everyone has one! And most of them stink. Yes... and for that reason I thank Capcom and their Auto option in Breath of Fire. B) I've gone more the other way. tri-Ace's Valkyrie Profile and Namco's Tales series. Fights are fun as hell in those 2. Especially Tales.

I didn't say criticism was irrelevant... I simply said to give the game a break. But I dun wanna. Besides, if people can hail it for being the best story ever, I can bash it for NOT being so. Its not as rough as you thinkg. In FF, what was better, the fact that you could customize your party right off the bat, or the cliche, tried and true plot? I vote for the job system. I vote for the OTHER stuff. FF1 was a dungeon crawler. The main point of the game was beating crap up. As one of the bigger fans of said system... The stat system was best. I've never understood why people don't like it. And regardless which was better, the game focus WAS pretty heavy on the gameplay. I'd argue FF2 was 50/50. Neither part really had an edge over the other. It's not allowed under the odd/even rule, though. How about driving an airship 10 minutes into the game? Point conceded. I think Square voted "WHOO! REAL TIME BATTLES!" They also introduced a strategy element since you often had a sub-optimal party. You get used to having a white mage, and she gets yanked. Enjoying your monk? Tough, we're killing him off. Whee! A bard! ... That has to be in combat. Figured out Cecil's dark wave? Well, he's a paladin now. He has cover, which not a one of our playtesters found a use for. They kept you adapting to new battle situations. You couldn't pick a strategy and stick with it, because it wouldn't work for very long. Speaking of Cecil's dark wave, the character's battle abilities(in 4, but not 2US) added another layer(except for Rosa's aim, which was just annoying since it SHOULD have replaced fight entirely). The level 9 thing is just masochism. ... Not unlike Nintendo Power's infamous "Beat FF1 with 4 white mages" challenge, actually. Heh. I had fun with the equipment screen. Equipping is an art, and one FF6 left more open than most other games in the series. And of couse, battle skills come back. Do we use Celes' Runic, and forfiet the ability to use magic untill our next turn? Or do we blow it off, use some magic, and possibly eat an ultima? Edgar's tools? Use debilitator to soften someone up for our mages? Or just smack 'em with the drill? Okay, Sabin's easy. Bum rush 'em! Cyan's sword techs made you weigh the effect VS the charge time. There were some awesomely powerful ones, if you felt you had time to wait for it. Et cetera. IMO, FF6 had rather deep gameplay. Well, yeah. Counterbalanced by the lack of a proper equip screen. I second the vote! YAY FOR EQUIPMENT AND SKILLS! ... Hey, it had one of my favorite game systems. Yah. Guess so. Personal opinion is there's a lot more there than people credit some of the games with. ... Though at one point I described every FF above 3 as suffering from "rubberband syndrome", a term I coined to describe RPGs where all you do is slap OK in most fights because a rubber band could play them as well as a human being. I think I was in a bad mood at the time.

Had FF on its name.... still FF. Chocobo was a spin off and it did not have FF on its name. You also forget Chocobo Mystery dungeaon. Well, I wasn't going to go to Chocobo's Dungeon, since I knew Chocobo Racing had FF characters, which I wasn't very sure about for Dungeon. Err... no. Ghaleon was lame simply because he got his ass kick by a angst ridden toddler named Alex... and then turning soft when Zophar was ready to destroy the blue star (or was it silver star?) Gah. Damn remake. Alex kicked ass. I know because he was mute, so the player got to fill his dialouge in. He was bad-ass. And the original Silver Star is still the official version, because Silver Star Story doesn't fit continuity, even after EB Remix was released. Zophar was going to destroy the world of Lunar. Which, hypothetically, was known as the Silver Star in olden times. That was Ghaleon's hometown. He wanted to RULE it, not destroy it. And he didn't even have much motivation for THAT after finding out that Dyne wasn't dead. His motivation was revenge for his friend's death. He kept going afterwards because he was comitted to that course of action already(ironically, his seeking revenge on the world for Dyne's death is what CAUSES Dyne's death. All very tragic). Changing jobs isn't exacly changing party members. I mean.... literally. You only had 4 members all the time in 5, while in 6 you had like 8 to 10. Which in my opinion decreased the level of character development. I thought we were talking from a strategic viewpoint. Sorry. Yeah... but other then being simply normal attacks that simply drove the numbers sky high... desperation attacks were nothing like limit breakers. Square themselves SAYS they are. Check the back of FFAnthology some time. I believe the package says "See the origins of the Active Time Battle and Limit Break!!!" ... But check it in a store. Don't buy it. When I said focus... I did mean as in "Hey! Its the job system again!!". You get to chose the job, each job has its limitations. Combining the right character classes were much of a strategy then anything else. Ah. I'd say the focus was more battle strategy. Any party can beat the game(even 4 white mages), it's just a matter of what style. Thats debatable. Each person would have their own opinion on what would be more significant, as the retargeting would have been a natural evolution for anyone with half a brain (and yet Camelot seems to be unable to implement that on Golden Sun <_< ). I still maintain retargeting does nothing but strip strategy from the battles. It's not an evolution to occur in pen and paper RPGs, because it MAKES NO SENSE. Once you issue the command, you're commited. From that point, your character starts moving. If the moster dies, too bad. The warrior's already headed that way. He can't stop, reassess the situation, and redirect immediatly. Even if he could, he's still lost time from comitting to the old attack. I saw it as a minor triviality, personally. Thats also debatable.... as half of it were really unneccessary and simply helped the gamer not to throw his controller at the TV out of boredom. Or draw the game out needlessly so they could have a 60-hour game instead of a 30-hour game? I absolutely loath pointless redirections. .Most ppl I know only played it for the story as the game system bordered unplayable. I liked it... it was far better, plot wise, then 7 and 10. I won't argue the point, as I haven't played 10 and 7 wasn't exactly well-written. But seriously, the gameplay was like every other FF since 3. Enter battle. Tap attack. Keep tapping attack. Win battle. Bad gameplay in an RPG is nothing new. I've slogged through rubber-band mush-quests before for the story. But like I said, most of the people I've spoken with found FF8's writing to be the killing blow. Case in point: " Oh wow! We all grew up together, What are the odds of this big a conicidence happening?" " Why didn't we remember? Oh yeah, because summon monsters eat memories!" " So why are we still using them?" " Because we're too stupid to even drink a bottle of water without one!" " Oh yeah!" ... Okay, the last2 lines drifted into gameplay. It sure as heck beats getting the predefined magic user, that has killer magic but if so much as a feather touches him/her they die. The predefined brawler/defender, good at taking hits but never good at helping out in a boss battle. The predefined hero, good at everything. The predefined hybrid, jack of all trades master of none , never seem to be able to do anything right. The predefined thief, gets hit once and died, plus the annoying luck factor when stealing.. So all other RPGs suck? My point is it takes years of training to become proficient in a given skill. You don't just change hats and go "Okay, I know I've never held a blade before, but I'm a swordsman now." It's idiotic. ... Which isn't to say it's not fun, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

You'd have a heck of a time finding it - it was from one of the pages edited out in the N American version for being too .. (ahem) ... "naughty". PM me if you want a jpeg of it. WHEE! LESBIANS! ... *ahem* That is... Errr... I've seen them before. Animeone, Anime-Kraze, Anime Junkies ... I think anbu did one too, but I can't remember. You can find them on IRC and Kazaa without too much trouble, and I know torrent links were available for a while. It's out there, and will be released in N America soon enough, if you're on diail-up. Dialup? No need to be insulting. Pretty much all of the main characters from the movie - Kusanagi (obviously), Batou, Aramaki, Ishikawa, Togusa. Maybe someone else that's escaping me at the moment. Are they using the movie Kusanagi, the comic Kusanagi, or the original form? I don't think that much - certainly not like the manga. It still has a more serious tone like the movie did, but there are the Tachikoma shorts that are kind of humerous. Just wondering.

The ones with #s.

Well, it can't exactly be WORSE. ... Well, not while bearing any resemblance to Ghost in the Shell. Some of us rabid Masamune Shirow fans may take exception to that, mister. Then again, from my knick and avatar, you can probably tell my opinion is hardly unbiased. Yup. Given a little time, I could probably tell you exactly what page that pic was from, too. Being in color helps, as does the jungle environment. Lets me narrow it down a LOT. Maybe I made a mistake reading the comics first. But if I'd seen the movie first, I likely never would've read anything of Shirow's. As it is, I'm something of a fan. I've read the Shirow comics I have multiple times, kicked myself for not having the cash to grab other stuff when I found it, and recommended his work to others. I still maintain that the point of the Ghost movie was to reduce Motoko from a strong female lead to a simmering pile of angsty crap. Is someone fansubbing those?(ask another stupid question) I've never really kept up with fansubs. Good! Which characters return? Or do they just resemble the old characters? YAY! What I've seen of Shirow's works also tends to inject humor when things start getting too tense(some more than others, obviously). Is that there? Hey, I was just saying it would be damn near impossible for it to be worse than the movie while remaining a Ghost in the Shell product. Because, you know, I hated the movie. Heehee.

That rule is rough at best. It doesn't really hold up to any serious examination. And there is a diffrence between minimal writing and bad writing. Since character class is only selectable at game start, it damn well BETTER NOT focus on the job system, because that would mean the entire focus of the game was party creation. What makes the game sytem unique: No experience levels or character classes. Stats operate on the use it or lose it principle. You use swords, your muscles get big, your brains get little. You lob lighting, your IQ goes up, your strength goes down. Events in battle effect every stat except luck. In my opinion it's the most intricate stat engine to date in ANY RPG, requiring one to actually THINK about their actions and what they'd do to character growth. I don't recall if it was this game or FF3 that introduced front and back ranks. And again you latch onto a relatively trivial point.A far mroe signifigant change was the addition of retargeting from dead monsters. This "feature" served to strip some 95% of the strategy from battles, and is a large part of why I prefer the first 2 games over ALL successive games as far as gameplay goes. You mean IV. And the addition of real-time battles was the big revolutionary feature. Battle was no longer turn-based. That was a BIG deal. Reason only FF and DQ mastered it: most RPGs refuse to touch it on the basis of it's a hideous bastardization of the concept of character class. Ghaleon would SO kick Kefka's ass. FF6's magicite system would be further refined in FF7's materia system. And both FF3 and 5 had, in essence, selectable parties. you just changed character class. FF6 had you swapping characters to change class. Personally, I think Cloud had no real development. They just threw 4 or 5 backstories out and left it to the player to pick one. Any argument to the contrary invariably makes critical failings by choosing scenes that are "true" scenes, with no supporting evidence. The only person that could really know what's going on is Cloud, and his head is so f'ed up that nothing he says can be taken as true. I'd give most character development to Barret. This being ACTUAL development instead of throwing out a new story at random to be discredited at a later date. It WOULD'VE gone to Cait Sith, for going froma backstabing traitor that blackmailed his way onto the team to soemone who would sacrifice his life to protect the black materia, had he not been a remote-control toy and therefore immune to the dangers. Limit breaks were a variation of FF6's desperation attacks, where a severely injured(stooped over) character would occasionally bust out a hyper-move when they attacked. The materia system was an interesting concept, but needed refinement. The removal of a proper equip screen was a slap in the face. And FF7 had a hell of a lot more story than any of the previous games. Beg pard? Most people I know hate the game because the story is steaming crap. I know it's why I quit playing. I couldn't stand to read one more line of badly-written, hopelssly-cliche'd text. Interesting concept,. poor execution. Nooooo, FF7 did that. If it's not a silly-looking boat with propellers sticking out of hte deck, I don't want it. Better than the previous 2 outings. And the equip screen returned! YAY! I bow out, not having a PS2 and having no interest in FFX. Not a true FF. If you count Tactics, you have to count Chocobo Racing too. And good luck there. Square broke that "pattern" a long time ago. I'd say 5 was the last to really fit it, and that's a stretch, as FF2 had a very heavy game system. If a game has a plot, and this plot is forced to your attention at every opportunity, a bad plot becomes a valid criticism. FF7 refused to let you ignore the story. Therefore, a criticism of it is relevant. No problem.

THAT'S what that is? I thought Guld just had some sort of bad-ass logo on his jacket, because he was special like that.

LIES! It IS real! It's just running behind schedule from paperwork!

Well, it can't exactly be WORSE. ... Well, not while bearing any resemblance to Ghost in the Shell.

YAY!

On the one hand... As children's toys, those joke machines would be GONE now if they hadn't been glued. I broke one 3 times before we chunked it. Glued it back twice, then pitched it. Specifically, the bars connecting the front and back fuselage were prone to failure. At least on my Max. On the other hand... What's the point of a non-transformable VF? I had a crisis when my dad was saying "We can fix it, but it won't be able to transform if we do. Whatever mode we fix it in it's stuck." It was like "But it's a TRANSFORMER! Can't you fix it RIGHT?" ... Transformer, of course, being a generic term for any robot that changes, including GoBots, Robotech, and Voltron. Anyways, that was repair #2. I picked "robot".

But Adventure wasn't an RPG. It wasn an adventure. Dragonstomper was an RPG, though. There was a brief flood. Then things died back down as people realized that what "RPG fan" means in America is "Square whore who just likes staring at FMVs". Things now are about back at the pre-FF7 days. The odd RPG gets released, but no one pays any attention to it. The exception is a game released by Square. And this is a GOOD thing? FF7's biggest contribution to the industry was undoing all the lessons learned since the introduction of CD-ROM technology about graphics VS playability. Do you remember the swarm of FMV games on literally everything? Grainy video, minimal interactivity, but it was FMV so it would be good. Only it wasn't. There wasn't any gameplay. No meat to back up the pretty movie clip gravy. It was a hard, painful lesson to learn. The industry has again forgotten that a game has to do more than look good, that it has to PLAY good. And I think we can both agree that hailing FF7 for birthing the modern graphics whore is just INCREDIBLY wrong. When you strip the FMVs and pre-rendered backgrounds from FF7, what you're left with is a mediocre game. It shows promise, but takes a perverse pleasure in shooting itself in the foot every time it's about to cross the line from average to great.

I think it's Chimera.

Of course, the Zentradi had good reason to be somewhat underwhelmed by our forces. Our ships were TINY, we hadn't even figured out beam weaponry yet, Britai's fleet was larger than our ENTIRE space force, and the vast majority of our infrastructure was just sloppy(under the zentradi assumption that everyone's a soldier and everything's a military facility). Us knowing how to repair ships and build nukes was just shocking to them. I mean, they were the mightiest force in the galaxy and they couldn't do it. And we were just a bunch of redneck hicks that hadn't even made a single hyperspace flight yet. Hell, we didn't even have an active colony on Mars. As I recall, they were initially thinking we'd found some prototype Supervision Army vessel, because we were so low-tech we had no business repairing a ship, much less redesigning it.

No. But then, what Macross entry ISN'T an attempt to make some money off of Macross fans? The original TV series and... the original TV series. Thank you. It really shows nothing that hadn't already been stated in the final episode of the original TV series. Misa was captain of Megaroad 1. Hikaru was not letting her leave without him. Minmay asked permission to come along, and was invited by the captain of the mission. Had Misa said no, she probably would've stayed home out of respect for Misa's wishes(What? Minmay did a LOT of growing in those last few episodes.), but with Misa inviting her along, what's to stop her? The biggest celebrity alive as a passenger on the Megaroad 1 would've been GOOD PR for a project deemed vital to humanity's survival, so we know darn well that no one else involved in the project was going to shoot her down. It's a GOOD collection of music videos, but it doesn't really add anything to the story.

Parasite Eve is a great game, but I gotta disagree with you on PE2. I thought it was unoriginal and awful. Gone was the old PE gameplay and instead they gave us Resident Evil. That games only saving grace was its beautiful cinema scenes. PE1's gameplay was an embarassment. PE2 has VASTLY superior gameplay. If being the 100th Resident Evil clone is what constitutes good gameplay, then yeah, I'd have to agree. Must also explain why PE2 went straight to the bargain bin. I'm sorry, but good gameplay is NOT an M4 rifle that shoots 500 exploding poison gas shotgun shells. It also isn't real-time motion but not real-time combat. PE2 played realistically. Sure it was a tad awkward at times, but it was LIGHTYEARS beyond PE1. And in a game that takes place in the "real" world, and uses real weapons and armor, realism matters. Hell, if you wanna get REAL picky, my father criticized the game on the basis of being able to switch firing modes on the M4A1 in combat. On a REAL M4A1, you flip a switch. Aya shifted modes too fast to do that. And of course, she couldn't change fire modes at all with an attachment on. I'm rather certain that some of the gameplay changes were actually in response to reviewers accusing PE1 of being a Resident Evil ripoff(and a bad one at that). It was something along the lines of "Okay, we're being billed as an RE game because our monsters were ugly mutations of real animals. What can we do about that?" "Ummm, we can run with it?" "Okay, do that."). PE2 doesn't really restrict your supplies the way the RE series does, which is really what makes a survival horror game. Well, unless you play in the hardest difficulty settings. The ammo supply boxes ALONE made PE2 not an RE clone. Never mind being able to buy armor and healing items. But mainly, being rid of the timer bar on physical attacks(I can squeeze 5 rounds out in 2 seconds, but I have to wait 2 minutes before I can do it again! Whee, my gun sucks!)and the idiotic customization system are what made PE2 so much better.

Happy Dreamland is a great place. You should try it some time. Yeah, but just trying importing DVD's from there. If I could get my quantum modem working I would. ... Or at least download some rips of Kazaa or something.

But Meteor would've killed the planet, not just the life on its surface. The lifestream saved ITSELF. Whether it saved those obnoxious humans is open to debate.