tacticknight

@Helghast102 Not good enough to buy a system over. Not to mention that it basically took everything that made the original such a sleeper hit/cult classic and replaced them with generic anime tropes. To be quite honest, the only *good* things that VC2 did were the improvements to the class system and the multiple area maps.

It would have been better had Sega skipped VC2 altogether and released VC3 as VC2.

@(Unverified) It's already been confirmed for Europe.

@locolukah Support Conversations (of the non-gimped variety) have already been confirmed.

@Vesuvium Not sure what you're talking about, given how nice and smooth the 3-D animations were in Radiant Dawn. The story may have sucked and character availability was terrible for anyone not part of the Greil Mercenaries, but the visual aspects of the title can't be denied.

And, after having the disgusting 2-D/3-D battle models in Shadow Dragon and New Mystery of the Emblem ~ Heroes of Light and Shadow, I'd much rather have full-on 3-D animations.

@(Unverified) Perhaps Intelligent Systems should have updated Shadow Dragon more instead? A remake of a 20-year-old game shouldn't feel like it's still 20 years old. Plus, I don't remember seeing any advertising for the title, so Nintendo of America is partially to blame for the low sales too. You can't solely put the onus on consumers.

@(Unverified) Nothing against your efforts though, by the way. I had a similar experience in the game my first time with the aforementioned Valmar's Eye. I up and *quit* playing the game for about three months before finally picking it back up and luckily managing to slog through the battle.

To be quite honest, the first encounter with Valmar's Eye is significantly harder than Valmar's Core, simply because it's a 7-on-4 battle and it's much earlier in the game. As such, your skills and spells are often nowhere near their endgame caliber, even if you've spent tons of time grinding for SC/MC/items.

Beyond that, while Valmar's Core *is* the next hardest boss in the game, if you use the IP Gauge correctly and make correct use of combos, skills, specials, and magic, the fight is definitely manageable. Unlike Xtreme or Grandia III, the number of hits from multihit specials and spells doesn't determine the damage. As such, even if Flying Tenseiken doesn't lift the foe into the air, it still becomes Ryudo's most SP-effective attack since, while it does slightly less damage than Sky Dragon Slash, it also costs half as much SP. Coupling that with other strategic decisions such as using a Max Star Tenseiken Slash/Impact Bomb/Golden Hammer/Lotus Flower while the enemy is in between COM and ACT to instantly cancel their impending instrument of death makes the fight easier.

That being said, I would *love* to see more of the series, but with Miyaji's death last summer, I doubt we will. I wouldn't trust Game Arts or Square Enix to try and extend the series, given the mediocrity that was Grandia III. But, in a dreamer's world, an updated Grandia that made use of newer/improved features in II, Xtreme, and III would be a wonderful high note for the series to die on. At least I can go back and continually experience the wonderful battle system in any of the four titles that were localized whenever I want.

@Traptz

What Granger said. I'm quite sure that there are *plenty* of 13-15 year old kids out there whose only means of income is an allowance and would love to play both games (assuming appropriate ratings or parental approval). Given the (often) limited amount of money allowances yield, dropping ~$80 on two games might be quite difficult.

This is, of course, on top of the fact that many of the players in the target audience consist of people in the low-to-mid 20s; a fair number of these players likely have to contend with astronomical student debt numbers and an absolutely pathetic job market, thus limiting what they can afford to spend for fun.

From the perspective of someone who was first introduced to the series via the original Warcraft (and *was* interested in and saw a decent chunk of WoW up through parts of WotLK), I almost feel as if WoW needs to come full-circle in order to bring back what was fun about vanilla and BC; sure, the "Big Bads" like Sargeras have always been there (behind the scenes anyway), but fundamentally what drove Warcraft was the conflict between the Humans/Alliance and the Orcs/Horde.

As WoW grew, the focus on the internal conflict between the races (mostly) shifted instead to basically saying to the players, "Go save the world." Granted, the lore kept flowing during this time and various plot and character arcs of the past *have* been resolved through this process, which is good for the narrative portion of the game. While plot closure is nice--and, maybe this is nostalgia blinding me--I just can't help but feel that the game felt more fun when the Alliance and Horde were just whomping on each other every day, simply because they didn't like each other. (Also, World Events need to be more prevalent. Instead of a new Daily, how about a new World Event every week or every other week that was fun and could break up the monotony of just leveling to the cap, doing raids, and making new characters (and repeating the process)?)

Yes, quests and dungeons and raids are important too, but I think that it would be easy enough to change something from "Go kill 20 Poisonous Spiders!" to "Fend off the Alliance attack on our village!" to incorporate a *war* setting back into *War*craft. I think I remember one of the Blizzard guys that spoke at BlizzCon saying that the feud would play a part in MoP's story, so I can only hope that it does in a meaningful way. If all else fails, Blizzard should just have Ysera go rapture on Azeroth, sending everyone to the Emerald Dream--a final, restored, and dreamlike state of Azeroth where the Alliance and Horde can battle against each other for all eternity (i.e. press the reset button on the world, basically sending it back to vanilla's appearance (pre-Deathwing, that is) and bringing the focus back on the factions, the politics of the world, and just beating the snot out of the opposing faction).

@Roto13
I don't believe in rewarding companies for selling rushed and/or incomplete products. As much as I enjoy the Soulcalibur series, V was definitely rushed to meet its deadline and because of that, the game's overall content ultimately suffered.

I'm not a tournament player, so the playability of the entry doesn't really affect me one way or another; Beyond slight adjusting for mechanics changes or new characters, II, III, and IV basically played the same to me. Gaming's just a hobby for me; I can't just piss away $60 every other week to buy whatever new game comes out. Since I game in my limited spare time, I want the games that I play to first and foremost be *fun*, and simply going online to want to get a 500-20 W/L record (exaggerated) doesn't constitute fun for me. Creating characters for several hours a day doesn't either, since I wouldn't have much use for them.

I mean, Weapon Master Mode and Chronicles of the Sword weren't much more than glorified Arcade fights against the CPU, but they were still fun in their own right (unlocking stuff in the former and the pseudo-strategic gameplay in the latter). V has nothing like that. If it had a single-player mode that was different/innovative and *fun* like WMM and CotS, then the playability and online components would be wonderful additions. But, as it stands there isn't, and it doesn't look like Project Soul even wants to consider catering to that crowd, instead focusing only on the tournament aspects of the game.