Zealot

If you haven't read what I intended to respond to Josh with, do so. I'm not a moron, as your snarking would reveal you to think; I obviously have reasoning behind what I said, and if you still have a problem, whatever. It's not worth it to me to churn out massive tl;drs to elaborately parse out my own typing or refute anyone else's.

Yes, good ol' no-localization Namco. If you want any hope of seeing this game in the U.S., fire off an email to XSEED. Apparently the localization/distribution rights to certain Namco-Bandai games are actually attainable, provided they're not a flagship series like Tales. I asked one of the XSEED employees about Fragile for the Wii and they didn't outright say that it was impossible for them to get it, but, rather, that it was one of their most-requested games and that they'd look into it.

Believe me, they have no qualms about dashing your hopes when you make a request, so when they say they're going to look into something it's not just empty placation--I've been flatly told "not viable in North America" multiple times. With Atlus sitting on their hands churning out half-baked Success Corp. and Global A titles, XSEED's probably your only option.

Of course, they are very sales-conscious considering that they survive on the thinnest of profits, so this slight hope itself may be contingent upon Blue Dragon Plus' sales in NA.

So is Tony Hawk's Motion (featuring HUE PIXEL PAINTER!!!) supposed to be an example of good or bad 3D graphics on the DS? While I'm definitely waiting until Motion hits the bargain bin, I played through the DS version of Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, which doesn't look all that different from what I saw in the Motion trailer, and the environments were graphically on par with ToI or any of the other standards for DS 3D.

Or, the reverse could happen and the $10 Squeenix Tax and the $5 Nintendo Tax could combine to form the nightmarish $15 Squintendo Tax, causing the game to be an unprecedented $45. I can see Iwata and Horii plotting behind the scenes right now--"If we're going to use Dragon Quest as a lure for casuals, why not? It's not like they know the price of an average DS game anyway, mwahahahahaha"

Cue a forked bolt of lightning outside nearest window, thunder crashes, and end scene.

That was meant to be a reply to Josh. Pardon me while I remind myself why I don't comment at 1:30 A.M. during finals week when I'm dead tired.

Yeah, my inability to place DQ in the RPG spectrum comes from inexperience with it (as I said, I just started DQIV but didn't get to play enough yet to get a feel for the game as a whole). If the game/series turns out to be a grindfest with little in between, then it's fine to determine its sub-genre based solely on combat and it would indeed be a turn-based/strategy RPG and not an ARPG.

The reason I mention Persona as an ambiguous case is because there are large portions of the game not immediately connected to the grind--not just from the standpoint of navigating the character but the objectives (i.e. school/relationship sim portions). From a combat standpoint it's turn-based, but overall it defies, at least for me, categorization.

Well, I was using Tetsuya Nomura as a counter-example because he does the character design for all three, but I can see your point because, although some art for things like KH, TWEWY, and Dissidia looks the same, admittedly he does use more realistic designs for flagship FF titles.

Point taken, since it's not just about the art :)

In DQ (as far as I know; I'm only a little into DQIV) the overworld and towns are freely navigable, so it's definitely closer to action than strategy, however, both of these labels are becoming increasingly obsolete as more and more RPGs borrow elements from each other. I'm playing Persona 4 right now, and I would be completely at a loss if I had to sum up its RPG sub-genre in one word.

Couldn't tell you about Chrono Trigger. I've never played it (not that I've never wanted to, though) and haven't been following the remake.

Wait, Chrono Trigger, Blue Dragon, and Dragon Quest are ripoffs of Dragonball because they all have the same character designer? By that same line of reasoning, Kingdom Hearts, TWEWY, and who knows what else would all be ripoffs of the modern Final Fantasy games. Do I need to spell out how illogical that is?

ASH is an SRPG, DQ games are ARPGs with turn-based battles. Either way, they're both sub-genres of RPG. Nintendo is making a huge mistake if they think they can use Dragon Quest to bait casuals into the DS userbase and keep them there, though. While they can obviously promote the hell out of it and rack up sales, people who are new to gaming or even just new to RPGs will not find it accessible once they start playing and realize their decision was based on the colorful and cartoony look of the game.

Apparently, even if ASH could sell to the base in NA/EU, it couldn't sell to the Good Housekeeping set and so Nintendo must have withdrawn their publishing support for it at the last minute, and, in an inexplicable move, they're still keeping their hands on it. It would have obviously been out ages ago if they had ever pawned it off to Atlus or XSEED. It smacks of ego--no one is allowed to profit off of a bad decision of Nintendo's.