Gaijin

When do you get Aurora Scarfs? I just started Chap. 13 and have headed back to Gran Pulse to do some hunts. I don't remember seeing them in any of the stores, hope I haven't overlooked them.

They are upgraded Whistlewinds.

Since the old thread is history, thought I'd post this: Buy 2 PS3 Greatest Hits titles, get one free from WallyWorld:

Buy 2 Get 1 Free PS3

Good way to pick up some good titles at a bargain.

On the FF stuff, I liked X, but didn't like Tidus that much. I liked the story, music, and most of the characters. I especially liked the summons in that game.

That said, I really like XIII. I'll agree that I doubt a demo will be able to convey the battle system well enough. It is probably the most exciting "wait until your turn" fighting I've played in an RPG.

Chapter 10. Almost 25 hours in. I will echo the above by Dreamweaver and say I love the battle system. The fights get so fast and crazy it's awesome when you pick the right "deck" of paradigms for different situations/enemies.

Love the art direction too...possibly the most beautiful game I've seen in a long time. Not a big FF fan but this one is tops in my book.

I have mostly "low str high mag" weapons equipped and upgraded. I mean, Hope is never going to be a commando, so I'm maxing out his magic for his ravager and synergist roles. Same for Vanille--it's about her only option really. Sazh is only "occasionally" a commando, so he too has a magic-centric weapon---and interestingly, his "most magical" weapon is more balanced than other character's equivalent. To me this says I'm on the right track for him.

Lightning has the most-upgraded weapon, Gladius, as it's so blatant she's inherently a commando. It's actually a slight annoyance to me, as her original/cut-scene weapon looks so much cooler. But it's simply inferior to the Gladius when she spends 90% of her time doing pure physical damage.

IMHO a "balanced" weapon isn't going to do much good in this game, as even with all the paradigm shifting, most characters still fall into primarily physical or primarily magical roles.

PS---anyone found a diagram or something that shows how her gunblade unfolds? It's so fast I can't figure it out in-battle, and they rarely show it do it in cutscenes. (plus there's 3 forms, not 2) I know there's plenty of stuff showing how Cloud's Advent Children sword works, there's gotta be something similar for Lightning.

Only thing I've seen so far. I thought it was like a paratrooper knife at first, and in a sense it sorta is like a hybrid folding balisong/paratrooper blade/gun.

Free anime has been offered through the Playstation Store with other shows once in a while. I got an episode of Vehicle Era Voltron and Full Metal Alchemist season two a while back, both dubbed.

Did anyone here get White Knight Chronicles? How is that going for people? I'm thinking about buying either that or Demon Souls.

I got White Knight as a gift. It's not bad. Haven't finished it yet though. Kinda overshadowed by FF XIII.

I am about 5 hours in so far. Can now use Paradigm shifts and got the first Eidolon. Didn't think the Paradigm's would really make much of a difference but it does add quite a bit of strategy to the fights. Battles up until the first tougher enemies seemed out of place until you have a swarm of them chewing your people to shreds. Paradigm Shift!

Vanille's voice acting is irritating me. I'm actually ok with the dub for this otherwise. But dual voice tracks would've been better.

Looks pretty good. Want to see what role Munn plays...

Played the first bit of Final Fantasy XIII up to the first save point. . .leaves me feeling rather indifferent; I'll probably be back to playing MW2 again tonight.

So you played through for like 10 mins?

I honestly have only played FF VII, VII, and X fully (that I can recall). I've played parts of XII and VI(III), and *shudder*X2. I liked X's music a lot and I liked VIII's story. Other than that, FF has never been the RPG series for me. I liked Phantasy Star, Lunar, and the Xeno games, plus Skies of Arcadia.

That said, XIII does look cool enough for me to pick up, and so far I love the music to I've heard. And I'm somewhat surprised to admit, I like Leona Lewis' theme better than the Japanese original theme music to the game.

I really enjoyed Lunar, the dialogue and the story. It was just a fun game in general, plus it was relatively hard since for every level you went up the enemies went up as well so everything was always stronger than you.

The original Sega CD Lunar TSS remains my all time favorite RPG. Especially the music, which they happen to keep on changing in every remake.

"Importance" thing aside, it's an amazing game. If you have a PS3, you owe it to yourself to play this one.

Too busy watching the Olympics. Will check PSN later.

I wouldn't turn your system on today. Might be a weird calendar bug, that is affecting the non slim ones that were turned on today. Some suspect it's a firmware internal clock leap year bug. Resets your date to 12-31-99, trophies won't sync, cannot connect to PSN, sand games which losd trophies won't work, not to mention PSn titles and downloaded PS1 titles.

PSN is down.

Yup. Big time. Affecting game discs that register trophies to play by not allowing you to start them.

Am I the only one that is a bit upset at Gainax's blatant "let's see how many versions we can release of each movie to suck more money out of the otaku" strategy?

Solution: Do not watch or buy it unless you want to.

Well,I never got into Fallout.Besides I done so much on Oblivion to quit now,I am up to level 11 and I am on my way to close the first Oblivion gate.

awe HECK!!,All this RPG talk made me remember I need to finish Xenogears and Xenosaga 2&3 again and restart FF12(I had over 190 hrs on this one and still not finished) because all memory lost when my PS3 died last june.

Well now I got reasons to enjoy my old games!

Always back your saves. Even the locked saves can be copied when using the back up utility in the PS3.

On a side note,, I just got a 500GB hdd for my original 60GB which had a 160GB upgrade a couple years ago. Using the back up utility, I transferred everything to an external, and then back to the new 500gb drive. EVERYTHING copied over, including downloaded games, and video from the PS Store. I was under the impression the games would have to be re-downloaded. I didn't use the back up utility the first time I upgraded, just backed the saves to a thumb drive. Going to throw the 160GB one in my 80GB.

This show is getting really good.

Grandia was very good. Pick it up with no reservations.

The Saturn version was superior.

Another plus for the PS3 version is that it will be released on a single Blu-Ray disk. How many disks will the X-Box 360 have? Two, maybe three?

The 360 one comes on 3 DVD's.

Yeah, I'm not claiming that the 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII will be better, nor am I claiming that the 360 version is always better. Just that it happens often enough that, combined with a few other reasons, I feel like I've been conditioned to favor the 360 for gaming and the PS3 for media.

As far as sales go, I do think FFXIII will do well on the PS3 mostly because I think that a lot of FF fans had already adopted the PS3 as their platform of choice since it was first announced for the PS3 before the console was even available (some of these people would be the same people who wailed about how Squeenix "betrayed" them when FFXIII was announced for the 360, because heaven forbid a series you like reach a wider audience). I don't know that it's really fair to say that an Xbox 360 gamer is a certain type of gamer. The 360 has had plenty of JRPGs, and games like Resistance and Killzone have done well enough for the PS3. I rather think that in the past few years there's been a trend away from Japanese games in general. That's not to say that there haven't been Japanese games, or hit Japanese games, being released. But when you look back at some of the biggest titles in the last few years (Uncharted, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Call of Duty, Portal, Arkham Asylum, Bioshock, God of War, etc) they come out of Western studios.

I'll stick to the notion that most 360 only owners are "certain types" of gamers, just as PS3 only, and Wii only owners tend to have a certain stereotype. As much as I hate to admit it, most gamers on average do fall into one particular camp.

Yeah, Western studios are now pretty much tops in console development. For every Japanese console game you'll see a dozen DS, PSP, and mobile games in Japan now and I don't see the trend changing.

Is this Rebellion the same that did the original original (Alien, not Aliens) vs Predator on the Jaguar? I had that game, and back then it was pretty cool in 1994...

OK, I'm a few hours in on WKC. I don't get the Lunar vibe anymore, but I don't really get any kind of vibe other than I still keep on playing. It's not great, but it's not terrible. And there's just something about it that I do like, but I honestly can't say what it is...the music during Boss scenes must be unremarkable because I honestly cannot remember the music from them. I think it's more than the sum of it's parts, but I suppose hardcore RPG players might find it lacking. Haven't really tried online quests yet but those commercials with the crystal camera make me wanna try.

I'm happy with it, hope I finish it before FF XIII drops. I have way too much to play right now...WKC, Bioshock 2, Heavy Rain, FF XIII, and GOW III too. Not to mention I picked up some bargain things I missed on my vacation, like Wet and the original Indigo Prophecy. If I keep on playing the way I have, I should be done with the above by...oh, Halloween.

And I still need to finish my second play through of Bayonetta on hard.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect that 95% of MW'ers are getting it for PS3. I mean, between Achievements and the fact that most multiplatform games wind up better on the 360, my inclination is usually to go with the 360 version now.

That's true of games developed with the 360 as a lead platform, but this was a quick port to the 360 so I doubt it will be "better" on 360. Multiple discs, compressed audio, lower res cutscenes, and a lower res in game so far are kinda pointing this one towards PS3. Square released a few 360 shots awhile back, and though they look similar enough, the 360 version has weird hair dithering. Doubt you'd notice it in motion but we'll see.

I think this will be the first multi platform title to outperform the 360 version in sales two to one. Mostly because I doubt this is a 360 gamer's type of game.