The Shrine

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>So I actually have a problem...I realize that, over the last four years, I've actually missed out on so many must-not-miss games that I will, never, ever play them all. I mean, hell, KH and FFX alone are good for another forty hours of gameplay, at least. Then there's Katamari Damacy...</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>It doesn't matter. Play them anyway. You'll just have to be REALLY selective, and try to find ways of playing them without spending 200 hours on them. (Somebody had a good article about adults and the lack of time to play good videogames.) Besides, there are some other shorter VGs out there.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Console RPG's

1) Skies of Arcadia
2) Xenosaga
3) Baten Kaitos
4) Final Fantasy 10
5) Tales of Symphonia (might be passed by Star Ocean 3 which I just started on)

Other:

1) Vice City
2) Metroid Prime
3) Soul Calibur 2
4) Zelda the Wind Waker
5) SSX series.


All in all, I feel that throughout all of the consoles the line-ups are fairly lackluster. The Resident Evil series is stunning now, but the games aren't very fun anymore, maybe I've grown out of that genre completely. RPG's are still good, but I liked the PSX ones better overall. Mario Kart Double Dash is a good game, but it feels like it is the next evolution of the SNES Mario Kart because of the short tracks (which I don't like, Mario Kart 64 was still by far the most fun). 3D platformers have improved. Sports titles are still bullshit, the only real advances were int he Snowboard games, and NHL Hitz, everything else was just a carbon copy of what we've been playing already for 6 years. Zelda WW wasn't as fun as the N64 Zelda games, and there is nothing to compare with Vagrant story this generation. I am still looking forward to Final Fantasy 12 and the new Zelda game as I faith that those two will be excellent just based on who is developing them.

Now handheld games is a very different story, Gameboy Advance has some excellent titles available, it is an SNES on steroids that fits in the palm of your hand.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>There is no f***ing way I'm going to play Skies of Arcadia/Baiten Kaitos/Tales of Symphonia/Star Ocean 3, not with the average RPG at forty hours and counting. Not to mention Xenogears/Xenosaga, it takes less hours to get your pilot's license than it does to play either one of those monstrosities.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>There is no way I'm going to play Skies of Arcadia/Baiten Kaitos/Tales of Symphonia/Star Ocean 3, not with the average RPG at forty hours and counting.  And don't even talk to me about Xenogears/Xenosaga. There are professional certification programs that take less time to complete than those two.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Metroid Prime 1 and 2, worth getting a Gamecube for; Beyond Good and Evil, best game no one played; Project Gotham Racing (either)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I haven't had as much time to play games the past few years, so I've skipped on a lot of them. Remember, playing videogames is supposed to be FUN. Just play what you have time for and enjoy it. Oh, and Katamari Damacy is both short and easy to jump into and out of.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Xenosaga is only like a 30 hour game. Skip the cinemas and it's probably only 20.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Yeah, but the cinemas are so sweet!</div>

<div style='font: bold 9pt ; text-align: left; '>When I worked at Walmart in the Vision Center, sometimes, if I was doing a lot at once I'd get a pain on the back of my shoulder on my left side whenever I was using the computer to put in customer info, etc. It only happened there while helping customers.

I decided to try FFXI online and after playing for a week, I started getting that same pain while "playing." That's when I decided that I didn't like FFXI. :)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>They're just space soap opera, i.e. "oh no the federation fleet got completely annihilated, again! Who would've thought?"</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>They're just space soap opera, i.e. "oh no the federation fleet got completely annihilated, again!"</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>Aren't there two episodes? Besides, I'm one of the few here who just really doesn't care for anime that much...I liked Spirited Away, Grave of the Fireflies, and a few others, but as a whole I just am not into it for whatever reason.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>No, see, I'm trying NOT to mainline all the electronic heroin of the last four years into my arm at once. I need less games to think about not more. Though I played Prime 1 and if I'd known that if I got 2-3% more completion I would have seen an ending I probably would have been lost in it forevr.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Watch Miyasaki's other stuff if you liked Spirited Away (www.nausicaa.net) and check out Perfect Blue, it rules. BTW, Xenogears was Episode 5 and Xenosaga was Episode 1</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Really? I didn't know that.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>So was Star Trek/Wars, Babylon 5, etc., etc. Doesn't mean I still don't like them. And I didn't think it to be as cliched as you make it out to be.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>As I said earlier, Xenogears was the longest RPG I have ever completed. If Namco took the flashiness out of their game, and made the combo moves faster in the battle system, I would definitely prefer playing a 90 hour game instead of 3 different parts of a 90 hour game 2-3 years apart from each other; only with the flashy graphics.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Yeah, can't remember if it appears in the opening credits or not, but that was one of the big things when Monolithsoft moved over to Namco</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>I was actually happy with the second disc, unlike most, 'cause it got rid of the more boring part of the game (trying to do it with no spoilers). Story is the best I've ever had in an RPG</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>This is the Wheel of Time of the console RPG world, except reading all seven books that I read (before I realized that Robert Jordan had actually started moving backwards in plot development by that point) took me about sixty hours total.

That actually seems long, and makes me think I'm a slow reader, but I figure each one of those takes me about a page and a half to two pages a minute, and considering those are good-sized pages I think that's fairly good. At 7000 pages, that's about 60 hours...</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I always liked the exploration aspect of Xenogears. I did not like how there was nothing to explore on the second disk. The second part is mainly just pure battling and watching text move by at a painfully slow rate. There are a few locations where you actually get to explore new areas, but for the most part, I felt that they REALLY rushed the end of it. I don't mind the second disk as much as a lot of people do, but I definitely feel it is the weaker part of the game; my favourite parts are generally Kislev, Shevat, and Solaris; but I like nearly the whole of the game.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>Agreed, the second disk was very different, i had never seen another RPG do it like that, and i also thought it rocked. It isnt boring to people who enjoy reading and deep stories.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>However, I always felt that certain RPG's of the FMV and post FMV era, namely Final Fantasy Tactics, Skies of Arcadia, and Final Fantasy 8. have managed to stay very solid. I also argue that Xenogears falls into this category, I also feel that the game actually wasn't long enough, because the second disk seemed to be very rushed (they cut a lot of character development short, as well as adventure elements that they could have put in). So if Xenosaga was a 90 -100 hour game that maintained the quality of a shorter RPG, then of course I would prefer getting that over three different games.

Skies of Arcadia could have been two different games as well, but it was one game, disc one and two of Skies of Arcadia are very different. Disk one is sort of where everything gets introduced, the situation, main characters get developed, and the second disk is where the story is. Disk one of Xenosaga is like disk one of Skies of Arcadia, and I assume that disk 2 and 3 of Xenosaga will be more like Disk 2 of Skies of Arcadia. There is one major difference between Skies and Xenosaga though, and that is that I have found that Skies has some of the best adventure elements of any game ever (particularilly in the gamecube version with the lower encounter rates outside, and then with the white map which allows you pretty much to circle the massive world and get in only 1-2 battles, plus all the extras added in); Xenosaga on the otherhand, so far, seems to have very limited adventure elements, and there are two gameply locations in the game that I didn't enjoy playing. On the bright side though, the battles are all very easy, very little leveling up involved, but be warned that you should know the gameplay system before jumping into the game, it can save you a lot of hours; ten minutes of reading through the tutorials and such could save you a lot of pain in the late game.

In my opinion the largest flaw with Xenosaga is the battle system, some of the later standard moves take around 3-5 seconds each, whereas a stabndard attack in say FF8 or FF10 takes less than 1 second; if you can get around this (as I did) then you will likely love the game (if you like long cutscenes), if not then I would recommend against playing it. Another thing about Xenosaga is that probably less than half the game takes place in battle zones, for sure less than 3/5ths, so about half the game takes place in town locations, story scenes, and other non-battle areas. For me, I find that enjoyable, so it is not an issue for me, but for others, they might not like it. I do know that in some games like Sword of Mana, the added story was painful to watch, I just wanted to kick some ass =) But that is a different style of game, and the Sword of Mana story read like a bad Fanfic for Final Fantasy Adventure.

I've rambled on a bit, but essentially, I would have liked to have played the actually moving plot of Xenosaga right after playing Episode 1. Episode 2 isn't far behind now. Xenosaga has stunning graphics for the most part, but I would have easily given all of this up for something similar to Xenogears if it meant getting all of Episode 1 of Perfect Works out faster.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>What makes you think Xenosaga is going to end in 3 episodes? I'm willing to bet Abel doesn't even show up in Xenosaga 2 beyond another 3 second cameo.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Xenogears is about 55+-5 hours I'd say</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I don't think the federation fleet got destroyed in 3 seconds by a single ship from any random faction (Durandal, Simeon, Rhine Maidens, any Gnosis anything, KOS-MOS) in these shows.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Other than the fact that 2nd disk FORGOT to let you choose a text scrolling pace, I really liked it, even if it means you've to be told what happened in key battles</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Yeah, 53 for me, and I was FLYING through the last 5 or so hours</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I don't, I just think that they will finish up Perfect Works Volume 1 with Xenosaga 3. Though it is possible that they'll tack on a 4th one since volume 2 does take place during Abel's lifetime.</div>