Pluralizations

So, Mario Kart Wii will allow you to play online using your Miis for global time rankings.

90% of all players are just going to be Chuck Norii.

Super Mario Galaxy Review

I'm not nearly enthused about Super Mario Galaxy as everyone else seems to be. While filled with plenty of truly outstanding moments (The Bowser levels and Splatter Matter, namely), it contains significantly less content than the previous two 3-D Mario games. For example, you fight the same boss for a star in each of two levels, and you can beat them without getting hit for another star. Unfortunately, the boss fight was too easy and simple to even justify one fight with it.

Hell, the entire game is just too easy and repetitive. I recommend waiting until it drops in price before picking it up, but you should get around to playing it, eventually.

It is truly heartbreaking to see the reviews coming in for both Assassin's Creed and Simcity Societies; the prior for the amazing potential it held, and the later for butchering one of my favorite series.

Persona 3

I've been a huge fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series until now, but Persona 3 has changed that. While absolutely brilliant at times, the game is far longer than it should be and completely flounders near the end. There is simply not enough content to fill 300 calendar days; before the game is even half over, all of the non-combat stats will be maxed out, leaving you with nothing to do during the Evening and Late Phases during the days you choose not to go to Tartarus. Since the entire month's worth of quests, bosses, and exploration can be completed in two days (and frequently just one), too many phases have to be skipped to no benefit. This wouldn't be that big of a problem if the load times were not so bad, but they are. Furthermore, by the end of the game, even the daytime phases will be wasted. There are too many restrictions as to what S-Link threads you can do on what days, so once you complete a few, you may be left with nothing to do on certain days of the week. Lastly, the last few hours of the game are drawn-out, cliched, ridiculously easy, and offers none of the vital explanations necessary to truly understand the game. The FES expansion released in Japan explains a lot, fills in some of the gaps, and gives the game another difficulty, but, as the game currently stands, the moments of brilliance are too spread out to justify the 70+ hour investment.

It isn't ALL bad though; six or seven bosses can be a bit a difficult, some of the music is outstanding, and the S-Link stories are awesome. However, they are not enough to compensate for the terrible endgame.

Their ages show.

Despite believing that PSX was generally a better platform for RPGs than the SNES, the games for the older system have aged better than those of the PSX, at least technically. The games of the PSX generation just have substantially more depth to both their gameplay and storylines, but long load times, slow text speeds, and blurry sprites have made a large cross-section of the PSX catalogue nearly unplayable. I fucking loved Xenogears back in the day, but the game is even harder to get into all these years later.

The cream of the crop, however, hasn't aged nearly as bad.
*Final Fantasy IX- Slight lag in the battle system can be annoying, but the load times are relatively small.
*Final Fantasy Tactics- Hasn't aged bad at all. Still a visual and aural treat.
*Persona 2- The battle system feels a little bit less polished than if it were to be published today, but still has far more depth than the vast majority of RPGs.

Most of the Squaresoft RPGs from the SNES area are as good as ever, technically speaking, but the gameplay is a bit simplistic by modern standards.
*Final Fantasy IV- Great music and storyline, but the lack of party selection or skill development makes the gameplay the most simplistic of any FF.
*Final Fantasy VI- Still a great game, in general.
*Chrono Trigger- suffers from the same simplicity problems that FF4 has.

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 2 is an unusual mix of great and fucking atrocious elements. As far as the main gameplay mechanics are concerned, KH2 is one of the best Action-RPGs in years. Both the boss fights and regular battles are a lot of fun, albeit easy, even on the hard difficulty. And as for the story, I like the main parts quite a bit. The problem, you see, is sojourns into Disneylands.

Every single time the game sends you away from Organization XIII, Twilight Town, or Hollow Bastion into the various Disney Worlds, you end up being treated to long cutscenes that are basically CG renditions of your favorite Disney movies, except with bad animation, terrible voice acting, and completely random gaps in the dialogue that combine to make the cutscenes excruciatingly painful and also entirely expendable. I have never skipped through so many cutscenes in my life, and through it all, I don't think I missed a single important point of storyline.

The story and worlds aren't ALL bad. The World That Never Was, Timeless River, and Space Paranoids are all GREAT worlds with interesting characters and boss fights. If Kingdom Hearts 3 abandons the traditional Disney worlds and storylines, and instead focuses on creating new and interesting locations, OR involves visiting worlds from the Square-Enix canon, they could end up making a very interesting game. Midgar? Garden? Lindblum? Zanarkad? Zenethia? The Mana Tree? They could all make AWESOME levels.

And, while visiting Square-Enix worlds, the composer could insert more audio cues and remixes from the games. I don't think either of the KH games made any audio references to the FF games, but damnit, they should have.

I have no problem with having 2D sprites on systems on next gen systems, but I think Disgaea 3 goes far beyond reasonable.

http://www.the-magicbox.com/0707/game070718g.shtml

The PS2 games were only marginally beyond PS1 capabilities, and for PS3, sprites that pixelated are borderline unacceptable.

Not that I would get the game, anyways. The map and Dark World sidequests in Disgaea 2 made it obvious that NIS has no idea how to design extra content without making it infuriatingly random or repetitive.