Before I get started on this. I would like to say I did not finish Lost Odyssey and I never plan to. I played it for a while and got bored as hell with it. Its like a combination of various different Final Fantasy games thrown together. Not to mention that its on multiple discs as well. This is one of the reasons I don't like 360 RPGs but its out there but I do want to play The Last Remnant and Star Ocean 4 which I hope comes out for the PS3 at some point as well. I mainly played this for a taste of RPGs on the 360 which turned out to be pretty bad. Other than that, its a console not for RPGamers and most the exclusives are nothing special and worth the cost of an Xbox 360 to play. If you ask me, if you want an RPG, look at the Playstation 2 and not the 360 and most JRPGs aren't doing well because its a demographic fail. They have the right idea for the wrong people.

NOTE: Keep in mind that I did not finish this game I do not plan to. As interesting as it may be, I got bored of it fast because its nothing really new or spectacular about it. Images are taken from RPGamer.com

Story:

The story focuses on a effeminate man named Kaim. He is basically an immortal with amnesia who is tryin

One of the greatest problems to ever strike the MMO community is grinding. The grind refers to the act of repeatedly doing something (usually killing monsters) in order to progress. Most MMOs have mundane and boring grinds while other games try to make it fun by combining various party efforts or alternative methods of leveling. The exp curve tends to be the primary problem while gameplay can be contributed to it as well. The following are some of the games I have played that I consider to have one of the best or one of the worst grinds. What appears in the parenthesis is the abbreviated name for the game.

One of the greatest problems to ever strike the MMO community is grinding. The grind refers to the act of repeatedly doing something (usually killing monsters) in order to progress. Most MMOs have mundane and boring grinds while other games try to make it fun by combining various party efforts or alternative methods of leveling. The exp curve tends to be the primary problem while gameplay can be contributed to it as well. The following are some of the games I have played that I consider to have one of the best or one of the worst grinds. What appears in the parenthesis

By now, most people think that side scrolling beat em ups are dead. Lunia: Record of Lunia War attempts to prove this wrong by combining elements of a side scrolling beat em up and MMO together. It does a fairly good job of it. After Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst went down in the US version, players had 3 choices. They either played Phantasy Star Universe, went to SCHTHACK's server, or quit the game. Then came Lunia which became the alternative to those choices. Lunia is good at doing what it does. If Lunia had to be classified, I would consider it an Action RPG.

Story:

The story of Lunia is the best that I have seen in any MMO. The game itself is broken into Episodes which are divided further into Stages. Each Episode contains 10 stages and at the end of most Stages is a boss. Between Stages are cutscenes that tell the events of the game. The only problem being that it is automated and you can't advance it at your own speed. There are a few dialogues during the stage itself as well. All of it is put together for a coherent story. The only problem is that depending on which English version you played, the translation is different. There have been 3 versions so far handled

This is my first MMO review in a while. Valkyrie Sky is an MMO version of what is almost a dead form of gaming. This type of game I am referring to is more commonly known as a vertical shoot em up. Other games that fall under this category are Aero Fighters and Giga Wing. Valkyrie Sky is similar to these other games but combines it with elements of a traditional MMO making it an odd product of the two. Game and game was the host of this “closed beta”. They say it was a closed beta but anyone with a game and game account can join so it wasn't really it a closed beta.

Story:

N/A – I didn't pay attention to what they said because it wasn't interesting. There's just a tutorial and you're basically off to run errands (quest) for people.

Graphics:

The graphics are quite poor for an MMO in this day and age. Its not very smooth and the effects used are dated. The characters are all copies of each other with the exception being the weapons. Armor changes the way characters look, but these are quite limited in possibilities so clones of characters are seen everywhere. There is no character customization at all. Each class looks a certain way and thats it. Some people

NOTES: PC/PS2 notes that I mention are based on the statistics of the English version, NOT the Japanese version. The Xbox 360 servers are global, that means the US/EU play with the Japanese unlike the PC/PS2 version. However, the information I have on PC/PS2 is dated because I haven't played it in 3 months or so. Also, traditionally, only special events such as Maximum Attack G (MAG) and rare missions give out higher exp and drop rates.

This is one of the recent updates posted at Sega's official Japanese Phantasy Star Universe website

http://phantasystaruniverse.jp/news/update/

This is a graph showing the number of players on Phantasy Star Universe for the last year. The US PC/PS2 servers has about 300 active players during peak hours down from around 500-600 during its peak hours just a bit over a year ago.

In the last year, the population has dropped significantly even with the release of Phantasy Star Portable. One of the reasons behind this is Sega's constant screw ups within the last year. In December of 2007, a few hackers were allowed to run rampant on the PC/PS2 servers and even crashed many players. This continued for about 2 weeks before Sega employees came back from their

Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica is the sequel to Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia. The game is similar to the Atelier Iris series but rather than focusing on alchemy, it focuses on Reyvateil, basically women who have the ability to cast song magic. There are some references to the first game that you will not understand if you have not played it yet. These are mostly unimportant to the story. Ar Tonelico II has a completely different fighting system than the other games by Gust.

NOTE: A few Ar Tonelico I spoilers so keep that in mind when you are reading this. I will try to minimize spoilers.

Story:

The story focuses on Croix who is a knight for Grand Bell. Little is told about each of the characters until later in the game. When it begins, you are thrown in the middle of a conflict which breaks out into a short war over Metafalica and the Goddess. There are primarily 2 story paths. The 2 story paths focus on the same things except for a few exceptions and replaces the character involved in each of the incidents, but the path chosen will lock you out of 1 of the game's possible endings and determines the character to be focused on for much of the game's events. There is an o

NOTE: I don't know how often I will write these, but I'll try to get the whole series I have planned out before I do other stuff. This is probably better off in an essay, but I'm bored and don't have much else to do.

This is going to be part of a series of articles I'm going to write about Western government control and some of their methods of influencing us. Eventually I will go on to talk about the future of it and there are some examples of the future of it since games like Metal Gear Solid and comic books like Marvel Civil War. Our society isn't that far from it. This will be part 1 of the series. This one revolves around schools and how the schools are methods of segregation and control. More rants really. Not much else. Most of this is based on the system in the United States. A few places do it based on other methods but it is usually based on the outward look at first. Sometimes its from which region they're from.

There isn't much done around kindergarten. During the 1st and 2nd grade (age 6-8), western schools have a method of segregating children based on race. This is done discreetly. Individually, children are tested based on their skill and ability in Engl

This game was never released in the U.S. Considering that it has very mature and violent themes, this game would probably take a rating of A (18+ only). Berserk is a series known for its main character, Guts. He is a tall man in black armor who carries a sword the size of himself and fights against various different monsters. Its also infamous for going to the extremes in terms of detail and violence. The reason I chose this was because the Afro Samurai game was recently released in the US and before there was Afro Samurai and God of War, there was Berserk. First non RPG review yay!!!

NOTE: Images are from IGN and Gamespot, some of which are taken direction from the Sammy website.

WARNING: This game is VERY VERY VERY violent. If you can't handle watching gallons of blood being spilled, this game isn't for you. Don't come crying when its too much for you to handle. I can't stress enough emphasis on the violence in this game. Keep in mind that the violence in this game is actually TONED DOWN from the original.

Story:

The story is a retelling of the Millennium Falcon arc of the manga series Berserk by Miura Kentaro. As Guts leaves what could presumably be cal

from the article http://www.oxm.co.uk/article.php?id=8166%3Fcid

1) Stop with the kid characters joining your party.

Adults are important, but kids are important as well. They explained before there's a reason why J-RPG characters tend to be teenagers. The reason is that these people are still in development and their thinking can change. Adults have a fixed way of thinking and usually will not listen to what others have to say because they hold to strong onto their beliefs. Kids also provide different viewpoints because there are things that only kids can think of and some things that only kids can do. One of the traditions in J-RPGs is that adults are ALWAYS the cause of the events of the game being set into motion. Its always a mistake and misjudgment on their part that leads to the kids having to take action in the first place. Don't want kid heroes? Don't have adult screw ups. There are cases where the kids accidentally awaken the ultimate evil, but that's normally in horror movies and some 10 year old RPGs. But if you have kids screwing up, you can have adults coming in to fix it.

2) Villains have to be cool.

Villains don't need to be cool. I don't care if the villain of the

I have my doubts about reviewing MUGEN. MUGEN technically isn't a game at all. In fact, its a game engine created by a now dead company called Elecbyte. Instead, I'll just provide a brief overview about it. About 10 years ago, they started developing a game engine that was free to use. However, around April 2001, they released their last version. Their website remained online for about another year, but then all of a sudden, their website disappeared and nothing has been heard from them since then.

NOTE: If you want to see MUGEN in action, you need to look for videos on websites such as YouTube. Screenshots can't really explain much since it looks a lot like other fighting games or can be easily photoshopped.

What is MUGEN?

MUGEN is a fully customizable game engine for fighting games. It's pretty popular and there are lots of websites out there for it. MUGEN itself comes with all the tools necessary to make stages and characters for it but most people rip their favorite characters from their favorite games and put them into MUGEN with some edits to make them function properly. Every aspect of the game can be modified. This means the intro movie, title screen, menu screen, characte