Final Fantasy Tactics - so much A++ you have no idea.

re: Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions
        PSP • USA RELEASE
        play time: 88:38 + approx 6hrs unsaved

After finished Crisis Core three weeks back, I pulled out Final Fantasy Tactics and proceeded to play it obsessively every spare moment I had. I finished it last night and it is just such an excellent game. I'm not a huge fan of strategy RPGs, but I might be converted after playing and finishing FFT. I played the PS1 version a long time ago, but I didn't ever really finish the game. I think I at least finished the third chapter, but I never got around to even recruiting characters. The story isn't the longest story, but it was really well executed. It was also really challenging. D8 I died countless times at the beginning because I was obsessively leveling up, only to realize that my equipment still sucked, and the random encounter monsters leveled up with my highest level roster character. D8 It was rather horrifying to discover. Mustadio was crazy useful later on in the game though. And then when I got Balthier I owned the entire thing so hard. On the undead maps, using seal evil and legshot made it really easy for me to train up my weaker characters.

Though, when I say I "finished" the game, I really mean I finished the story. I have a few separate save files so I can go back and do the last few subquests and the Midlight's Deep bonus dungeon that opened up. I also want to re-level Ramza in order to increase his stats. I mastered a lot of job classes, but Onion Knight is still only at LV5 so you can tell from there how many I mastered haha. But yeah, when leveling Ramza, a lot of times I let him level without making sure he was in a strong class, and so his stats could be better. I'm planning on spending a couple dozen hours dropping his level using degenerator traps and then re-leveling him up to LV99. It'll almost be like the transmigration system in Disgaea! Sort of.

BUT ANYWAY, the game was really excellent. I even purchased a second copy so I could play melee and rendesvous with my little brother. And then I purchased the Japanese version. There were some fairly interesting differences to see! I feel a lot of the text is cleaner in the Japanese version, and less fuzzy, especially in the introduction. But none of the scenes are voiced, and there are other slight differences. Like Ramza's bravery is only 65 and his faith is 71 at the beginning, instead of the 70/70 in the US version. And Agrias and Gaffgarion don't hit as hard in the introduction battle.

So yeah, I think that's all I had to say about FFT. It's such a fantastic game I didn't interrupt in the middle every few hours to type up blog reports, hahaha.

Overall: 9.3
    9.5 Story
        10/ Characters
        9.0 Plot
    8.0 Graphics
    9.0 Gameplay
    10/ Sound
    10/ Replay Value

I had to ding on the graphics slightly because while the graphics are great for the pixelated sprites and especially considering that this game was first made in 1997, the remake could have been better. For one thing, they should have redone/fixed the graphics instead of stretching the original PSX aspect ratio sideways to fit the 16:4 ratio of the PSP. Bad decision, guys. Bad decision.

re: Star Ocean: First Departure
        PSP • USA RELEASE
        play time: 4:03

...It's kind of weird right now. But okay. The voicing is a bit choppy and awkward at times, and Millie is rather on the side of annoying. Also, Dorne = Naruto, Millie = Sakura... Roddick wasn't really a Sasuke though. But srsly, Dorne looks a lot like Naruto and likes Millie who likes Roddick and is always beating up on Dorne, etc.

Yeah, I don't have much to say about it. It's pretty fun though. We'll see how it goes.

re: Dissidia Final Fantasy
        PSP • USA RELEASE
        play time: --

I hear there might be a Dissidia Final Fantasy Universal Share? Or something of the sort? It's just a rumor, but if it does, I might not have to retrain all my characters! XD Which would be AWESOME.

Anyway, I purchased both Tales of the World 2 and Tales of VS the other day. I probably won't play them for real any time soon, but from what I've tried of both, it seems like it'll be quite a lot of fun! (I REALLY suck at Tales of VS.)