Sheikah

Gah, damn Americans with their stupid lack of imagination. What's wrong with people forming their own opinion of how a character might sound? For instance, I loved it in FF games when they didn't have voices. In KH the voices they prescribed to characters were mostly annoying and ruined it a bit for me.

The reason people think an 8.3 (7 on Eurogamer) is low is because many review sites use bloated scores. Loads of games are getting 9.0 or higher, which when you think about it shouldn't be possible (it's saying the game could only be faulted for 10% or less). There's so many games that are crap and rated high scores, or at least not that great and rated ridiculously high (e.g. GTA IV), so if games that aren't that great are scoring so much higher, it makes you think that games scoring a chunk less must be even worse. To top that off, with this game I would say that the score is disappointing given that it is much lower than scores given to BK. Series that fall short on an installment stand out. Now that is stupidity. It's not our fault that they made a somewhat crap sequel, so there's no need for them to be bitchy.

That's how I got into it- great manga it is.

I prefer baths, as they are much more relaxing. Showers are solely for getting clean. I'm not bothered about the water getting less clean as when you get out of the bath you're pretty much guaranteed that the dirt stays in the bath. Besides, how dirty are you guys? My bath water is never that dirty.

If they could combine the graphics of this with HM64/BTN gameplay they would have the best HM game ever.

Same, not checked recently though. They were up and then went down earlier.

My Play.com one came earlier too, playing it now. :p

Didn't you find that it had such a cheap way of throwing a story together? The majority of the story advancement was done through text on a background with a narrator (who had the most annoying accent) reading it out to you. The lack of character development or dialogue between characters made them feel generic, as did the fact that they could all equip any weapon or use any ability. It is a shame that they went that way with FFXII, because most fans of the FF series were fans of that trademark development and charmful story. I don't know about you, but at the time of creation the early PS1 FF games filled the hole in Europe where people hadn't had much contact with in-depth story RPGs. I'd hardly say they were cheesy. Having an actual story compared to not having one really doesn't make it cheesy.

It's random where exactly they will appear and which ones (within a select group of enemies for a particular map), and to run them all isn't feasible. A good example is that place early in the game where the lights temporarily go out...trying to outrun every enemy won't work (especially because they can do range spells). Yeah except this game had many, many more enemies along the way than the other games (and little story afterwards to make it feel as if you weren't just killing enemies non-stop). It also lacked No Encounters ability which kinda sucked. I agree that not being able to see the enemy can be tedious, but I found in those FF games you would bump into maybe 10-15 battles along the way, but in this game it would be something like 50-100 enemies, depending on the dungeon. Characters were undeveloped ghosts with next to no interaction. For instance Penelo never even talked to Basche. Most characters had no reason to be going on the journey to risk their lives for little reason. Cut scenes were scarce, as was dialogue, and the story was ridiculously pale in comparison to most FF games. I loved the stories in FF7-9; unfortunately a story with any charm was completely lacking in this game. It was like playing an MMORPG made for offline play. Um that was dark aeons, they only came on the international (so European too) version of the game and you didn't have to kill them. :p That was FF's answer for hardcore gamers. Yeah, how the hell we would have learned what was required to create the weapons (e.g. the Tournesol) and exactly which monsters dropped them without a guide I do not know.

Play posted it today. Considering they're slow as hell and quote "Delivery usually takes 3–5 working days", it's not looking good. :p Ah well, free content is good.

They already announced it was 80% vehicles, and you need vehicles to get through the game pretty much.

To be fair, it was usually only 1-2 jiggys on the odd level that used the FPS system, whereas this game is vehicle dependent for nearly the whole thing. Even Banjo Kazooie had non-platforming elements (sandcastle floor, racing to get out of a maze quickly, matching the tiles game). I would say BT was 90% platforming, 10% FPS + other mini games.

It is very far from BT. BT at least followed the same style as BK, just it was bigger and had annoying backtracking.

Unfortunately I think you'd be an idiot to keep your oder with this game rather than to cancel (unless you really loved the building element of the game). The demo easily showed the core game mechanics. I found the whole thing rather insulting the BK series, actually. Mumbo has been transformed from a powerful shaman to, well, frankly an idiot wearing dungarees who lectures you on how to upgrade your vehicle. Much of the game will involve collecting things and placing them on your vehicle using some loopy gravity gun-style wand (that throws the item all around giving you next to no control). Certain elements seemed deliberately tapped on for the sake of making the game feel like a BK game - notes in the main town for the sake of just being there, to be honest, and the first level had a remix of 4 or so BK songs back to back, as well as a load of BK characters ripped out of their normal habitat and just stuck there for the hell of it. Really, a demo is supposed to let you know whether you want to buy a game or not. If you hated the demo, I'd say you'd have to be an idiot to keep your order rather than the opposite, unfortuantely. The only thing weighing on my mind is that original BK release!

That's only a trick. In fact, there's far more random battles in the game than any previous FF games. Holding the button to run past them all just isn't practical and you end up fighting far, far more enemies than you would have in previous games. It's enjoyable enough at first, but eventually fighting the same enemy over and over becomes really tiresome. It would have been better if there was more story and dialogue sequences to pad out the battling, but as there wasn't, it seemed that most of the time was spent just fighting enemies continuously. I like doing my Final Fantasy sidequests, so naturally I was disappointed when I found out that they had made getting the legendary weapons nearly as difficult as in an MMORPG. I found the FFX weapon gathering had a pretty cool take - you had to get the sigil for a character by doing something fairly unique (blitzball, chocobo racing, hunting down the summons, monster arena completion) rather than just harvesting items from mundane enemies.

Enforcer is possibly the worst weapon to use as it is slow and the power is not necessary. Best to use is inferno combined with the Red Dragon pistol. The Red Dragon pistol is much better than the enforcer anyway, but people just look at the Enforcer damage and just assume it's the best. Red Dragon is practically a Uzi. For the enforcer shotgun - you get a key from Giles' farm after you buy it (or if he dies you dig the key from his grave) which takes place after the 'Hot Date' quest. You then need to use the key in one of the barns in the cellar to go deeper into a dungeon, and there's a dig spot at the end that has it. After you've gone to the spire, go back to Brightwood Tower where the cullis gate was and look for a broken bit of railing. Jump off there and get through the dungeon and come out of it to instantly find a chest with the Daichi (best melee weapon in the game).

The problem with a 'Top 100' list is that there's really little difference between #78 and #79, for instance. It should be something like the 'Top 5'.

lol you and your hype-machine! You can sell a game to anyone, you can. Thought of taking up sales? :p

I bet they're wishing they never put the demo out now.

Agreed. 95% of all Wii games basically. Here's one - ridiculous grinding of levels or really lengthy, MMORPG-style gathering of items for quests. See Final Fantasy XII.

Well done on Fable II, definitely what I would choose! Well I did choose that, after all. :P Fable II is great fun, and it's nice to have your friends join you too.

Ugh. Caught a glimpse of this...pure egotistical shite. I don't know how you guys can still watch this trash. The judges are so far up their own arses that their heads are exactly where everyone else's heads are.

Word on that. FFXII was just disguised turn-based - you couldn't attack until the bar filled up, and moving around in battle did nothing really. You'd still be hit even if you were a fair bit away from the enemy so being able to move around the enemy was just for show. All it meant was that there were a million more enemies to fight to get through the dungeon as they didn't have the 'entering battle' sequences and had to rack up the play time somehow.

Oh come on, I'd say that demo is a very good reflection of what the game will be like. I'm not talking about collection of specific jiggys, I'm talking about the core mechanics of the game. We've got a feel of the vehicles, upgrading and platforming. I don't see how the placement of jiggys in the game can change every single aspect of the game that I see as poor. In fact, it can't. Don't say that people who can see this don't have common sense.