My friend bought this last week and after being quite impressed with it when hs showed it to us i thought i'd pick it up. It's a 360 JRPG.

It's also the most overwrought emotionally painful thing I have ever seen in a video game.

Unfortunately I don't find that something I desire in a video game. It's like watching a Saturday morning cartoon with a cute spooky crime solving inexplicably talking dog, and then halfway through the episode cutting to watching him die on the vets table of cancer while his puppy and friends blub like little girls. Dear lord it gets worse, imagine then having to interact with the process and play as the puppy attending and partaking in some funeral service - accompanied by the most overwrought piano music ever.

I know the Japanese are a repressed and frankly equally inexplicable culture, but if this is how they get their emotional release, then that's not healthy.

I'm all for video games being more than just mindless violence, but theres only so much the format can reasonably take without becoming mawkish, insipid or clumsy. This game trades on all three to the point your console is at risk of killing itself.

The game itself is stuffed with so many cut scenes and dream sequences, all of which seem to require some measure of deliberate heartstring pulling. I've never seen anything like it. To be qutie honest I've found it both tedious and deeply uncomfortable. This is really not the right place to have an interactive two hour funeral involving two super cutesie young kids after watching their mother die in her bed of some disease. Dear god, watching Lassie die would have been more tasteful and less heartrending.

To be quite honest it's just too much for a video game. I think if youre' going to attempt to convey or include some measure of emotional intensity in a game then less is more. Having it beat you over the head for a couple of hours is not the way.

It is an experience unto itself. What I did was not read all the stories. Made things sooooo much better.

Seanchai

the only issue i had with the game was that unless you imported it from japan you got a standard case with all 4 discs stacked on top of each other, why they decided not to release it in the same sort of case as asia is beyond me.

the funeral bit is abit long winded though but it adds something to the memory of the main character since its his daughter who dies and the kids are his grand children...i guess it coulda been handled abit better though.

Read the reviews and stayed away - far, far away.  Gears is about as close to being in touch with my emotions as I need to get in a video game.  That or the sympathetic pain I feel while bailing in Skate.

Are you referring to the trite subplot in Gears2, because if not you might want to avoid that.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;304619I know the Japanese are a repressed and frankly equally inexplicable culture, but if this is how they get their emotional release, then that's not healthy.

Wow. Nice bigotted racial profiling there.

Quote from: jeff37923;308023Wow. Nice bigotted racial profiling there.

Wow, i bet you couldn't wait to jump to your conclusions and rush to post your righteous little diatribe.

Lots of cultures are repressed and lots are also inexplicable (just look at the character of Sakura from SF4 to know what I mean by inexplicable and repressed - a schoolgirl who flashes her panties at every available opportunity).

Racism is prejudice against someone on the basis of race/colour/creed.

That post wasn't racist. Go educate yourself dimwit.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;308169Wow, i bet you couldn't wait to jump to your conclusions and rush to post your righteous little diatribe.

Nah. I was bored and your bigotry presented itself, again.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;308169Lots of cultures are repressed and lots are also inexplicable (just look at the character of Sakura from SF4 to know what I mean by inexplicable and repressed - a schoolgirl who flashes her panties at every available opportunity).

Racism is prejudice against someone on the basis of race/colour/creed.

Yeah, and your past anti-semitism isn't bigotry either.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;308169That post wasn't racist. Go educate yourself dimwit.

Sure, I'll educate myself as soon as you look up racial profiling...