TerraBreaker

damn, I've been away for a while but whatever, felt like I'd post in this thread since its relevant. My fics have pretty much the most hits of any fic in their given section (reviews are hard to come by in the videogames section as I'm sure WotanAnubis will attest), and generally I have the most reviews in the given section, but its still just pitiful. I've not written anything for AFF in the past 6 months for the simple reason that the reviews aren't coming in. The videogames section is particularly notorious for this. My latest fic for Tales of the Abyss started off positive last year, plenty of hits and a decent number of reviews, but then they just stop... BUT the views continue to increase - it baffles me - even if an author has gone on hiatus for x months/years surely it'd at least be courteous to say SOMETHING. Without reviews, I can't tell if the demand is there, the aforementioned fic - hits 2422, Reviews 11 - wtf? Did 11 people like it and 2000~ hate it? This is exactly what I mean - is it 1000 hits because people like it but are too lazy to review/rate. Authors spend hours writing these things, all we're asking for from the readers is a few seconds/minutes to write a few lines. Due to the fact that there's no correlation between hits and reviews I honestly don't know how to proceed - do I get a high number of hits because people like my fics or do lots of people read a few lines then leave, hence no reviews. As I have no way to gauge interest in a particular fandom I've simply dropped & deleted a whole bunch of fics I was working on. Makes me want to write a Harry Potter fic as a test just to see how many reviews / hits Ill get. Yeah, I generally write one-shot lemons, but its still nice to have some consistency with the reviews to hits ratio. I'd even be willing to add chapters to my one-shots if I got more but whatever. *sigh* and people wonder why fics never get updated, in the end they've only themselves to blame when they drive the author mad.

nah, they ruined it for me when they... SPOILER :made nemesis a good guy at the end of apoco Like so many game/movie tie-ins: 1- they don't work 2- they have nothing to do with the game 3- because of point 2, the game fans end up hating them.

Yep, Star Ocean 2 is one of the greats. Vanguard Bandits is one of the many games that I own, but have not had time to play yet

Yep, Alundra had some VERY taxing/patience sapping/annoying puzzles, not to mention white monkeys flitting about trying to kill you - it wasn't a bad game overall as far as Zelda clones go and I certainly invested many hours into it. The best overall PS1 RPG's though would probably be Xenogears, Valkyrie Profile, Tactics Ogre, Lunar 1+2, Suikoden 2 and FF Tactics (none of the PS1 versions ever made it to the UK, except Suiko2, hence my glee when I managed to import them all.) I think I might be missing one of the greats here, but it'll come to me. Vagrant story was very well realised too, I certainly felt a vagrant storyish feel when playing FFXII. Indeed, you've hit the nail on the head there Planescape though on the PC is on a whole different level to anything else I've seen though.

lol, maybe

True Love 95 - the game that started it all, both for me and many others I bet. Absolute classic. Tokimeki was and still is an amazing game - the threesome in the hot springs most ppl find themselves in first playthrough really draws you in. Shame I had to pirate it first time i heard of it (I own the real thing now), but I couldn't exactly convince my parents to buy it for me at the time Kana - My little sister is an amazing game too. Most recent h-game for me is Bible Black - next one will probably be Amourous Professor Cherry.

Most of the Working Designs saga is detailed here, I think their last truly great release was Growlanser Generations - a great two game package (once again, I highly recommend it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Designs Victor Ireland went on to form GaijinWorks in mid 2006, and I don't think anything of import has happened since: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6154707.html SPOILER :I recognised it was Nall straight away. It's amazing how I'm much more in touch with these sprite based characters I am than with all the polygon based chars of recent years. If you've not played Suik2 I recommender getting a copy *thinks back to wasting a large part of my school summer holidays with that game - time well spent* But, Suik2 is pretty rare and expensive now - good thing I bought it at release On the topic of 360/PS3/Wii, I wish Microsoft would get their act together and commission some decent JRPGs for the console - they must know, that is what they need to sell the console in japan. Once that headway is made, the floodgates will open.

heh, they haven't mentioned it yet - that I can recall at least. Lunar 1 + 2 = gaming bliss - some of Working Design's finest work, I mean its a game where you actually want to talk to the NPCs as they say something other than "please save the princess," etc. Damn shame that WD folded. First Suiko is great, but 2 is amazing - Luca Blight is a real bastard. Suiko III + V are great too. Not too many RPGs out on the next gen consoles at the moment. Give it time though and I'm sure it'll change.

lol I'm with Samurai on this on I'm afraid, I've not played it. It's a royal pain in the ass setting up a translator for Japanese games, so I usually don't bother with them, maybe some of the hetro/yuri titles, but nothing yaoi for me I'm afraid - sorry! On the subject of hentai, I've been out of the bishoujo gaming scene for a while now (pretty much since they started of releasing yaoi stuff) but I hear G-Collections has resurrected- I'm thinking about trying to pick up some of the titles that I've missed, and maybe get back into the scene, but it's finding the time to play the damn things... But a quick scan of Peach Princess reveals that... Amourous Professor Cherry is looking mighty... "intriguing" though, and I've heard good things about Family Project ~ Kazoku Keikaku ~. + Princess Waltz. I've had my eye on Lighting Warrior Raidy for a while though... Knights of Xentar! How could you forget the scene with Red Riding Hood + the wolf, or snow white + 7 dwarves - absolutely hilarious stuff in that game - some great one liners from the main character. I must remember to dig up a copy of it from my *cough*archive*cough*

I've only played about 5 hours of WA5 thus far, and I think it has improved on WA4 in that battles aren't finished after one attack from raquel Story hasn't really got started yet but the character development seems better than WA4. I'll reserve my final judgement for when I finish the game though. It's nice to have the flashy package, etc that ATLUS provided for Wild Arms, Persona and Growlanser, but it isn't really adding anything for me. I for one, would rather ATLUS delay Persona 3, and added the FES 20+hr bonus content from the Japanses version than give me a pretty artbook. For me, the games come out of the box, get installed to the HDD and are then placed in the cupboard, never to be seen again. There's still Wild ARMs Crossfire on the PSP to come as well. Indeed, the PS2 is becoming an RPG nirvana, just as the PS1 did before it, and I'm loving it. Both Lunar games are classics, and the Arc Trilogy is one of my fave Working Designs releases. The PS1 days were true bliss though... I'll also recommend Metal Saga as a severely underated RPG - check it out if you can find it- it's dirt cheap and a very different experience. I'm also playing Warriors Orochi on the 360 - gotta love the DW/SW characters finally together in one game. The Wii doesn't really seem to have done... much of anything after demonstrating the initial gimmick that is the control system, nobody has really followed through with anything substantial... time will tell though.

Well, you're gonna have to update at some point - either the 360 or PS3. I've got the game but have yet to play it - I have a ridiculous backlog already God only knows how I managed to finish Persona 3 last weekend Though there's still loads of great stuff on the PS2 (Growlanser V, Persona 3, Wild Arms 5 and Soul Nomad to name but a few recent releases) that should suffice for RPG fans. Still praying that Ar Tonelico 2 will get a US release so I can import.

They made another movie? Dare I ask what it's called this time?

heh, they're always good for a laugh. I do think that people tend to get a little... overexcited when it comes to reviewing a fic, and in their haste to type out the usual "teh fic r0xx pls upd8 soon" they (understandably) forgot the basics of the english language. I agree with you completely, it's difficult to accept criticism (concrit or otherwise) from someone who writes like that. If it's any consolation I've read some of your work (not had time to review sadly) and I don't think you have any problems in that area.

hostile takeover...