Mento

• Warrior of Light = Blank slate.
• Firion = Non-entity that got stronger by hitting himself in the face. No idea why Dissidia turned him into Batman.
• Onion Knight = Blank slate (but a well-dressed one).
• Cecil = Dug the redemptive arc. Kain and Golbez were more interesting though.
• Bartz = The ol' "legendary hero that doesn't realize his origins" bit. Kinda old even then. "Had a pet Chocobo" is the only thing I can say about Bartz that wouldn't apply to a thousand other JRPG heroes.
• Terra = Most interesting of all the FF protagonists, definitely. Pity she vanishes so often.
• Cloud = Groundbreaking at the time, often amusingly sardonic and cynical, but spoiled by fame and adaptations that didn't understand the character beyond "mopey".
• Squall = Wettest of blankets. Going from petulant teen to adult was an interesting path for a JRPG protagonist considering how many of them are teenagers that don't act like regular teenagers.
• Zidane = Zidane's cool, I guess. They did try to have their cake and eat it by making him a chipper 16-bit-styled JRPG hero until a moody mid-game turn, but it felt germane enough to the story.
• Tidus = Lord no. Too much drownball and daddy issues. I have a horrible suspicion some of that will carry over to this new Noctis guy.
• Yuna = Don't really understand Yuna's character development beyond FFX. She spent that entire game knowing she would die saving the world and didn't, so... what comes next? Dresspheres? Sure, let's do dresspheres. She's got time to burn now.
• Vaan = Shoehorned in at the last second as desperate fan appeal, like Fake Lisa in that Simpsons Variety Show spoof. Had Matsuno had his way, I don't doubt it would've been the Basch and Ashe show (with a certain pair of sky pirates for color).
• Lightning = Seemed like the worst excesses of Cloud and Squall. Then she... kind of got more relatable? Then she went back to being a stoic badass again. I give up.
• Serah = Upbeat yet strangely aloof too. Like Yuna, in fact. Spend so long as an inanimate object and you're bound to get a little detached, I suppose.
• Ramza Beoulve = (Not so) Secretly the best FF protagonist. Again, Matsuno at work. Goes through a hell of a lot, isn't the most powerful fighter ever, still manages to keep principles intact.
• Benjamin = I'll just throw Benjamin in here for shits and giggles. Dude was not the sharpest tool in the shed. 2GP a month allowance?

This is definitely another one of those situations that needs to be cleaned up/clarified by a Style Guide. For a lot of the more venerable companies we do have their previous "legacy" incarnations as separate Company pages (take Namco and Namco Bandai for example, or Squaresoft), but there's also plenty of situations where the older company name has been superseded by the new one with the former being added to the latter's page as an alias.

I think we should probably ensure that there's separate company pages for every obsolete company, with links on those pages to indicate who now owns them or what they're now known as where applicable. Would probably be less messy than incorporating an alias-switching widget. (But then there's also the confusion that comes when people erroneously credit games made by the old company to the new one and vice versa. Hence it being a sticky issue that needs clarification from the high-ups.)

Just in under the wire: I wrote up a four day "an alternative to E3" series here (first post links to the rest) and an "an alternative to an alternative to E3" E3 list here.

I've never played a Golden Sun beyond the first but it's not because I didn't like it. I think it's one of those "historically significant" types, the context for which you generally ignore for the sake of judging a game by its merits alone, because prior to that game it didn't seem like the GBA could pull off anything graphically that didn't merely resemble a SNES game with a smaller screen. Besides being one of the first original JRPGs for the system, it was able to demonstrate what the GBA was capable of and that probably went a lot way into justifying its existence and making it a true leap forward for Nintendo handhelds.

But yeah, I've completely forgotten everything about the story. Since the Lost Age is a direct continuation, it makes me slightly apprehensive about starting that one without remembering anything that happened.

Maken X is one of a considerable number of games I bought with my Dreamcast from eBay and for some reason have never played. I've got quite a few shooters, racers and sports games mixed in there as well. Come to think of it, I paid way too much for that bundle considering all I've played on the thing is Skies of Arcadia (which I rebought for the GC anyway), PSO (ditto), Jet Set Radio, Record of Lodoss War, Evolution and Chu Chu Rocket. The only Sega console I've really spent a considerable amount of time on was the Master System, and that's just depressing.

Boy, that teacher lady sure talked a lot about Mahjong. I recognized all those terms but the last one. Damn you, Yakuza 2. I still have no idea to this day how the scoring actually works either; it seems entirely too conditional for my liking.

I hope you did get in some social linking with Mitsuru. It's tough to get started, what with the prohibitively high Academics requirement, but "how do I eat a hamburger, I'm so rich" never got old. Or rather it gets old almost immediately and then becomes this fascinating trainwreck. Still, you don't want to wake up with her severed head lying next to you, so best stick with Chihiro for now.

The price difference isn't the sticking point for Europeans. We're used to it. It's more that it costs that much to begin with. Curious to see how much the PS4 will be (the Sony console was the more expensive one last time, infamously so if I recall, but the new one doesn't have a dumb intrusive motion sensor built into it).

I always play as female characters in games where you build your own protagonist to make up for the deficit. Well, all right, I do it because I'm uncomfortable with projecting myself into a game like that. It's why FemShep, as well as having the superior voice actor, can feel like her own independent entity rather than just a proxy for my own inherent boundless wisdom, gun-toting badassery and silver tongue. (See what I mean about the dangers of projecting oneself into these roles?) I'd rather follow a story with a well-developed lead character that I like (or like to hate, in the case of my Renegade).

I do agree we could probably use more female protagonists, but I also think that those games ought to be written with a female lead in mind rather than gender-swapping Mr Generic Late-20s Brunette mid-way through development and asking Nolan North if he can pull off a convincing falsetto. I still think there's something to be said for how common it is for games in which the lead is a blank slate to have female options, and all the better if that option happens to change the game in a significant way.

Sounds pretty promising Jeff. I wasn't sure whether to support implementing a whole new system on top of the current wiki infrastructure to highlight problem pages because it sounded like more trouble than it was worth, but if you guys have plans in place to introduce one I'm happy to hear it. We do kind of need one, and specifically one that is able to highlight separately pages with grammatical/spelling/style errors (which can be fixed by anyone) and those lacking information/text (which can only really be done by people who know the subject).

I could've sworn adding new releases adds those platforms to the wiki. Maybe it's just that one initial instance. I'd be fine with bhtav's suggestion to just block out the platforms section and let people create empty releases once the relationship between the two has been fixed (or, hell, vice versa: create a blank release whenever you add a platform, similar to how you can create blank game/character/concept/etc. pages while editing another).

@blacklagoon: After making a new page I always add the releases first and then usually discover that the same platforms have been added to the section you're talking about (in "Game Details") as well as at the top of the page under the title. It's possible the site only adds the first platform included in a release just so something is listed there. I've noticed that the first release date is weird like that as well: sometimes it gets filled in (if blank) when the first release is added and sometimes not.

@slag: I've noticed a lot of the entries on Morrow's list tend to follow a theme; groups of characters belonging to the same franchise and the like. Those are the kind of things the wiki community could build some really good Wiki Task initiatives around. There was a thread not too long ago about someone wanting some idea of where to start editing, so I'm sure we'd find plenty of people who would be game. If some enterprising soul (perhaps a mod) wanted to start a Wiki Completion thread in the Editing & Tools forum for a specific franchise and its related character/game pages we might see a lot of good work come out of it. (Though I suppose such a task would need to rely on editors who are familiar with whatever that franchise happens to be. I don't know the first thing about One Piece, for example, so I'd probably be of no help there.)

Anyway, I could see why someone might be squeamish about adding releases since they might not have all the data (like Product IDs) on hand, especially now there's way more fields to fill in. If that person just wanted to add the correct platforms to the game's details from the main wiki page as a suitable stopgap, they should be allowed to.

I should really add something to that "How-To Wiki" guide that we need something about image galleries too. It used to be you had a bunch of pre-generated galleries whenever you created a page (Box Art, Screenshots, Concept Art, etc.) but now they're all gone. If newer editors wanted to add images they might not realize there's an established precedent for where specifically to put them.

Oh man, I remember ganguro girl. Yosuke would've definitely been into that nonsense if he was a female character. I'm half surprised that he didn't brown up for the drag queen contest.

Late October means you're pretty close to the end, right? Though I suppose there's enough unfortunate lunacy in The Answer to keep this thread going indefinitely.