Zeik

I'd recommend starting with 4. Mostly because it's a good starting point in the story to jump in (the least connected to previous games), but also because it's like half the price right now.

I disagree. 4 was my introduction to the series and I couldn't have asked for a better place to start. 4 starts a whole new story arc with mostly new characters, so I felt like I was mostly starting fresh. 5 feels like a continuation of what started in 4.

Yeah, it's got a slow start, but that's Yakuza. If you can't deal with some slow burn every now and then Yakuza probably isn't the right series to play.

Mary's chile rant is the best.

It saves a lot of effort though.

I mostly hated FFXII's combat because it took way way too long to get the Gambits to do really basic, but important tactics, but at the same time it was never fun to control your leader either. It was much much more old school MMO style than this. (It was clearly very very inspired by FFXI.)

I actually liked the combat in the original Xenoblade a lot though, much more than I thought I would going in. Technically you had less control over your party members, but that's mostly because they were smart enough to do basic tactics without you explicitly telling them they should. And controlling your leader actually feels a whole lot more active than Dragon Age 1 or KOTOR, which were more about queuing up a bunch of actions for your party and watching them play out before pausing and doing it again. To be honest, I'm really not a fan of old school MMO combat or DA1/KOTOR style combat, but something about Xenoblade hit the right notes.

The original Xenoblade did have a way to directly assign actions to a party member during clutch moments though, which helped keep it from feeling overly automated. If this one doesn't have something similar that would be a shame.

@kishinfoulux: That's very much not what my post was, because I have not played the game, and I have no idea if I'll like it or if it will be good or not, and frankly I couldn't care less what you personally like or dislike. What I took offense with was the notion that a game like this should not exist without dramatically trimming down the density of its mechanics and any game that does otherwise is bloated and crammed full of "bullshit".

The original Xenoblade wasn't without issues, but I don't consider the density of the mechanics one of them. I did almost everything you could do in that game my first time through and even after the 100 some odd hours it took to finish it I immediately had the urge to start all over and do a "perfect run". I didn't, because that would be crazy, but the point is that I still wanted more.

As for the mechs, the only reason they were a necessity in Xenogears was because they were forced on you as a necessity. The story dictated that they mattered, not the actual gameplay. If you replaced all those Gears fights with on foot fights the game itself changes very little, apart from not having cool ass mechs in it. Whereas in this game getting a mech actually changes how you physically explore and interact with the world and where you can go that you wouldn't be able to without one. Frankly that seems like a more meaningful addition to me than just having mandatory boss fights. If they truly don't matter to combat at all that is disappointing, but that's not the only relevant factor to how it affects your experience with the game.

@kishinfoulux: Since you clearly haven't played the game I'm baffled at how you can you speak with such authority about what should and shouldn't be in the game. Especially considering the giant mechs have kinda been one of the major selling points of the game and Austin explicitly stated it changed his experience with the game in a notable way.

I enjoy and still enjoy more simple JRPGs akin to the SNES and PS1 era, but at other times I enjoy dense as fuck JRPGs like Xenoblade (Xenoblade Chronicles was easily one of my favorite RPGs of the last generation), and so do a lot of other people. Both have their place in the world. Have you not noticed the deluge of kickstarters for PC RPGs that try to harken back to the days of ridiculously dense and system complex RPGs of the 90's? People miss and want games like that.

If that's not your thing there's nothing wrong with that, but frankly I find it pretty obnoxious when people start acting like the authority on what should and shouldn't be allowed to exist just because they want something different.

@ominousbedroom: If you want to get back into Xenosaga at this point I'd highly recommend just watching the remaining cutscenes on Youtube and skip straight to 3. It's a way way better game.

I thought the 3rd Valkyria was way better than the first one personally. (Shame it never officially came over.) I really wanted to like the first game more, but it was so cringe inducingly cliche at times, and I have a fairly high tolerance to anime cliches. And while the gameplay was really neat in concept, I thought it had a lot of issues in practice. (Namely that it heavily promoted abusing your scouts to make a beeline to the goal.)

That 3rd game certainly isn't perfect, but I found the story and characters to be slightly more interesting/original, and more importantly, the gameplay felt much more rewarding, actually giving you valid reasons to utilize the various classes the game gives you.

I never touched the 2nd one, as it seemed to be everything I disliked in the first one amplified.

Goof Troop was definitely not Disney Channel exclusive, since I watched that and I never had cable of any kind as a kid.

It's kind of odd hearing them talk about Disney cartoons as some kind of weird exclusive thing that only rich kids got to see, as that's kind of how I viewed Nickelodeon growing up. Saturday morning cartoons on basic network televison always had plenty of Disney cartoons. Nickelodeon was something I only got to see on rare occasions at my Grandma's house or my friend's house who had cable.