[quote name='Rei no Otaku']Normally I'd be angry about the 360, but the couple weeks it'll take for me to get it back will give me time to play some of my backlog. So I won't complain too much.
I've been playing Etrian, and it is fun. Though I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be. My guess is that most of the people playing it are used to current RPGs that are easy as hell. As long as you make sure to plan ahead, and save often, you'll do fine. The only part that I'd say makes it tough is money. You'll probably have to spend some time farming for cash in the game.
I'm the same exact way with reviews. I couldn't care less about the score. I just read them for info on things like glitches or bad game design. Doesn't matter to me what some random guy on the internet thinks about a game. I'm a big boy, I can make my own decisions. I love Koei games, and I think Ar Tonelico was one of the best games this year. Obviously I can't go by other people's opinions XD[/QUOTE]
I'm thinking I'll give Ar Tonelico a shot one of these days... how is it difficulty wise? I realized that's the thing that made stop playing RPG's altogether is that they are piss ass easy with stories that have been told 100's of times over. I don't mind a weak story if the gameplay is there (and challenging), but usually I can't get either. Farming for cash and the fact you can't just walk all over the game has me super excited to go pick up Etrian on Wednesday - Botticus tells me Yggdra Union is pretty tough as well.
I used to put stock in reviews but after reading some horrible reviews for games I liked, and some glowing reviews for games I thought were merely a little above average (Super Robot Taisen comes to mind), I just skim reviews - these days I don't really bother to check reviews, unless a game starts scoring 2 out of 10 for some reason.
I found people who read a review, notice it's flaws, and will go into a game actively looking for those flaws - how many people would have made a big deal about the slowdown in Odin Sphere if it wasn't such a focal point in the reviews? I probably would have never noticed the black wars on the side of the widescreen RE 4 Wii if I didn't already know to look for them.
Point is, especially with RPG's, reviewers are super critical of anything that's not a main stream big name game - I'm actually surprised Odin Sphere scored as high as it did. Shit, looking at Gamerankings, Etrian didn't do too hot on the reviews but the way it's been previewed and talked about means I'll like it, so as you said, who cares what one guy out of millions thought about the game?
Hey, I thought Godhand was an awesome game, and IGN gave it a 3/10, so yea, I can't go by reviews either

Since I don't backlog shit anymore, and it's easy to tell if a game sucks within the first 5 hours of playing it, if it's horrible I can usually have it up on Ebay that day or the next day, and I'll lose at most $5 - $10, which is the cost of a rental without actually doing the work of renting it.
Are you getting Hoshigami Remix, by chance? I'm actually kind of excited because one of the main complaints is that "it's too hard!!" which is awesome, at least for me. I don't know why Botticus if finding Summon Night 2 so hard... I finished everything in 17 hours and only died once due to carelessness, the second game was tons easier than the first.
I'm really sad that Square has decided to dumb down Final Fantasy over the years. I'll still buy it, because it's my first and favorite RPG, but damn Square, put back in the hard mode plz
