Well I've beaten the game I found it enjoyable. Not a great RPG by any standard, but still fun. I think giving 6s and 7s though are reasonable scores as it is an average game. You either like it after the first hour or you don't is really what it'll come down to.

Uhh, I'm pretty sure everyone I've seen who's gotten it so far has liked it, so I don't get how that's denial...

You are right maybe SO4 wasn't that bad...

Nevermind, I'm gonna have to go with my original assessment.

And as their story problems it is probably more grounded in it being very generic... to begin with. But it has some pretty radical twists all the way through the story so it keeps it interesting. Actually given this kind of story, generally I'm able to guess the big twist but I wasn't able to do it this time. Guess that kept me interested even more haha.

For the battle system I actually thought it was a well functioning battle system. I really don't see what are too many people's issues for it. Really the main things I had with the game were graphics wise which I just thought were terrible. Mainly with the environments which just look awful. Everything else in the game was just solid for an RPG. Which is why 6s and 7s are what it deserves because it is an average RPG.

But I would agree for $60, probably shouldn't pick it up for that price.

For one thing, the lack of any really great JRPGs on the 360 has set standards pretty low. Most fans are willing to overlook A LOT of faults that reviewers won't just so they can finally enjoy a good JRPG. I should know, I tried to do that with Lost Odyssey. It didn't work for me. Second off, I don't care how many people you've seen, that's why we have reviewers as a far more objective system. And they mostly agree that it's not that great of a game. And LordMatrix seems to think that Gamespot is biased against JRPGs, when instead, most of them are just average this generation (and Magna Carta 2 is no exception).

Look, I love JRPGs as much as the next guy, but there have been a lot of stinkers.

Dude anything is better then Star Ocean 4. Even with Japanese voice overs It can't save It's cringe worthy story line and presentation. The battle system was decent and graphics were nice though.

Yes Magna Carta is above average I'd say a 7.5, but given the low expectations of a lot of professioanl reviwers (cough GTA4 cough) I'd say anything below a 7.5 and/or 8 is considered "bad" these days.

No denial here. I am fully aware that game reviewers rate jrpg games low 90 percent of the time even if they are good ones. I take their scores with a grain of salt but will read the reviews for things that might make or break the game for me. The majority of consumers who have played the game really like it. That is going to help spread good word of mouth and help build sales. All jrpg fans know western game reviewers are harsh on jrpg titles when it comes to scores most the time.

So what that one character was disturbing/creepy it doesn't change the fact that Star Ocean:TLH was a fun game to play.

SOIV was woefully average without taking Lymle into consideration. She simply was the straw the broke the camels back. Maybe the game wouldn't have bugged me so much if I hadn't played and completed ToV first. Infinite Undiscovery was average as well but no one approached Lymle when it came to the annoyance factor. Quite frankly I had higher expectations for SOIV than IU. And if I ever hear "kay" again it will be far too soon.

I don't think it's that jrpgs have gotten worse on consoles though. I think I'm (and many jrpg veterans) are just losing patience with these type of games. Fun doesn't really seem to be a consideration when jrpg developers design their games. The typical jrpg game is designed to be like a "you fight a bunch of boring battles, now here's your reward (level up, cutscenes and maybe an exciting boss battle)" type of game. I want a game where the actual grind is fun (beating the crap out of baddies and seeing your stats go up is much more fun in Castle Crashers, Muramasa, Crackdown, etc. than in MOST jrpgs). Jrpgs are becoming more and more irrelevant. Why suffer through another cliched adventure ( a feature that used to be a big selling point of the genre when we were too young to realize these stories sucked or when they weren't stale) when you can find stories that are actually entertaining (instead of painfully stale) in anime, movies, tv shows, books or visual novels? Ace Attorney > any jrpg's story any day. Because the Ace Attorney stories, while nothing to write home about literature-wise, are actually fun to see unfold. Why level up (an addictive feature that used to be a big selling point with jrpgs) in a boring battle system when you can level up with fun gameplay in a lot of games these days?

I plan on getting jrpgs for my DS eventually but I'm only interested in action jrpgs (and when I mean action jrpgs, I mean ones where you only control one player. Tales-like battle systems don't do action quite as well as full-blown action rpgs), Pokemon (for some reason, grinding in Pokemon doesnt get old in the way that it does for other jrpgs) and also the traditional kind so as long as the length is short (ie. Chrono Trigger, which has better gameplay than most to boot). Games like Dragon Quest IX and Etrian Odyssey are out of the question (ok the little that I've played of Etrian Odyssey, it was addictive but I could see it being a game that I'd shelve halfway through). It's very common for me to lose interest half-way through a jrpg.

If you want 40+ hours of my time, you better impress me. To hell with this "40+ hour game, you get your money's worth!" nonsense. If those 40+ hours aren't fun, what's the point? Castle Crashers is short but I had fun. Fun doesn't have to be complicated but jrpg devs for the most part still fail to make their games fun. How difficult is it to actually make most battles fun (and by fun I don't mean implementing button mashing and rhythm-button pressing schemes like Tales. That gets even more old than the traditional turn-based setup) instead of giving us 95% chore-like boring battles and only 5% exciting battles? When I play Tales and an enemy catches me and we enter into the battle screen, it's like "oh crap not this again. another battle" whereas in say Castle Crashers or Diablo (despite the rediciulous repetitiveness of that game) I feel the exact opposite when I see hordes of baddies coming my way. It's just not as fun hacking and slashing with Yuri. Would it kill jrpg devs to just take a beat-em-up/hack-n-slash, add in level progression, maybe some story too if it doesn't suck (translation: no kawaii desu ne, melodramatic crap or pretentious convoluted crazy plot twisting type of stuff) slap a coat of animu paint on it and call it a game? That's all I'd really need from a jrpg to experience what is called fun. The traditional (and by traditional I don't just mean turn-based. I include stuff like Tales in this) jrpg needs a make over if they want to win back all those PS1 jrpg fans who have moved on to shooters, action-adventures and wrpgs and only dabble in jrpgs for the occassional new Final Fantasy here or there.

Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon were above average jrpgs without a doubt (Tales of Vesperia and Eternal Sonata just plain bored me on the other hand) and I had fun with those games but I did get sick of those games after a certain point in the story (especially LO, BD not as much) and had to force myself to beat them. After having taken a break from those games after beating the main quest, I would definitely be up for side quests and buying the DLC now. But I felt the experience was hindered when I had to force myself to continue on to beat those games.

So yeah, this is why I'm gunshy with jrpgs now. I skipped TLR and SO4. And I might skip MC2 as well considering the reviews. I'm not even sure if I will buy FF13 and Resonance of Fate. I'm just so jaded with this genre. It was a good idea for me to take a break from it (and I'm still on the jrpg break). I don't want to bash the genre since it was my favorite genre at one point and it's hard for someone to admit that they're losing interest in something they invested a lot of time in the past into. But they just don't set off dopamine in my brain like they used to. There are games from other genres that do a much better job of doing that.