1) -Tried a 100% first playthrough on Tales of Graces f with a friend and his brother. Planning a second to help with the optional dungeon. Loved it. Favorite in the series.
- Now playing every once in a while with two friends Tales of Xillia. Got it for one of them for his birthday. We should play it more often, seems good enough, despite the well....couple of failures it clearly shows. It's still a Tales game.
-Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Screwed up on ONE CHOICE and ended up with such a BAD ending I couldn't even FIGHT the final boss after 80 HOURS. Still, it was so amazing that one day I will totally replay it with a decent ending.
-Pokémon X. Well...not much of a JRPG as in depth, but I got it for my birthday and my friend is still playing around with his team's preparations. Can't wait.
-The Legend of Dragoon: A PS1 Classic. Totally worth it. Loved the timing thing in attacks. Dragoons are too broken, though.
And well...I played a lot of them this year so... I'll just stop there =O
2) Since I first touched Tales of the Abyss 8 years ago, I've been drawn to their japanese clichéd story-driven magic. Yes, it is too action-packed to be the first I played, but in my family they were never too supportive of video games, so I only heard about the genre from a couple of friends. Then I started playing turn-based classics and my mind was just blown. Guess I just love taking my time to beat the crap out of the boss with insane attacks that destroy the world but might miss the target. And besides, their beautiful worlds filled to the brim with interesting yet bizarre characters and locations is just a nice escape from reality.
3)Well...I feel some JRPGs nowadays focus too much on the visual appeal rather than what's important. For example, my first impression on Tales of Xillia was that....IT LOOKS BEAUTIFUL, THE ATTACKS LOOK BEAUTIFUL OH MAI GAD LOOK AT THAT LINK ARTE....but then I watch the cutscenes and I feel like it's going back to the stiff movements like in Eternal Sonata. Can't say it's bad, I love the series and the gameplay is just superb, but I just feel that...Tales of Graces was a Wii Game and even such a little thing like the cutscenes were just brilliantly made.
On the other hand, some games are improvising with the battle systems to make a difference. And a couple of them did a nice job.
