[Felix]

i've played one and three start to finish, and haven't touched any of the others.

i enjoyed them a lot. one has a lot of jrpg archetypes, but it's mostly the good ones, and the stuff it uses to fill in the cracks is mostly very good stuff. i recall liking the battle system and dialogue of 3 a whole lot, probably more than any ps2 rpg except final fantasy xii. our tastes seem to be a least a little similar in this regard, so.

[Felix]

dude, that's not a canonical true rune.

[Felix]

it's interesting to me the way you seem to regard games that both of us like quite a bit (fft in this example, previously mentioned: trauma center) as "coming close" to being great, but ultimately squandering it in the end - in either example, because they couldn't help being videogames - whereas i'm not bothered in the least by these things.

question: how do you feel about being john malkovich? i don't really like the content of the movie so much as i admire the hell out of kaufman seemingly working a bit too long on the script before going to bed one evening and subsequently opting to take it as far as he could in such an out-of-left-field direction, rather than going back and making it a bit more sane. (this applies to adaptation too to an extent, although it's less focused in that regard and certainly has other merit, so)

i, uh, don't really know where i'm going with this.. i love fft. i don't think suikoden is fft. i think you're looking too hard, lately. i think it's extremely comfortable with its own archetypes, in any event.

as regards the strategy (and again i'm going to have to profess to loving fft all the more in this regard) - play 3. i say that as somebody who never got around to 2 for no good reason, but really. 3's quite something.

[Felix]

been waiting on the sufami translation patch of that for a while now.

i hear it's almost done!

[Felix]

tactics ogre was matsuno's 1995 sufami epic, an evolution of the ideas he first put forth in ogre battle, and the game that motivated square to "buy" him and his entire team and set them to work on final fantasy tactics. prior to all of this nippon ichi nonsense, TO and FFT were the only things really properly "alike," and they still are, to an extent.

TO was later ported to the playstation and translated, in light of FFT's success, but the print run was terrible and the port was, among other things, completely unnecessary - snes/sufami is the preferred way to play it by a wide margin, and some translation guy or other has been working on dropping the official playstation english script into the sufami rom for a while now. i can't wait.

(note: quest went on to make another ogre battle and tactics ogre after matsuno's departure, for n64 and gba respectively, and they're both totally decent)

[Felix]

that's just artwork, afaik. you'll notice even the artwork is almost identical to fft's, mind.

but yeah, i've been waiting to play this myself for a long, long time.

[Felix]

ah, but - an snes romhack could be played on a ds, or psp--

WAIT!

holy god! popstation! can popstation run tactics ogre?