Your post is an example of why I will never again live with anyone that isn't a family member or a close friend. I have never had a positive experience living with strangers. No more roommates.
Each character can choose two license boards, which can't be changed once they're set. The second one doesn't come until after a certain milestone in the story. You really have to think about your builds if you want to get the most out of the game. The Espers and Quckenings also play a role in the license board as a lot of licenses are locked behind Espers and Quickenings, and each Esper can still only be assigned to one person.
The Espers are much more powerful, especially the level 3 Espers. They can also be actively controlled when they are on screen.
Your characters can now inflict more than 9999 damage and can have up to 19,998 HP with a base 9999 HP and the Bubble Spell.
The elite weapons and armor, by contrast, are somewhat harder to get for the most part. That invisible merchant in the Necrohol of Nabudis no longer sells you every top-level spell in the game, you have to actually go out and find them.
I haven't beaten Yiazmat yet. I'm trying to get Zodiark, and am using a lot of colorful language in the process. Zodiark is a cheating SOB.
I hear you on trying to eat healthier. I still eat a lot of crap.
My preferred snacks change. One day it might be peanut butter M&Ms or Reese's Pieces. One day it might be Nutter Butters. One day it might be Ruffles with jalapeno cheese dip. My beverage of choice is either Coke or Dr. Pepper. I don't snack often while gaming. I'll usually get something to eat for an actual meal and then go back to playing when I'm done.
I need to stop eating so much crap. :)
I'm also sorry I missed out on contributing to this blog. "Anime games" is a massive, massive category in my game library. My top three would have been Valkyria Chronicles (which someone else covered), Sakura Wars: So Long My Love (made by many of the same designers), and probably Lunar, a game I've mentioned here before. I could probably do a top 20 of this one.
Life got in the way, sadly.
Most of the high-end hunts are indeed endurance matches. Zodiark, by contrast, has only a fraction of the HP but is a complete asshole, and the game forces you to get your gambits together to beat him as quickly as possible or you're going to have a lot of problems.
The Espers are a lot more buffed in this game. The more powerful ones can have HP in excess of 9999 (it just shows as 9999 unless their actual HP drops below that), and they can now do more than 9999 damage (so can your characters, for that matter, with the right weapon/armor combos). They can also now be controlled actively through the battle menu and even be made the controllable character while on-screen, whereas before they just followed their gambits, which includes choosing when to use their super attacks. You don't have to wait for the exact right one-in-a-million combination of circumstances for Ultima to use her big attack. With those things in place, the weakest link ends up being the summoner, who can still get dogpiled on by the enemies.
It's kind of cool that this collection has Rolling Thunder in it. My cousin and I used to play the unauthorized Tengen-made version on the NES, and I liked how the enemies would melt when you shot them. It was a pretty cool game for its time. I just wish this version had Gaplus in it. I never saw the arcade Rolling Thunder 2, but I do know that Rolling Thunder 2 was released in the US on the Sega Genesis.
I always wished that Namco would include Jr. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man in a Namco museum (there's an emulated version of Baby-Pac Man available that includes a recreation of the pinball table.) I do understand that those games were made without Namco's authorization and they were pretty upset that Midway made them without their permission, so they've disavowed them. But Jr. Pac-Man wasn't a bad game. Namco's always had an uneasy stance towards Ms. Pac-Man, since it was also an unauthorized game, and they were probably embarrassed that it sold a LOT better than their own in-huse Super Pac-Man. I notice Ms. Pac-Man isn't in this collection either. :(
It's kind of weird how popular The Tower of Druaga was in Japan. I've played it and it's not one of their better games. The music is kind of catchy though. They had Chunsoft make a Druaga-flavored Mystery Dungeon game and there was a Druaga dungeon, complete with the music and sound effects, in the Gamecube RPG Baten Kaitos.
I think that at one time, Namco had said that Mr. Driller's mother was Kissy from Baraduke. Kissy and Taizo Hori had been married, but got divorced. It's interesting the idea that Namco thinks of their game library as a continuous universe. I wonder where the Tales series fits into that.
I've actually hit a lot of walls with gaming in my lifetime that ended up totally derailing me. I'm not fortunate enough to be enjoying BotW yet, but I have had plenty of games where I've gotten loss or ended up against a tough boss that I can't get past, stopped playing, and then got too caught up in other stuff.
I only work weekends now (still get paid the same salary, though, yay me!) so I have a lot more free time on my hands for gaming. I'm thinking about working on a concept I have for RPG Maker MV, an JRPG-styled version of the old Taipan! computer game.
Stage Select:
I've seen two approaches to this question: actual gaming figures and gaming characters.
If we do the former:
1. Shigeru Miyamoto. Probably the single most powerful individual in video gaming.
2. Hironobu Sakaguchi. Popularized RPGs into the mainstream. Not to take away from the likes of Richard "Lord British' Garriott who did a lot of the early pioneering work in the genre.
3. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. He didn't invent video games, but he did bring them into the mainstream.
4. Kojima. I'm not as big of a MGS fan as other people here, but Kojima has earned his place.
For characters, I'd put up Mario, Link, Pac-Man, and Sonic. Those four characters put a recognizable face on gaming, but I realize that others might think that Geralt of Rivia, Snake, or some other less cartoonish character might be more appropriate.
Chrono Crossing: Although there were great games like TMNT, Dragon Warrior, and Faxanadu released this year, I'm going to go with Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. Sure, it was a half-sized Mario with a lot of weird concepts that never made it into mainstream Mario canon. The reason why it sticks out to me is that in 1989, it was incredible for 11-year-old Andrew to be able to play a handheld Super Mario game. The Game Boy was one of my favorite Christmas presents of my entire life. I still have my old Game Boy that's now nearly 30 years old. I guess the "correct" answer to this would be "Tetris," which is more universally known and could be argued to have more universal appeal. But the novely of Tetris has been long gone for me, while Mario is still as awesome as ever. I have a PS Vita and a 3DS now, plus every handheld that Nintendo ever made... but Super Mario Land was a miracle of technology in a time when most portable games were of the primitive Tiger/Game & Watch ilk.
This is me right now.
I tried a few DBZ games, but I hated the controls, which were incredibly stiff. This game might be worth checking out.
