Well, happy birthday, in any case. Tales of Symphonia is a great birthday game. It didn't take me long to get the Penguinist Gloves, but I totally went blank on the solution to the Ice Temple sliding puzzle! Thankfully, I still have my original ToS strategy guide.
Yaaay, Tami! Good call! :)
Seriously, I like to think of myself as the Gray Hair of Tales games. :)
I really enjoyed Symphonia. Xillia has finally managed to put out a better Tales game, but Symphonia is still a great experience, and no, that's not because it was virtually uncontested on the Gamecube. Most of us Gamecube owners also had a PS2, ya know. :) I liked the whole cast. I'd have to say my favorite is either Sheena, Lloyd, or Presea. Lloyd because he was the best character to actually control in battle, Sheena because of the summons, and Presea because of her delightfully twisted backstory.
I'm thinking about trying out Inazuma Eleven, more because I'm a fan of Level-5 than because of any feelings I have about soccer. I just like to support them because their games range from fun stuff like The Guild games to fantastic experiences like Dragon Quest VIII and Ni no Kuni, and I want to see more from them.
Check your characters' titles. The title that changes to a "classic" costume is at the bottom of the list. I own both Xillia and Graces f in addition to Symphonia, but apparently you only have to have save files from one game or the other on your HDD registered to the same PSN ID to unlock all of the costumes. They'll also be unlocked in New Game + if you don't own either Graces or Xillia.
Lloyd: Guy from Tales of the Abyss
Colette: Rita from Tales of Vesperia (title "Researcher")
Genis: Luke from Tales of the Abyss
Raine: Pascal from Tales of Graces
Kratos: Ludger from Tales of Xillia 2
Sheena: Judith from Tales of Vesperia
Zelos: Alvin from Tales of Xillia
Presea: Elize from Tales of Xillia
Regal: Malik from Tales of Graces
The only PS4 I've ever seen is the one sitting under my TV, because my wife preordered and bought mine on launch day. They are waitlisted here. Meanwhile, piles of Xbones including the much-touted Titanfall bundle, and plenty of Wii Us, the latter of which I also have.
I'm in Heimdall, so if this were the Gamecube I'd be close to the end of disc 1.
I still like Square Enix, but I wish we'd get some of their better games. Who knows when Dragon Quest will ever be seen in the US again. I'd love to have Dragon Quest VII and I'd give Dragon Quest X a shot, seeing that they did a great job with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn. Yeah, I know it was a do-over but at least they didn't give up on it. Bravely Default was quite awesome, but it took Nintendo's marketing muscle to make that happen in the US. Hopefully now that Bravely Default has been a success here Square Enix will be less reticent about some of its non-Final Fantasy RPGs. And Final Fantasy XII was my favorite Final Fantasy other than VII.
I don't really see why all the Internet rage about Capcom. Yes, their business practices suck, but it's not like this is anything new from them. How many versions of Street Fighter II did they release on the SNES, and that's nothing compared to how many revisions they did for Street Fighter on the PS1.
Plus, the entire industry is saddled with bad customer service practices like heavily crippled "free to play" cashgrabs games that actually want you to pay NOT to play them, and always-online tethering, and then game companies crying persecution when people call them out for it. If Capcom truly were the worst offender in gaming, the industry would be in healthy shape. As it is, the thing I'm most irritated with them is them teasing Breath of Fire 6 and then making it a F2P browser/mobile game.
Gamingwise, I played Tales of Symphonia on PS3 and Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded on iPad. I bought the latter because it was 5 bucks on the App Store and I still had money left from a prepaid card, so impulse buy. Tales of Symphonia is as awesome as I remembered it to be, and LSL is funny.
I feel your pain. I'm still stuck on DSL in my area. There simply isn't anything better available and likely never will be anything better in my neighborhood. Titanfall on XB1 was designed so that Microsoft could toot its own horn about its Azure cloud servers and is heavily dependent on them to function, so if your Internet isn't up to snuff, you're going to have problems.
I'm not nuts about everything being on the "cloud" myself. I'd still rather have everything stored locally on my end. But march of progress (i.e. how can we monetize the shit out of everything) and all that nonsense.
This month is pretty loaded up, and there's a lot I want coming out, like MGSV: GZ, Atelier E&L, Dark Souls II, and of course the FFX/X2 HD Remaster. These games are also fighting for recognition against the much-hyped Titanfall, which is supposed to be the "savior" of the Xbone.
I don't think that's bad per se, even though I don't have spare money to buy everything on this list, or the time to play it. But it is unfortunate that the game industry is so reliant on day-one sales and they claim to take huge losses if a game isn't a success right out of the gate. It seems to me that games had longer tails back in the day, but maybe that could be chalked down to game industry news not being readily available on the Internet back then, and day-one sales were as important then as now.
On the other hand, unless you're talking about Nintendo titles, most games do drop like a stone after the first week.
