Don't get me wrong, I love this game a lot and am having tremendous fun playing it but throughout the course of my gameplay I have had some serious deja vu. First off the backgrounds for Eternal Sonata look so similar to Final Fantasy X and X2s that it's just downright eerie. The Elegy of the Moon and the Farplane are virtually the same place in both appearance and purpose. The little glowing "agogos" sure look a hell of a lot like the "fireflies" of the Farplane and are both most certainly representitive of the souls of the dead. The love story between Polka and Alegretto is reminiscent of the love story between Yuna and Tidus. Yuna/Polka both function as the game's clerics/healers and Tidus/Algretto as the speedy fighters. The attitudes and personality of them are identical (the young, too-sweet girl who must sacrifice herself despite her love for thecocky-but-loveable, free-spirited hero). The ideas of dreams and reality meshing and that love can officially merge the two worlds as one is the ultimate theme in both games. Since my PS2 broke last year and I haven't played FFX or FFX2 in 2 years it's both fun to relive the adventure again through Eternal Sonata but at the same time, it's "Hey I've been here and done that".

So is Haku a male or a female? Were Haku and Zabuza an item? Well here are a few things that led to my opinion on this whole debate.. #1) Haku is given a female voice in the English Dub (something which yaoi-fearing Western civilization does often in anime in the hopes that we don't read the manga or notice a lack of breasts or watch the original with Japanese voices). However, in the manga, Haku is refered to as male quite a number of times. #2) Haku is 15. Regardless of gender this is just creepy. My personal opinion: #1) Yep Haku is a boy #2) Yep he was in love with Zabuza although I don't think Zabuza realized this until Haku sacrificed himself for him. #3) Their story is a sad one regardless of how you view their relationship

I was looking forward to playing Final Fantasy 11 online in December and was very excited to get a copy. However, the excitment quickly turned into annoyance as it took nearly 8 hours to get all of the game set up and extras downloaded. The $16 a month for a character and $1 for each additional character didn't really impress me either. The controls were wonky, the graphics not that stunning and the character design was so limited that I almost didn't want to play. I tried 2 hours of gameplay and ended up deleting my character and account because it was just way too boring. Enter Eternal Sonata. A friend of mine leant me his copy of this game and at first, I was skeptical due to it's cutesy opening and extremely long cut scenes. After 2 hours of game-play however, I becamedrawn into Sonata's vibrant andfantastical world.This game is everything Final Fantasy 11 should have been. Beautiful scenery, charming characters, easy gameplay, and, above all, an interesting and compelling story. I only wish I had discovered Eternal Sonata before I wasted the $40 on Final Fantasy 11.

Have a Happy New Years everyone and remember not to party too hard :P Good news, we finally recovered our Gamer profile and are currently able to play Carcassonne LIVE ranked matches :D Hopefully this means that whatever happened is being fixed. At least I can play hung-over Tetris Splash multiplayer tomorrow :)

Thanks to everyone who helped me figure out this one ;) For those of you who are die-hard Naruto fans like myself, having the game freeze mid-mission whenever you reach an explosive trap can be absolutely maddening. I was contemplating exchanging my game in for a new one considering that the disk had no scratches or flaws. Apparently downloading Shikamaru causes some serious flaw in the game. I deleted him along with the Japanese Voices and so far so good, everything seems back to normal.So much for free add-ons. I haven't heard about any problems regarding downloading Jirayia and Sarutobi but I'm not going to risk it for 500 points.

Ok so Xbox Live has been down for 3 days now. Normally, I wouldn't really have a HUGE problem with this, but there are a few things that are REALLY beginning to p*ss me off. #1) I just paid for 3 months last week and I only got about 2 days use out of it; and this is sharing the gamer time with my signifigant other as well. #2) This is my vacation after a hellish 2-week Christmas rush nightmare at work and I can't even kick back and play some Halo3 or Naruto: Rise of a Ninja with my friends and others online #3) 3 DAYS???? I understand about "technical difficulties" and all, but good lord, 3 days is an insane amount of time for this service to be down #4) The 1-800-4-MY-XBOX tech support workers keep insisting that XBOX's homepage has information regarding this issue and I CANNOT FIND IT for the life of me. Is it really on there? Do I have to REEEALLLY go treasure hunting for it. Come on, people, you have thousands of angry, irate customers and you won't even admit IN REALLY BIG LETTERS what is going on? We pay for this service, the least they could do is TRY to explain what happened and ESTIMATE a time they will be up and running again. If they showed this information or at least made it visible to the average net surfer, then maybe so many angry people wouldn't be calling up all the poor tech support people all the time to scream at them...it's not their fault, it's xbox and Microsoft's. #5) The tech support people aren't offering any information about being compensated for our lost time. I know 3 days out of 3 months may not seem like a lot but goddamit I worked hard for that money and I am paying for a service that is not accessable and I'm not getting any real feedback about why. I'm a customer, you're a customer, why the hell aren't we being treated as such? Anyways, that's my ranting for now. I sincerely hope they get this problem fixed really soon.