You can find it here:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/shaiyalightanddarkness/player_review.html?id=582017

Its a great game worth checking out. Let me know what you think!

If you're over the age of 10, and you still collect these things, its time you did a little growing up. That is all.

Those who hated, disliked, or simply found too many faults with Final Fantasy XII seem to love asking this question. They are so wrapped up in their own opinions about the game that they just can't fathom what someone else might enjoy about the game. So here it is, the list of things that I liked about Final Fantasy XII:

I enjoy the large immersive world, beautiful vistas, and the ability to actually spend time exploring due to the sheer size of areas throughout the game. Since the beginning of the series, the world design has given each game the feeling of being on rails for the majority. XII remedies this by allowing large scale exploration almost from the beginning.

I enjoy the gambit system, both for its highly customizable nature, and for the fact that the entire system is completely optional. That's right, you can turn gambits off and still play (pretty amazing, huh?). Furthermore, despite what the detractors like to claim, you can simply use gambits in moderation (automating healing, manually using offensive commands, among other things).

I enjoy the much more grounded and realistic cast, as opposed to anime cliches of the past several games. From VII to X the games have felt like playable animes, which is nothing short of dull. Even the SNES felt a bit anime, though the sprite graphics helped to water down this effect. XII remedies this by delivering characters that feel as if they belong in literature.

I enjoy the storyline for feeling like a mix between Tactics, FF6, and Vagrant Story: a mix of politics and fantasy. I hated the over-the-top internal struggle storylines of the PS1 era. X's was ok, but XII finally gave us something a bit more interesting.

I enjoy the extremely creative, well designed summons as being some of the best in the series, and welcomed the change from massively overpowered to they'll only work for you if you're smart enough to use them properly. Lets face it, summons have been broken since FFVII's introduction of Knights of the Round. During the SNES era they were useful, without being broken. X was the pinnacle of broken summons, with mega-damage available with most of the summons in the game. XII brings it back down to a level where you actually have to plan out your summon use and put some effort and thought into making them useful.

I enjoyed the cities, towns, and dungeons for their attention to detail and their feel of being much more alive than in past games. You need only spend a little time looking around at structures such as the Rabanastre Palace, Necrohol of Nabudis, or Tomb of Raithwall to appreciate how well crafted these things are.

I enjoyed having a villain that you were meant to sympathize with his point of view, rather than simply hate him because he's the ultimate evil. This is closely tied to the anime cliche bit mentioned above, but super villains such as Kuja and Sephiroth are dull. Villains that feel both human and dangerous (as opposed to feeling like demi-gods) are a much more interesting angle

I enjoyed the fact that archaic features such as random battles and explorable "world maps" were eliminated. Let's face it. These features are nothing more than antiquated relics of the past. They were brought into use due to limits of technology in past consoles. There is enough storage and processing power in present day consoles, that we no longer have need of such things. The only reason that people refuse to let go is for the nostalgic value that the system holds. There are no legitimate reasons for it.

There are 3 kinds of gamers in the universe.

1. The "Purist" Gamer. The highest form of gamer. Those of us that are able to realize the true value in a game by playing through free of guides (wherever possible) and cheats. Now obviously sometimes we simply get stuck, can't figure out what to do, and look for outside help, but solving problems along the way for yourself is a much more rewarding experience.

2. The Guidebook Gamer. These fall in the middle of the gamer hierarchy. These guys range from using guides and messageboards every step of the way, often because they're so uptight about "getting everything" that they can't simply stop and enjoy the gaming experience, to simply relying on them more than they absolutely need to, whatever the reason may be.

3. The Cheater. The bottomfeeders in the gamer hierarchy. These guys seem to think that "beating" 2000 games puts them above other gamers, because they see a each game completed as a trophy of sorts. The only reason they play is to finish, and they get no real joy out of the games themselves. The lowest of the low, and worthy of any and all contempt aimed in their direction.

I am a "purist" as the cheaters and guidebook gamers have labeled us, and that makes me better than you. Deal with the truth.

I'll preface this by saying that I have, in fact, NEVER played any Guitar Hero game. The idea of it has never really interested me at all.

We're now on the third installment into this series of games, and I still don't get the appeal. Its always made me think of Dance Dance Revolution. Only, rather than jumping around on some squares like an idiot, you stand there pushing buttons on a toy guitar. Yet, I see people raving about it on message boards, I hear people talking about it at work, and South Park even dedicated an episode to it (funny episode, by the way).

Now, I'm not exactly a huge fan of music. I listen to it in the car, and I use my mp3 player a couple times a month. Other than that, I pretty much don't have music on. Music doesn't factor into my opinion of a game, unless its so completely annoying that I simply can't tune it out. I barely notice music in movies and television. I suppose this is probably a large part of my attitude towards this game. I don't value music much, so why would I enjoy a game that centers around it?

I really don't know. Maybe there's something that I'm missing here. Fill me in if you know something I don't.

Before I say anything else, lets clear up two things: 1) I don't dislike it because its "cool" to hate something that's popular, and 2) I played through the game twice, so I definitely gave it a chance.

More importantly, I don't even hate the game. It was okay. But that's it. It wasn't good, it wasn't great, and it definitely wasn't "the best evarrr!!!" Part of what many people loved about FF7 was the "amazing graphics". For me, I was never all that impressed. Until they really fine tuned polygon graphics, I hated them. When Virtua Fighter and the first Tekken games came around, I thought they looked terrible, despite what they were attempting to do. They may have created 3D characters, but they just a mess of blocks vaguely similar to a human shape, much like the block characters of the Atari/Intellivision age were.

In my eyes, they had graphically taken a step backwards, as the sprites of the SNES era of games were superior in many ways. It wasn't until FF8 that polygon graphics in the FF series really began to shine. Graphically, FF7 was garbage. At least where gameplay was concerned.

On the other hand, FF7 was the first FF to really make use of gorgeous cinematic FMVs, some of which are the most memorable FMVs ever produced by Square.

The characters were really nothing special. Everyone loves Cloud for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom. He was a depressed kid with a severe psychiatric disorder. How that makes for an appealing lead is beyond me. Everyone else, with the exception of Tifa (who was really only memorable due to her physical design, rather than dialogue and personality traits), were not even all that memorable. I welcomed Aeris' fate with open arms, as it gave me one less mediocre character to tote along the rest of the way. Sephiroth was as uninteresting as Cloud, and really made for a terrible "ultimate villain". His motivations were completely lacking.

On the bright side, Gold Saucer was the source of some of the best mini-gaming we've seen in an FF game, and I'd love to see something similar in future games.

The story, well, aside from major plotpoints, it wasn't terribly memorable either. Even after two playthroughs, I find that years later I can hardly remember the order of events beyond Gold Saucer. I can remember the general goal, as well as many key scenes, but other than that, it has become a blur, showcasing its mediocrity.

and its close relatives PWN'D, PWNED, PAWN, and PAWNED. Its ridiculous how a mere typo can turn into something as obnoxiously contagious as PWN has managed to do. Every single time I see this "word" repeated, I die a little on the inside. Its not funny, its not cute, and its not witty.

I work with this annoying kid who regularly wears a shirt with the phrase "I PWN'D YOU" across the chest. I constantly have to resist the urge to do things that would cause me to lose my job, where he's concerned.

Stop using it. Its annoying.

Yes, I went there. Deal with it.

Ask for a list of "best games evar!" and this game will inevitably end up being mentioned by several people. But if we're being honest here, this game's appeal lies primarily in the fact that it placed one of the most popular casts of video game characters into an RPG.

What I'm getting at here, is that were you to replace Mario and crew with a generic crew of RPG heroes, swap out koopa troopas for "turtle warriors" and goombas for "evil fungus", and people would have thought much less of the game than they do.

Lets face it, the gameplay and storyline were average, and these are the two most important aspects of jrpgs. The only reason this game gets the praise that it does is because everybody loves Mario. That's what it boils down to.

Thus, SMBRPG is one of the most overrated games ever made.

If there's one word not born of the internet that message board kiddies have latched onto in the most annoying way, its epic. Just because some FMV sequence in a game blew you away, it doesn't mean the word "epic" fits. Epic: of unusually great size or extent. This is the definition of the word that people are typically reaching for when they use it. The key word here being "unusual". Battles between two powerful forces in jRPGs have become commonplace. There's nothing unusual about them anymore, thus, epic no longer fits these situations. Most recently, someone on the FFXIII board described one such battle between Bahamut and Alexander in just this manner. As I've said, these types of scenes are commonplace and expected in games now, so the word "epic" does not work when describing them. If you can't use it correctly, please stop using it. Failure to do so may result in unending mockery.