FINALLY!!! Whew. lol.  This game was certainly a long and thorough quest for me.  But that is due in part to playing maybe the first 3rd of it while still in school.  Also, it kept getting overshadowed gaming-wise by NCAA Football 2006, and the development of Atlas of War overall.  Good game.  I was getting pretty ticked with the second-to-final boss.  The difficulty seemed rediculous at first.  But then I realized the strategies I was using (from Gamefaqs) just didn't work effectively enough.  So what I actually did was completed a couple different techniques from two different FAQs as well as one of my own strategies that almost immediately allowed me to go from dying over and over again, to beating the boss within a few minutes, but then its second form gave me some trouble.  Then a big shock then a sigh of relief hit me when I had to immediately go and fight the final boss without the ability to manually save...and died.  Man I was bumped out, thinking I had to do all that over again.  So when I chose to restart from the last save, SURPRISE!  I got to pick up right at the point where the other boss died!  Whew!

I think I only managed to get an ok ending as I had about at 69% completion.  I just downloaded 100% speed run from speed demos arhive so i'll just look at that to see the best ending.  Man...i'm glad to have finally completed this game.  I'll likely write a review for it as well as for Mario Kart DS soon.

In the meantime, i'm enjoying Final Fantasy.  Its kinda cheesy in a way but I guess thats just evidence of its age.  Its nice hearing some familiar musical tunes from later Final Fantasies in the game, nice to experience their origins.  Music overall is pretty well-done, but hey, it was Nobuo Uematsu.  Now that Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is done, its time to start Jade Empire which i'll likely do sometime today.  I also plan to watch Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children tonight, looking forward to it.