Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Red Soul, you should give Last Remnant a chance

I can see why its kind of a divisive game and my main critique of it is that I would like more control of my characters, in some ways it is like Ogre Battle where you are limited in how much you can control your parties. Whether battles are slow or fast depends really on what the player sets up since you have the ability to dramatically slow down time and either pick off one group of monsters or create giant battles with multiple groups of monsters. I still haven't reached the really big battles yet because I got distracted with another game but there will probably be a point where I have 4-5 parties of characters (with 3-5 characters each) fighting up to 7 enemy parties. Of course its also very easy to just avoid the enemies but there are a lot of goodies for defeating them and the goodies get better the more risks you take. Anyways, out of all the Xbox 360 JRPGs I have played, I would probably rank this 4th behind Tales of Vesperia, Lost Odyssey and Star Ocean 4.

The game I got sidetracked with was the Ultima 5 remake for PC that uses the Dungeon Siege engine. They did an outstanding job. They created a gigantic world with no transitions between the forests, mountains, towns, dungeons and the underworld. All of the characters actually have schedules they follow modeled on a realistic life. They work, stop for an hour for lunch at home or the pub, work, get dinner etc. All of them have long detailed amounts of conversation. You can take either a Resistance path or an Oppression path, both of which are very detailed. And finally there is so much room for exploring both in the overworld, underworld and in the dungeons. If anyone is interested, it is a free download although you need Dungeon Siege (which is very cheap) to play.

http://www.u5lazarus.com/

They also just finished version 1.0 of Ultima 6 in the same engine with the same detail

http://u6project.com/

If you ever liked the Ultima series, Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, these are great games to check out.

Never had the patience to play Ultima seriously, but these remakes could make things interesting somewhat. I'll take a look.
Thanks for conterweighting my negative views about Last Remnant, I'll give it another chance sometime, although I'm hoping to get Nier soon, and considering the collection I have at hand, LR will fall to the wayside for a good while (not to mention freshly translated games like Tales Of Innocence). Still thanks for sharing your thoughts, Ultpaladin.

Finally captured every pokemon on Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, like I did on the first game. Actually it was much easyer than I thought it would be. Regigigas is very slow, and besides, two Ampharos specials took care of half of his life. The first game's Deoxys was so much more difficult.

I just hope the third game would not be so unbalanced, specials are way too powerfull, and you can use 8 at the same capture. Not that I used more than 3 in the same capture, anyway.

And, I'm still playing Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love. Just finished chapter 5(Subaru's chapter) and she/he finally moved from the bottom.

Pokemon Ranger deserves much more credit than its given by most I believe, its a very interesting concept, far more action oriented than the mainstream games. Incidentally, I quite like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon also, as much as it is a side game as well, I find it rather fun (Moreso than most "Fushigi" style games, as it is less punitive).
I'm rooting to see Guardian Signs released in english soon, although I doubt the Wiiware PMD games will, given when they were released. Perhaps they'll see DS re-releases hm.

Yesterday I finished Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, for PS2. Did Gemini's ending, actually I wanted to do Ratchet's but she's like a secret character and her ending can only be done on a second playthrough.

At first it looks very diferent for an SRPG, but with time I started liking this game more and more. Now I can say that I really liked the game, and would like to play the first ones, I'm more interested on the Paris ones.

Master Chen,

What kind of controller was being used on Xenoblade? I read that it is compatible with the classic controller and I would use that instead of a Wii-mote.

I started playing Dark Wizard for Sega CD on my PSP, with Picodrive.

It's a SRPG and at first it doesn't look like much, but it's addictive.
This game reminds me so much of Brigandine for PSX, which is also a very addictive game.

Dark Wizard isn't bad but the load up times for the animated combat sequences makes me want to cringe.
I don't dislike Brigandine but I felt they stuffed just too much management in the game, its kind of overbearing.

Actually I prefer games with lots of customizations. That old gain-skill-when-leveling is too simple for my tastes.

Its all a matter of execution I suppose. I do like customization, but I dislike excessive management, as they are very different factors.
Said excessive management is what kept me from games like Spectral Force Genesis for instance. On the other hand I felt games like
Infinite Space have a good blend of it, and I'm enjoying it quite throughly now that I made it work.