Nerdy Thoughts, Start of School

Some disappointing ways to start the semester. Actually, just one thing, I forgot to bring my external hard drive's power source so I am stuck with watching videos off of youtube. Oh, the joys of video hunting, how I miss thee. The experience is making me inclined towards getting a portable hard drive without a power source. But... i feel like I would lose considerable quality in hard drive-ness if I did. I guess I should stick to the more permanent kind, plus it makes me feel cooler to use.

Classes have started, and I am doing the readings! My public health econ classes seems... well I don't have impression of it because the professor wasn't there. He was traveling back from Europe, hopefully he will have delightful stories about public health in Europe. Amsterdam, anyone? History of Battle was alright, but the class was completely full. Talk about learning phalanx formation...

I also have the PS2 here and definitely started to think a bit about the quality of Japanese video games, specifically RPGs. With FFXIII and the rise of western RPGs such as Mass Effect, I could definitely tell there has been a decline in the quality of Japanese RPGs relative to Western RPGs. Why is that? During the better times of Japanese RPGs, there were scarcely any equal-leveled competition from Western RPGs. I don't even remember hearing of Western RPGs when I was in middle school and high school. This made Japanese RPGs the only game in town: whether they were actually good is a different question and difficult to answer because there were not many comparable games at the time. Western RPGs were lagging behind.

But that all changed as Western RPGs saw what Japanese RPGs were doing and made their own games better. Nowadays, you'll be hard-pressed to find an RPG that lacks some sort of encyclopedia, character classes, and more side quests than you can shake your Ultima Weapon at. With the advent of quality Western RPGs, Japanese RPGs finally had some competition. But does this mean that Japanese RPGs will get better in response, or will they maintain their status quo of quality?

To be honest, I only play Square-Enix games, so my view is slightly (largely?) skewed. So of course I am going to talk about (surprise surprise) FFXIII. Which I thought was a good game, don't get me wrong. But it does not compare to its earlier predecessors such as FFVI - which I just started playing. Also compared against FFVII - FFIX, FFXIII illustrates a growing trend for Square: sacrificing the plot line for graphics. Sure the characters look great as my desktop wallpaper, but do I really feel for them? Not really. In some cases, I am more frustrated than awed by their decisions (Hope, anyone?). Square needs to step up its game - but can it? The likes of Mass Effect 2 and other great (yes, they are good) Western RPGs make it difficult for Square to stand out.