The explanation: Mike now has bleach-blonde hair. You wouldn't have noticed this without me telling you, but you can tell if you already know it's there. Also, at the end of comic number 33, Jonathan made us get into the car.

In other news, Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus comes out tomorrow. It's a third-person shooter set in the FF VII universe taking place a year after the recently released movie. Clearly it is necessary. Square would never ever give us an unnecessary sequel. Still, irrational brand loyalty causes me to be interested. I'm waiting to see some reviews first, at least.

What warrants explanation is how he goes from talking about the comic, relevant to those who visit this site, to listing off his personal whimseys about video games as if this were some sort of personal (we)blog of his. Clearly that gin-and-juice caused permanent brain damage. I apologize for leading him down the path to ruination.

In other news, I got a new motherboard for my desktop and everything is up and running again.

Yahoo!

I hope that the shift to talking about his quaint computing technology was intended to be irony.

I just thought I would mention that I have no idea why shining hair makes that sound. To the best of my recollection "schwa" is the sound of pepsi cans opening, or the sound of refreshing action. Lookup Pepsiman for further details. But... I couldn't think of a better sound so I let them go with schwa. Despite the fact that I don't find my hair, sexy though it may be, particularly refreshing.

I'm probably the only one in the world who actually LIKES Final Fantasy X-2. To me the second story felt pretty natural, and despite what others will tell you there aren't THAT many stupid minigames that you MUST do in order to advance the plot. NONE in fact, as I believe they are all optional. Don't hold me to that though as I didn't fact check. Also, bear in mind that the game is meant to be played multiple times... it has a New Game+ feature for a reason. Therefore games that rely on memorization and give you only one shot to get it right are in fact not so objectionable. You can beat the game and enjoy the story without doing everything and I fail to see why it is a bad idea to make you work for it a bit if you desire to get 100% . Now... is some of the music God awful? Yes it is. Do the characters occasionally girl-out a BIT too much? Yes they do. Does that make it a bad game deserving of the venom and bile that everyone seems to hear upon it? Not in my opinion.

Final Fantasy X-2 is deserving of all of the venom and bile that everyone seems to hear upon it. Most of the minigames are not required, unless you wanted to have access to a majority of the classes to use in the class-driven battle system that makes up the only part of the gameplay that's worthwhile. The music is terrible. Brother's character is ruined. The ending of the first game is ruined. The ability to take Yuna's character as anything more than a joke is ruined. The world would be better off if this game never came out, and they had saved the wonderful battle system trapped within its cleavage for another title.

The reviews for Dirge of Cerberus are coming in, and they don't look good. It seems as though they failed to effectively emulate the charm of Devil May Cry's gameplay while at the same time failing to add much to Final Fantasy VII's story, or so I read. I'm probably not going to get it, or at least I wont until it is $10 in the proverbial bargain bin.

I don't know that you can blame ruining the ending of Final Fantasy X on X-2, given that X ruins its own ending. Also I applaud you for reproducing my typo. Charming.

Though it was certainly a detriment to the ending that was previously established, the extra bit at the end of FF X at worst left the big question up to interpretation. By metaphor, it pisses on the grave of the ending that should be. FF X-2, by contrast, exhumes the corpse and has its way with it, leaving it as a twisted zombie that must awkwardly walk amongst the living.

I thought I'd continue the discussion with a bit more detail. First, let's talk about the Dressspheres and aquiring them. Consulting Gamefaqs.com there are 14 jobs usable by the characters individually and then the 3 super jobs which are much like summons and usable by only one character. Glancing down the FAQ and using my memory I recall that it is in fact VERY easy to miss the Alchemist job. (See FAQs for more details) Lady Luck requires one to play a small amount of Sphere Break, the card game style minigame this time around. It is also possible to miss the Trainer by not talking to Khimari early in the game. Two of the super jobs are basically mandatory but the other can be missed quite easily. Finally, the mascot job is, for all intents and purposes not intended to be obtained on the first playthrough as it requires you to complete just about everyquest and sidequest, some of which are challenging on an initial play. Now to be fair, if you don't do certain missions it IS in fact possible to NOT get most of the jobs. I suppose that may seem like a lot, 4/14 and 1/3 but speaking only for myself, I got all the jobs save mascot and the transformation job for Paine in a very casual initial playthrough. Therefore I don't really feel it fair to say that you must play games to use a majority of the classes.

Music I allready agreed can be bad at times, God awful I said actually, so let's not revisit that. Let's talk about brother's character for a bit though. Now, maybe it is just me... but I don't really recall him having much of a character in the first game. Does he? I genuinely don't remember him doing much in Final Fantasy X, let alone having character development or significant characterization to be ruined. I recall him being basically a somewhat daring pilot who spoke in al bhed and was the focus of the trnaslating game which revolved around that. If anyone who reads this would like to correct or remind me please do, but at this point I can't really agree that his character was ruined since I don't recall learning much about it in the first place.

I didn't really feel that I could take Yuna as a joke following the events of the game. To me the game was about someone who has been on one path their entire life finding a new one and making choices for herself when circumstances change and the world turns upside down. It was also about her coming to grips with the loss of someone important to her and moving on with her life, this is implicit in the ending to X I think... but this game shows it more explicitly. Now this can of course be countered with the fact that there IS of course no loss if one gets certain endings. That only really comes out of left field at the end though, she still goes on the journey and learns something about herself and the world through her experiences. As you can see in the other ending she does in fact get over the loss of Tidus and therefore still, to my mind, grew and matured.

The only final fantasy I ever played to completion was 1 (the Playstation remake), and I only finished it then because some had dibs on my game clear data. I did, however, find the girliness in X-2, of what I saw of it, to be painful. The class-changing combat did look decently fun, though.

We're still working on the next comic. It's required some actual graphics work on my part, but I hope you will end up agreeing that it's worth the wait. You may also look forward to my stunning rebuttal to Mike's pathetic and vacuous arguments. It's all coming your way as soon as tomorrow evening. Later.