Honestly, I don't care much about SqEx, but the Ivalice Alliance is hot shit. Don't hate, y'all.

Hmm, come to think of it, I'm probably going to be skipping Final Fantasy XII Revanant Wings, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Ring of Fate, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2; pretty much all of the DS spin-offs.

When I remember about those, I'll have to agree that S-E is trying to put out a lot of crap for quick cash, but I guess that means they'll be able to rake in the money for a good project here and there? I mean, if they're trying to pay for producing FFXIII, more power to them...

Ahh, ever the optimist, aren't I?

Oh yea, FF XII!  Forgot that was under thier label.

This is true for me as well.  Personally, I think it has probably made me less patient towards games that take a while to get going, though I've still managed to have my share of memorable experiences.

I think what affects me more is that I want games to try something different here or there.  If I get a 'been there, done that' kind of feeling, I tend to get bored with a game.  Sometimes I think that it affects 3D games moreso than 2D games because of the simple fact that just getting around requires more of a time investment than it used to.

Yeah, I used to enjoy those older games a lot, but then I grew up.

I love it when people talk like that.  It's so self-serving.  I can actually ignore the 'little sprites' part despite the fact that I disagree (there's a certain something called imagination that I feel like great games both old and new should try and get you to use, but that's a conversation for later), but throwing in the additional fact that you've gotten older and using that to come to the conclusion that those older titles draw too much from nostalgia to be as good as they were in this current technological reality of ours strikes me as a contemptible attempt at establishing your personal opinion as truth for anyone who is 'old' enough (i.e. mature and aware enough) to accept it.

I still enjoy a lot of older titles because many of them are well-designed, and good design doesn't stop being good based on dated technology alone.  It's also possible for a game to have high quality graphics and yet be less remarkable in those other areas (like art, gameplay, and music) that make a game great for someone.  One thing I know for sure is that you can't use one extreme or another to generalize about 'older' games or 'newer' games.  For me, there might be a short adjustment period when it comes to adjusting to an older title after playing a newer one, but once that adjustment period is over, the brilliance of a great title will often come through again.  I've even enjoyed older titles that I never played until after the PS2 era began.

Also, I wish that some people would stop using their concept of nostalgia as a way to label or dismiss differing opinions.  There are plenty of games that I feel nostalgic about, and there are many which never qualified as 'great' for me.  One cannot clearly define nostalgia and the impact that it does or does not have on anyone's opinion but their own.  To use nostalgia for anything else is to make assumptions about how others determine the overall quality of a game.  For example, I don't like it when someone tries to tell me (whether directly or indirectly) that the only reason I think a game like Super Metroid is better than God of War is because I'm letting myself be 'blinded' by nostalgia.  It's wrong.

I enjoyed FFXII as well, but for me it was the exception and not the rule.

I think the last all-new Square or Enix game that I really enjoyed was Threads of Fate (Dew Prism), and that was back in 2000.  I did like what I played of the demo of DQ8, but I never got around to playing my copy of the full game.  So, I am looking forward to DQ9, but I won't be getting the DS versions of DQ4-6 since they are the old style of DQ that puts me to sleep.

Hell, I even gave Crisis Core a chance recently.  I was actually enjoying it just a little bit in spite of the stiff controls, awful voice acting, and hideous haricuts until I saw that it had random battles.  Random battles?  Still?  In a 2007/2008 release?  I'm sorry.  I'm willing to put up with that in remakes of classic games, but seriously, their time has passed, and I'm too old for that.

I'm 99% sure that the game uses Panzer Dragoon Saga style "random" battles where they occur in specific places, as opposed to being actually random.  They tend to be in the larger, more open areas in dungeons and you can usually bypass combat by merely staying against the wall when walking through.  The battles seem to trigger when you walk within a certain range of the middle.