Is anyone else playing this one? I'm working my way through the rather long U.S. demo (the full game doesn't hit the states until next week), and it's pretty darn good. It's basically a new old school Final Fantasy with a few interesting twists, the most significant being the ability to adjust the encounter rate at any time. This simple ability makes the game so much more fun to play than a typical JPRG because you can control when you want to level vs. when you just want to explore. Add lovely graphics and music, a robust battle system, and cool Street Pass features, and I'm sold. Definitely picking this one up.

Looking forward to it, but being cheap and having a long backlog of games I've been meaning to play, I'm going to wait until I can get a copy for under $20.

I plan on picking this up. I have some feelers out as I'm trying to score a copy of the collector's edition... but if all else fails (it's really not looking good...) I'm just going to get the standard edition. I put $40 down on it already so I have it paid off or if my source comes through I'll have to make up the $15 difference.

It's kind of sad though, outside my small little gaggle of friends I've run into no one (non-internet) that is interested in this one. I'm really intrigued and I even liked The 4 Heroes of Light which is kind of the spiritual successor to this one.

bestbuy.com still has the Collector's Edition for preorder if you want!

I'm probably gonna pick this up. That box art is like some kind of beautiful love child of Vagrant Story and Battle Angel Alita. I'd love to see if it's a grand return to form for the JRPG medium that I'm told it is.

I'll pick this up. It should satisfy my once-a-year game itch. Last year was Ni no Kuni.

I finished the demo last night and I'm good and ready for the full game. It's been so long since I sat down to play a proper JRPG, and I can't wait to dig into this one properly.

I'm about 40 hours in, starting up on Chapter 4 (out of an apparently 8 chapters), and I've loved every minute of it. The game feels like a spiritual successor to Final Fantasies V, IX, and Tactics -- but with modern mechanics to offset what may be perceived as archaic JRPG trappings. (The encounter rate adjuster and autoplay/sped up battles are godsends.) A winning combination to be sure.

What I find perplexing is, for as much praise as the music tends to receive - and make no mistake, it's an incredible score - that nobody mentions how poor the sound engineering is in places.  After becoming reasonably acclimated to both the OST release and the music as presented in-game, I find that a lot of songs suffer from an overabundance of bass.  Actually, I hesitate to call it 'bass,' but it does sound like some weird anomaly in the mastering that gives off a distinctly muffled, treble-less quality.  The battle tracks seem to suffer the most, including the boss battle themes "That Person's Name Is" and "Fighting to the End" -- along with the suite of final battle tracks, the 'Special' battle themes for the four characters, and "Ship Soaring Through the Heavens."  I thought it was only me, but then I also listened to the Luxendarc studio arranged albums, and they too were given the same muddy sounding treatment. 

Apparently, some folks have said that this is something of the norm with Revo's and Linked Horizon's releases -- but has anyone here *not* noticed such discrepancies with the score?

Personally I found loudness to be an issue in the OST and one reason perhaps I didn't take to it as much as several of the other people here.  I imagine compressing it to fit within the game doesn't help matters.

I don't think it's so much a matter of compression as it is the mastering of the actual music.  As said, it seems to be an anomaly narrowed down to very specific songs, and the CD soundtrack suffers from the same sonic missteps.

I've currently put 21 hours in and I'm in Chapter 2 and I'm loving it. What really impresses me is just how dark the stuff the villains in this game do. The cutesy graphics really let them get away with stuff that games with more realistic graphics just can't get away with, especially with the Teen rating on this one. I haven't seen stuff like this in an RPG since Kefka in FF6. I'm very much looking forward to playing more, although I'm kind of dreading the changeover in Chapter 5 which I've read very mixed impressions about, so we'll see.

Are we talking Luca Blight "die pig"-type evil here?

Wait till you meet Victoria. Nasty little piece of work, that.

I never played through any of the Suikoden games, so I'm afraid I can't comment on that. If you want to know some of the stuff that goes on in just the first two chapters, I've put it in spoiler text here:

-Burning people's houses while they sleep
-Persecuting and hunting down people based on their religion
-Cutting off a town's water supply, cranking up the price of the remaining water, then directing people to a source of free water but warning them of bandits so you charge them for protection, but the bandits are under your employ so you just end of robbing them when they get to the site of the "free" water.
-Working people 20 hours/day in a factory
-Ripping fairies apart to use their wings as jewelry; but the fairy secretes a chemical that causes a murderous greed that makes people kill one another for the jewelry
-Children killing other children

And I'm not even done the second chapter yet!

I'm playing this now. Surprised I'm enjoying it. Felt like the JRPG was a dead art a long time ago (last truly excellent one I played being Shadow Hearts 2). Dismayed I can't rename my characters to continue my tradition of naming my dudes after dead musicians in these games, however.

Art style is f---ing gorgeous. I love Akihiko Yoshida so much. It really brings fond memories of Vagrant Story. Also, shades of SaGa Frontier 2. What a beautiful, visual treat.

Haven't listened to the music. I play at night, and music will wake my son up, so to ensure my wife and I get some rest, I mute the game. Haven't bought headphones to listen to it yet. Can't think of any other time a traditional band has done the music for a video game (although Dario Argento's frequent collaborations with Goblin in film come to mind).

Currently trying to break the game for some added FF Tactics-esque hilarity.

EDIT: As is usual for almost every job-based FF game, the monk class is broken as hell. I'm on hard mode, and absolutely nothing, not even bosses have put a scratch on my team.