After beating Kid Icarus: Uprising on Wednesday before school (a totally awesome game that you should pick up if you have a Nintendo 3DS) and spending the next two days trying to figure out what I needed to do to fill up the Treasure Hunt cards for more loot, I went out to GameStop today to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles and fulfill the last preorder I’ll need for a good while. I also got myself used copies of Lock’s Quest, Rhythm Heaven, and Star Ocean: Second Evolution, and got rid of some old games I had no use for in some sort of weird Yu-Gi-Oh-esque summoning ritual.
Xenoblade, as you may or may not recall, is the first of the three “Operation Rainfall” games (a fan campaign to get Nintendo to publish/distribute more Eastern-developed RPGs on the Wii), having been released in Japan and parts of Europe several months ago and finally making its way to the U.S. today. I don’t expect this to sell that many copies here since GameStop and the Nintendo shop are the only places stocking it, but I’m glad that it got here at all. I’ll probably play this one a lot between Warriors Orochi 3 (also surprisingly good; shame about the lack of English dub, though).
Star Ocean: Second Evolution is the PSP remake of Star Ocean: The Second Story, which came out on the original PlayStation almost a decade earlier. This one is supposed to have much better voice acting than the original (which, while not on a level of badness as the first Grandia, made so many battles painful to listen to), but probably isn’t all that different from the first game. I may give that one to my brother if he still cares to play with his PlayStation once in a while.
P.S. Don’t bother trading in your PS2 games toward store credit; you’ll get almost nothing for them. You’ll be better off selling them at a flea market. PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS/3DS, and PSP/PlayStation Vita games are where it’s at nowadays.
