Rogue Galaxy -- Moot.

It's been a while since I've updated. I've spent roughly twenty hours with Rogue Galaxy and I believe I'm done. I'm not going to be finishing the game. I'm finding it to be the very definition of tedious. The rate of combat is far too high and the dungeons crawl on forever in my opinion. The constant micro management of items and special moves in combat further adds to the tedium. The character progression system and the weapon upgrading and the factory sub-quests are also just too involved for their own good and also fall  under the heading of tedious. The story hasn't really grabbed me either. Jaster Rogue just seems to be along for the ride and the story comes from the characters he meets along the way. Which is how most RPGs work and is fine in and of itself. The problem comes in how the game just seems to barely connect the bits of story. It's almost like an anthology more than a cohesive single story. It also doesn't help that it's all just very weird. From the characters to the art design. It's all a big mismatch of styles and concepts that just don't mesh well in the end. Rogue Galaxy is very much like Level-5's Dark Cloud, in that its ideas are sound and its ambition is grand but it just doesn't have that needed polish to rise above the tediousness. It also shows that Level-5 is like raw talent that just can't seem to get it right without a guiding hand, like that of Yuji Horii. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. What can you do? I'll consider this one a loss and move on to something else.