I really, REALLY need some motivation to finish Kingdom Hearts 2. Last night I finished the second chapter of The World Ends with You and Neku is now playing his final Game. At this rate, I'll finish it by the end of the week. If that happens, I'll have started and finished four games since I started KH2. I really do want to finish the game. The amount of leveling I still have to do with my Final Form is keeping me from challenging the final boss. What usually motivates me to finish a game is to listen to the game's soundtrack over and over and over. That's not working. Maybe I'll need to hit YouTube and find a video of KH2 music videos and gameplay. Maybe I need to hide all of my other games and consoles until I finish it. Ha... that last one takes too much effort. Oooh, maybe I should keep the game case out on the coffee table so that it will stare at me and taunt me. That might work.

I have started Squenix's latest and greatest: The Last Remnant. Unfortunately, my writing projects have kept me so busy that I've only played the game for a few hours at a time, so I don't have a full opinion of it yet. I am confused by all the negative reviews, though. Everyone says it has beautiful graphics, fabulous music, a highly innovative and fun combat system, and a great story, but they give it low ratings because of all the technical glitches. I myself have not witnessed the poor frame rate and texture issues everyone bitches about. But really, are these enough to rate an enriching RPG so low? I guess I'll have to wait and see how horrible these technical difficulties are. Unless they totally alter gameplay, I don't see what the problem is.

Not entirely sure how I feel about the combat system. It is turn-based, but instead of each character in a party having a turn, the partymembers are grouped together in unions, and each union as a whole gets a turn. How a union fares in battle depends on who is in the union. So while you don't get to control characters' individual abilities, you have to be aware of each character's abilities and assess how they will fight along with specific characters. I haven't had to create more than two unions at a time yet, but it really takes some strategic consideration, even with just two unions of three party members each. I feel like Shawn would be better at this game than I will be, since he has real life experience in commanding troops and he likes the Tom Clancy games where you do just that. I have a feeling that I may die a lot before I hone my strategic abilities. I was somewhat decent in Warcraft 3 and Age of Mythology when it came to ordering around battalions, so maybe it won't be that horrible of a learning curve for me. So far it hasn't annoyed me nearly as much as Infinite Undiscovery did, so there's always hope.

Whether you like or hate either game, it's still nice to see Square Enix trying out different styles to implement with the party system.