It’s the end of the year, and I’m about to go out of town for the holidays, into the land of no gaming systems. Thank God I still have some DS games to play from my stack of shame. But I’m digressing.

Since it is the end of the year, I want to thank all those who have been so incredibly supportive of Strategy Guide Reviews over the last year. Thanks to all of you, this little quirky idea I had one day has become something, and this something has been more fun than really any of my other writing jobs in the gaming biz.

HUGE thanks to:

• Future Press
• Prima Games
• Press the Buttons
• Dan Birlew, Guide Writer Extraordinaire
• Bryan Stratton
• Stephen Stratton
• Nick Michetti
• Eric Frederiksen

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I’m looking forward to 2011!

This past weekend I completed all of the C and B missions that I could get to and were unlocked, so it was definitely time to tackle the final bosses. Thanks to all of the missions I completed, I had very little trouble with any of them, which considering my final time clock at 59 hours and 53 minutes, I was grateful for that. I have to say that I am so happy I pushed myself to finish this beast. I loved the story, the gameplay, and every little wtf moment.

However, I am disappointed with how the game ended in terms of the Crystarium and CP earned. I knew that the final levels of the Crystarium did not unlock until after you finished the story, but I expected the last bosses to dole out CP so I could continue to level up and have too much fun on Pulse finishing up the missions. [Read more…]

Everyone who voted in last week’s poll regarding whether you finish your games all voted that they try to finish them. Either I asked a really bad question or all of you are terrible liars. Or you all really do try to finish games. The answer is probably the first theory, but my ego demands that it’s the second.

No poll this week because I’ve been focusing on Final Fantasy XIII and not really much else. I took a brief hiatus to watch and laugh at the Video Game Awards on Saturday, and I have a few poll questions from that but I need to stay focused. Like my l’Cie characters in FFXIII. Baddum kssh! [Read more…]