The dragon lies slain...

I haven't had the best of luck lately. Just yesterday I was celebrating over buying Blue Dragon to bring my Sakaguchi collection one step closer to a full circle. Well, I started playing this morning. About ten minutes into it, and immediately feeling it - that good old sensation of a classic J-RPG - the game completely froze. I reset the game and started over, only to get the startling message "This disc is unreadable." Well, I did all the usual stuff; I wiped the disc (looked like someone wiped their ass on it, by the way), let the 360 cool down for a while before restarting the console, and I even tried the old Final Fantasy trick and tried to load the game from another disc. Well, Disc 2 was ALL banged up, even the print on the disc face had worn out some. Disc 3 was OK, and it loaded the game up just fine, but when it came time to insert Disc 1, I was back at the dashboard, getting the same "fuck you" treatment from the 'box. Well, after confirming that the console was fine, and other games worked fine, I marched back to GameStop.

This is where it got interesting. I already knew the sad fact that they didn't have another copy of Blue Dragon in store; like I said, the game is hard to come by. Well, the clerk asked me if I wanted my money back, or use the defective game as an incentive to buy some other game. I couldn't resist the latter option, I had my mind set on a sleeper RPG. He figured that I must know my RPG's, so he listed quite a few items I might be interested in, and which were priced about the same as Blue Dragon; Tales of Vesperia, Infinite Undiscovery, The Last Remnant, and finally, Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Finally, he said that I could get a Limited Collector's Edition of the last game mentioned at the same price as a standard edition. I started thinking about Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, which I used to own on the PlayStation 2 (for some reason, I forgot to mention it in the "lost" part of my collection last year), and recounting why I quit playing the game, although I liked it quite a bit. I couldn't come up with a good reason; it was a big game, it looked fantastic... the combat system was a bit quirky, but I remember getting used to it. Also, that offer for the Collector's Edition sounded too great to pass up, so I replaced Blue Dragon with this:

So, before tomorrow's updates, I'm going to take a swim in Star Ocean, for the first time in about five years. I'm at least hoping for a game easy to drown my sorrows with.