In FF12, Penelo and Vaan are more like the eyes of the player as opposed to actually being a traditional 'main character'. You can clearly tell by the dialogue that neither offer any real insight or have any stake in the ongoing conflict because they're not supposed to. They're just 17 year old kids who got dragged along. Balthier would probably be the real main character as far as story-importance. If Ashe wasn't the descendent of the Dynast-King one could make an argument that Fran and Basch are both more important than she. Similar to FFX the 'main character' is just the character who you see the world through. Like Tidus, Vaan is definitely not the most important guy to the story of FF12, but you see the world through his eyes.
If the character strenghts are supposedly to roughly reflect reality, the only party you'll ever use is Fran, Basch, and Balthier because these are clearly the only people with any real fighting experiences on their belt. Penelo, Ashe, and Vaan will most likely be killed in one hit by the first imperial elite you ran into. It also wouldn't make a very interesting game that way. Note that they try to reflect this somewhat with the guests. Basch is very strong relative to your characters as a guest at least in attacking damage. Vossler again is considerably more powerful than your characters of the same level. Larsa is a medicore fighter but makes up for having infinite gil to burn on supplies, which suits his position as the son of the Emperor quite well.
But even if that is not possible from a gameplay point of view, it does establish this quite well in the story. You really get the idea that Penelo and Vaan, the two who shouldn't have anything to do with world-saving, are just there for the ride. Ashe, if not for lineage, would be merely another bystander as well.
As far as the music goes, I think it is simply weaker than the other games. So far Old Archades is the only place in the game I can think of where the music actually establishes the mood instead of just being some filler stuff to listen to as you go from one location to another. The battle music is your standard 'pretty good but not awesome' like most Square games. FF12 is on track to beat FF9 as the FF game I remember the least, music-wise (FF9 I only remembered the overworld theme).
So far as the non-drama goes, it reminds me of the non Squall part of FF8. Everything is handled quite professionally. Just like when Raijin and Fujin abandoned Seifer but there's no sudden burst of outrage, and they departed peacefully. The same happens with FF12 with Vossler and Basch, or Judge Darce and Gabaranth. Bad things happens but people handle it like adults, instead of crying "WHY ME? WHYYYYYYY?" which, ironically, is started by the recent Square games. The party in FF12, at the very least, has the emotional strength necessary to save the world. This cannot be said for a lot of other games where you wonder how your rage-filled group of adolescent misfits will ever get to the next town without being consumed by melodrama.
When I saw the Sears question my intuition says "Refrigerators". I don't even know if that's one of the choices, and it is clearly wrong. If I was there I'd have lost the $250,000 question if I go with my hunch and no one would be interested on my insight to human intuition except perhaps on how NOT to play Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.
I'm sure the techniques have some basis to why they work, but it is easy to fit the model to the data when you turned out to be right. Why don't we ask every person who didn't get very far in Millionaire and see what their thought process is? I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who thought they remembered something, and plenty of people who went on a hunch and was wrong.
Suppose he remembered NCAA wrong and thought it was National College Atheletic Advancement and then reasoned it out after 15 minutes, and was ultimately wrong, we would just never hear any of it because it'd just be some guy who thought he was right, but was wrong. I've no doubt that such techniques are useful but the justification here seems to be just because he won. I've seen plenty of times on Millionaire when the guys would go through all these anecdotes and thought he remembered correctly, but turned out to be wrong. Does this disprove such methods?
You're supposed to pay license fees or whatever you want to call it because it gives you legitmacy, and it's supposed to be an advantage. If only you have to pay the said fees while other pirates are allowed to ignore it, then you're simply losing money for nothing. It is perfectly acceptable that if Google/YouTube paid the copyright holders a bunch of money to establish legitmacy that it'd be in their interest to get rid of other illegitmate sources. Otherwise they'd have wasted all that money for nothing.
In WoW most grinds, no matter how crazy, you're at least given the information in some form so you know what to expect. Take a typical faction grind, you need X amount of faction and with some effort you can determine what's a likely rate of faction gain per unit of time (say, an hour). Therefore you can get a rough idea of how many hours it takes to go through the grind, so at least you've some idea of what to expect. Here no such information was given. Maybe there is nothing wrong with a '$2100 grind' for an Ogre suit or whatever, but people need to at least have a chacne to know that's what they're looking at before starting, which they did not.
This would be like if someone camped out and buy boxes of McDonald fries to try to get a Broadwalk, only to find that the prize for Broadwalk is not announced until a week later and turned out to be only $1000. The wisdom of the buyer is questionable regardless of what the prize was but people should at least know what they're shooting for. In this case, they've nothing to base it on because the conversion system isn't announced. While the most logical thing to do would be to wait and see, I do think it's not asking too much to know what you should be expecting. If it is announced ahead of time it takes $2000 of cards to get trinket X then there's no one to blame but the buyer, but in this case it was not.
The next generation battle hasn't even started yet. At the start people thought N64 sounded like a good idea and it turned out it was a very bad idea. Certainly no one thought Nintendo could screw up with the N64, but they did. So why would you expect anyone to be able to predict the future with any accuracy? No one will say that PS3 is off to a great start, but one as bad as N64? Historically a screw up of that magnitude has happened only once. It could happen again, but that's not where I'd start betting on.
DS and Wii are two completely different markets. Nintendo has always dominated the handheld system and this hasn't change in 10 years. It is also clear that succees in one doesn't translate in the other. N64/Gamecube is a minority in console but GBA/DS has been the market leader. Likewise Sony's success in PS/PS2 did not translate to PSP. Using handheld numbers is simply meaningless because they're inherently different markets.
To me as a gamer that one that matters the most is the market share because developers tend to congregate around the system that sold the most. Unless you're into some kind of games that only show up on a certain system (Nintendo comes to mind), the console with the bigger marketshare is almost always the better choice for games simply because every developer wants to be on the winning side.
I know some people use profitabilty as a criteria. It seems to me that would be a good one if you owned stock in Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony, but otherwise I don't seem to have any benefit from Nintendo making a ton of money and I am not harmed by Sony losing a ton of money. Now clearly profitabilty could cause your system of choice to stop altogether, as in the case of Dreamcast, but I don't think that will happen to the 3 major players anytime soon.
Historically, it took some major screw up on Nintendo's part (N64) and a briliant system (PSX) for market leader to exchange, so yes it is pretty safe to bet the guy who conclusively won the last round will probably win again. One might say Sony is in a worse position this round than the last, but they got quite a bit of room to work with coming off as the undisputed winner of last two rounds. They can give up quite a bit of market share before even losing the majority (50%+) status. Now if PS3 end up with 50% while Wii and XBox360 end up with 25% each, I'd think Nintendo and Microsoft will be very pleased while Sony will not be, but Sony would have still *won* the next generation if winning is determined by market share. If Sony's goal is to achieve the same dominance as PSX or PS2, then it seems almost certain the battle has already been lost. But achieve a better marketshare or even a majority of the market? That's certainly possible.
I'm not aware of how the Earth, taken as an entity, can 'lose' before the rest of humanity 'loses', ignoring planetary colonization (one would think the technology required for this would be enough to clean up whatever problem we cause at home). The planet is certainly far durable than we are, and we're getting along fine right now so it can't be worse than us.
I don't think Skies of Arcadia ever tries to present it as 'goofy' except letting you pick a dolphin as a logo of the Delphinus. It's a light-hearted but quite serious adventure story. The ending says something like "A girl had a mission, (forgot Aika's part), and a boy have a vision, and together they changed the world" and that seems to describe overall game tone very well. I'm not sure what you mean by the optional stuff to do. If you're talking about the exploring aspect, that part is entirely a by-product of the game's graphics. It is because the world is beautiful that it is worth exploring.
FFX sort of just kept your party together at all times (with the mysterious restriction that only 3 people can be fighting at once) which works reasonably well. At any rate, there's a physical limit the size of your party can become before characters cease to have meaning. When you're lugging 30 guys around like Chrono Cross, there's just no way all the people could have meaningful things to say on everything you do. If they do it'd take 10 hours to just read through what everyone needs to say.
Well, any time you got a game where you consistently stick with one recognizable party throughout the whole game, the characters are bound to be more developed just because you stuck with them the whole time. It's not like Elena or Milenia are the most developed characters ever, but you're stuck with them for the entire game so you can identify with these characters. Because there is exactly one party composition it is obvious for them to say the relevant things on the relevant events.
On the other hand, take Xenogears, what does Rico feel about Shevat? What does Maria or Billy Lee Black feel about Zeboim? I bet not even the creators knew but it is certainly possible to have these characters at these respective arcs, so you end up with some personality-less filler line simply because the complexity of the story is too great that not even whoever wrote it is sure what is supposed to happen, if anything, with a particular party combination.
I think it also helps that the cast of Grandia 2, and Grandia in general, are all around good guys. They might not be the coolest or most likeable guys ever, but it is plausible to believe these guys are actually going to be the one doing the things that matter. This is not true with the 'unlikely hero' syndrone in a lot of RPG (exemplified by Square RPGs) where you've crowd of misfits that seem to be on the brink of a complete breakdown before they even get to the next town, and it makes you the player wish you can trade some of your clowns for someone who is actually willing to do something instead of having someone cry about their childhood traumatic experiences all day.
I'd also argue Grandia 3's system is not improved at all. It made the game necessarily too hard to pull off the traditional 'no heals needed' approach you can do at Grandia 2, which in turn terms Grandia 3 into a standard 'heal very aggressively' RPG, except in Grandia 3 you also throw in a lot more defends too due to cancels. I do like the fact that defend is useful command in Grandia 3, but the game basically forces you to play like a turtle because you can't risk having the boss connect 2+ big attacks. Perhaps on a theoratical level you can say the system is better because it sealed off the infinite cancels of Grandia 2, but the infinite cancels is what made Grandia 2 fun. I can't think of another game where when your people dips into the critical region, your first reaction is to attack even more, instead of start healing.
Just because the console never done something that was done on the computer doesn't mean it's somehow innovative. It'd be like saying that the first typing game on the console is innovative (Typing of the Dead? Mario Teaches Typing? Or maybe even older?) because it's never been done before. Does PSO gets cool points for inventing its own time system that no one uses? I don't think it's ever been done before, and there's a reason why no one's ever tried to reinvent the 24 hour clock in a game.
For proving that a good game, RPG even, can be founded entirely on graphics alone. Despite the dungeon crawl yawn-a-thons, the way too high encounter rate on the overworld, the insanely long airship battles, and a battle system where it is not possible to die once you can buy Riselem crystals or have Lunar Light, the gorgeous world somehow makes you forget about all the shortcomings and make the game good.
PSO is no different from Diablo 1, a RPG that you can happen to play online. The only interaction with other players is in the form of rooms where everyone has to step on a switch at the same time, and knowing when to not attack when someone gets soul stealed on Dark Falz (of course people will probably ignore you anyway). Consider you've an input system where typing 5 WPM would be considered pretty fast, communication is all but impossible so you might as well be playing solo.
The most innovative part of PSO is that you can actually play a RPG and create an avatar that sort of looks like what you want. If you want a Sephiroth clone you could be one.
Grandia games has always been about the gameplay, though Grandia 2 managed to accidentally get some story right compared to the rest of them, most notably the Eye and Horn of Valmar arc is actually really quality story while the rest of the Valmar arc is standard garbage. Grandia 2 is also the first RPG I can think of where you arguably don't need to heal the whole time even on boss battles as long as you know how to rotate your cancels. Sure it is fairly easy to pull off, and you always have the heals if you do need them, but most RPG's 'attack and heal when low' model is beyond trivial.
Grandia 3 tried to do away with the perma cancel cheese but in reality it just made it into another attack & heal RPG because you can't count on canceling anything you need, so you just go back to the conservative healing method so make sure you never die.
Civil disobedience is not doing something you think is wrong because you can get away with it. Civil disobedience is doing something you think is wrong, and get punished for it so people can see the fallacy of the laws. If people are submitting themselves to be fined for whatever outrageous amount the copyright laws demands, that'd be civil disobedience. I'm pretty sure that's not what people are doing, though.
The benefits of piracy is a sign of bad design in the first place, not the benefit of piracy.
For example, the 'turbo mode' found on the SNES emulators makes playing many SNES games far more enjoyable than originally. This doesn't mean pirating SNES games has some inherent value. It means a feature like 'turbo mode' is a very good idea if it is at all implementable. Clearly you can't just turbo mode stuff like loading time, but there's no reason why you can't be allowed to walk at 4X the speed if you want to. Chrono Cross does this, and it makes replaying the game a lot easier when you only need 1/4th the time to go through something you've no interest of seeing again (or possibly even once).
Likewise I much prefer the 'save anywhere' feature found in almost all emulators over the actual game itself, and certainly I do not know of anyone who thinks being able to save anywhere hurts you (because you can just not use it). This suggests most people would like to be able to save often and frequently. Again it might not be technologically possible to save at anywhere, but this suggests people would prefer game with more, not less, flexible saving capabilities.
If you train your customers that they're rewarded for downloading a crack instead of buying your game, most people will eventually decide they should just download the game instead of buy it.
Episodic content can be just as frustrating as any copyright protection scheme. There is plenty of complaints about buying a game and then having to shell out more for additional content (and people can pirate that too). The only place this works well is on MMORPG because the the bulk of the revenue is tied to some kind of credit card number, not the ability to sell boxes. Games like WoW could very well be free for the box (not that Blizzard would like it) and still maintain most of their revenues because there's no easy way to get around the monthly payment.
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In FF12, Penelo and Vaan are more like the eyes of the player as opposed to actually being a traditional 'main character'. You can clearly tell by the dialogue that neither offer any real insight or have any stake in the ongoing conflict because they're not supposed to. They're just 17 year old kids who got dragged along. Balthier would probably be the real main character as far as story-importance. If Ashe wasn't the descendent of the Dynast-King one could make an argument that Fran and Basch are both more important than she. Similar to FFX the 'main character' is just the character who you see the world through. Like Tidus, Vaan is definitely not the most important guy to the story of FF12, but you see the world through his eyes.
If the character strenghts are supposedly to roughly reflect reality, the only party you'll ever use is Fran, Basch, and Balthier because these are clearly the only people with any real fighting experiences on their belt. Penelo, Ashe, and Vaan will most likely be killed in one hit by the first imperial elite you ran into. It also wouldn't make a very interesting game that way. Note that they try to reflect this somewhat with the guests. Basch is very strong relative to your characters as a guest at least in attacking damage. Vossler again is considerably more powerful than your characters of the same level. Larsa is a medicore fighter but makes up for having infinite gil to burn on supplies, which suits his position as the son of the Emperor quite well.
But even if that is not possible from a gameplay point of view, it does establish this quite well in the story. You really get the idea that Penelo and Vaan, the two who shouldn't have anything to do with world-saving, are just there for the ride. Ashe, if not for lineage, would be merely another bystander as well.
As far as the music goes, I think it is simply weaker than the other games. So far Old Archades is the only place in the game I can think of where the music actually establishes the mood instead of just being some filler stuff to listen to as you go from one location to another. The battle music is your standard 'pretty good but not awesome' like most Square games. FF12 is on track to beat FF9 as the FF game I remember the least, music-wise (FF9 I only remembered the overworld theme).
So far as the non-drama goes, it reminds me of the non Squall part of FF8. Everything is handled quite professionally. Just like when Raijin and Fujin abandoned Seifer but there's no sudden burst of outrage, and they departed peacefully. The same happens with FF12 with Vossler and Basch, or Judge Darce and Gabaranth. Bad things happens but people handle it like adults, instead of crying "WHY ME? WHYYYYYYY?" which, ironically, is started by the recent Square games. The party in FF12, at the very least, has the emotional strength necessary to save the world. This cannot be said for a lot of other games where you wonder how your rage-filled group of adolescent misfits will ever get to the next town without being consumed by melodrama.
When I saw the Sears question my intuition says "Refrigerators". I don't even know if that's one of the choices, and it is clearly wrong. If I was there I'd have lost the $250,000 question if I go with my hunch and no one would be interested on my insight to human intuition except perhaps on how NOT to play Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.
I'm sure the techniques have some basis to why they work, but it is easy to fit the model to the data when you turned out to be right. Why don't we ask every person who didn't get very far in Millionaire and see what their thought process is? I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who thought they remembered something, and plenty of people who went on a hunch and was wrong.
Suppose he remembered NCAA wrong and thought it was National College Atheletic Advancement and then reasoned it out after 15 minutes, and was ultimately wrong, we would just never hear any of it because it'd just be some guy who thought he was right, but was wrong. I've no doubt that such techniques are useful but the justification here seems to be just because he won. I've seen plenty of times on Millionaire when the guys would go through all these anecdotes and thought he remembered correctly, but turned out to be wrong. Does this disprove such methods?
If I make $1 from every 1000 Chinese I have a million dollar.
If every 1 in 100 PS2 owner buys a Playstation 2 game I made, I'd have sold a million copies of the game.
Therefore it must be easy to make a million dollar or for anyone to sell a million copies of a PS2 game.
You're supposed to pay license fees or whatever you want to call it because it gives you legitmacy, and it's supposed to be an advantage. If only you have to pay the said fees while other pirates are allowed to ignore it, then you're simply losing money for nothing. It is perfectly acceptable that if Google/YouTube paid the copyright holders a bunch of money to establish legitmacy that it'd be in their interest to get rid of other illegitmate sources. Otherwise they'd have wasted all that money for nothing.
In WoW most grinds, no matter how crazy, you're at least given the information in some form so you know what to expect. Take a typical faction grind, you need X amount of faction and with some effort you can determine what's a likely rate of faction gain per unit of time (say, an hour). Therefore you can get a rough idea of how many hours it takes to go through the grind, so at least you've some idea of what to expect. Here no such information was given. Maybe there is nothing wrong with a '$2100 grind' for an Ogre suit or whatever, but people need to at least have a chacne to know that's what they're looking at before starting, which they did not.
This would be like if someone camped out and buy boxes of McDonald fries to try to get a Broadwalk, only to find that the prize for Broadwalk is not announced until a week later and turned out to be only $1000. The wisdom of the buyer is questionable regardless of what the prize was but people should at least know what they're shooting for. In this case, they've nothing to base it on because the conversion system isn't announced. While the most logical thing to do would be to wait and see, I do think it's not asking too much to know what you should be expecting. If it is announced ahead of time it takes $2000 of cards to get trinket X then there's no one to blame but the buyer, but in this case it was not.
The next generation battle hasn't even started yet. At the start people thought N64 sounded like a good idea and it turned out it was a very bad idea. Certainly no one thought Nintendo could screw up with the N64, but they did. So why would you expect anyone to be able to predict the future with any accuracy? No one will say that PS3 is off to a great start, but one as bad as N64? Historically a screw up of that magnitude has happened only once. It could happen again, but that's not where I'd start betting on.
DS and Wii are two completely different markets. Nintendo has always dominated the handheld system and this hasn't change in 10 years. It is also clear that succees in one doesn't translate in the other. N64/Gamecube is a minority in console but GBA/DS has been the market leader. Likewise Sony's success in PS/PS2 did not translate to PSP. Using handheld numbers is simply meaningless because they're inherently different markets.
To me as a gamer that one that matters the most is the market share because developers tend to congregate around the system that sold the most. Unless you're into some kind of games that only show up on a certain system (Nintendo comes to mind), the console with the bigger marketshare is almost always the better choice for games simply because every developer wants to be on the winning side.
I know some people use profitabilty as a criteria. It seems to me that would be a good one if you owned stock in Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony, but otherwise I don't seem to have any benefit from Nintendo making a ton of money and I am not harmed by Sony losing a ton of money. Now clearly profitabilty could cause your system of choice to stop altogether, as in the case of Dreamcast, but I don't think that will happen to the 3 major players anytime soon.
Historically, it took some major screw up on Nintendo's part (N64) and a briliant system (PSX) for market leader to exchange, so yes it is pretty safe to bet the guy who conclusively won the last round will probably win again. One might say Sony is in a worse position this round than the last, but they got quite a bit of room to work with coming off as the undisputed winner of last two rounds. They can give up quite a bit of market share before even losing the majority (50%+) status. Now if PS3 end up with 50% while Wii and XBox360 end up with 25% each, I'd think Nintendo and Microsoft will be very pleased while Sony will not be, but Sony would have still *won* the next generation if winning is determined by market share. If Sony's goal is to achieve the same dominance as PSX or PS2, then it seems almost certain the battle has already been lost. But achieve a better marketshare or even a majority of the market? That's certainly possible.
I'm not aware of how the Earth, taken as an entity, can 'lose' before the rest of humanity 'loses', ignoring planetary colonization (one would think the technology required for this would be enough to clean up whatever problem we cause at home). The planet is certainly far durable than we are, and we're getting along fine right now so it can't be worse than us.
I don't think Skies of Arcadia ever tries to present it as 'goofy' except letting you pick a dolphin as a logo of the Delphinus. It's a light-hearted but quite serious adventure story. The ending says something like "A girl had a mission, (forgot Aika's part), and a boy have a vision, and together they changed the world" and that seems to describe overall game tone very well. I'm not sure what you mean by the optional stuff to do. If you're talking about the exploring aspect, that part is entirely a by-product of the game's graphics. It is because the world is beautiful that it is worth exploring.
FFX sort of just kept your party together at all times (with the mysterious restriction that only 3 people can be fighting at once) which works reasonably well. At any rate, there's a physical limit the size of your party can become before characters cease to have meaning. When you're lugging 30 guys around like Chrono Cross, there's just no way all the people could have meaningful things to say on everything you do. If they do it'd take 10 hours to just read through what everyone needs to say.
Well, any time you got a game where you consistently stick with one recognizable party throughout the whole game, the characters are bound to be more developed just because you stuck with them the whole time. It's not like Elena or Milenia are the most developed characters ever, but you're stuck with them for the entire game so you can identify with these characters. Because there is exactly one party composition it is obvious for them to say the relevant things on the relevant events.
On the other hand, take Xenogears, what does Rico feel about Shevat? What does Maria or Billy Lee Black feel about Zeboim? I bet not even the creators knew but it is certainly possible to have these characters at these respective arcs, so you end up with some personality-less filler line simply because the complexity of the story is too great that not even whoever wrote it is sure what is supposed to happen, if anything, with a particular party combination.
I think it also helps that the cast of Grandia 2, and Grandia in general, are all around good guys. They might not be the coolest or most likeable guys ever, but it is plausible to believe these guys are actually going to be the one doing the things that matter. This is not true with the 'unlikely hero' syndrone in a lot of RPG (exemplified by Square RPGs) where you've crowd of misfits that seem to be on the brink of a complete breakdown before they even get to the next town, and it makes you the player wish you can trade some of your clowns for someone who is actually willing to do something instead of having someone cry about their childhood traumatic experiences all day.
I'd also argue Grandia 3's system is not improved at all. It made the game necessarily too hard to pull off the traditional 'no heals needed' approach you can do at Grandia 2, which in turn terms Grandia 3 into a standard 'heal very aggressively' RPG, except in Grandia 3 you also throw in a lot more defends too due to cancels. I do like the fact that defend is useful command in Grandia 3, but the game basically forces you to play like a turtle because you can't risk having the boss connect 2+ big attacks. Perhaps on a theoratical level you can say the system is better because it sealed off the infinite cancels of Grandia 2, but the infinite cancels is what made Grandia 2 fun. I can't think of another game where when your people dips into the critical region, your first reaction is to attack even more, instead of start healing.
That's exactly what unbeatable means - cannot be beaten. It does not mean it can beat you.
Just because the console never done something that was done on the computer doesn't mean it's somehow innovative. It'd be like saying that the first typing game on the console is innovative (Typing of the Dead? Mario Teaches Typing? Or maybe even older?) because it's never been done before. Does PSO gets cool points for inventing its own time system that no one uses? I don't think it's ever been done before, and there's a reason why no one's ever tried to reinvent the 24 hour clock in a game.
For proving that a good game, RPG even, can be founded entirely on graphics alone. Despite the dungeon crawl yawn-a-thons, the way too high encounter rate on the overworld, the insanely long airship battles, and a battle system where it is not possible to die once you can buy Riselem crystals or have Lunar Light, the gorgeous world somehow makes you forget about all the shortcomings and make the game good.
PSO is no different from Diablo 1, a RPG that you can happen to play online. The only interaction with other players is in the form of rooms where everyone has to step on a switch at the same time, and knowing when to not attack when someone gets soul stealed on Dark Falz (of course people will probably ignore you anyway). Consider you've an input system where typing 5 WPM would be considered pretty fast, communication is all but impossible so you might as well be playing solo.
The most innovative part of PSO is that you can actually play a RPG and create an avatar that sort of looks like what you want. If you want a Sephiroth clone you could be one.
Grandia games has always been about the gameplay, though Grandia 2 managed to accidentally get some story right compared to the rest of them, most notably the Eye and Horn of Valmar arc is actually really quality story while the rest of the Valmar arc is standard garbage. Grandia 2 is also the first RPG I can think of where you arguably don't need to heal the whole time even on boss battles as long as you know how to rotate your cancels. Sure it is fairly easy to pull off, and you always have the heals if you do need them, but most RPG's 'attack and heal when low' model is beyond trivial.
Grandia 3 tried to do away with the perma cancel cheese but in reality it just made it into another attack & heal RPG because you can't count on canceling anything you need, so you just go back to the conservative healing method so make sure you never die.
Take Two lost millions due to the Hot Coffee mod (repackaging cost, recall cost, lost sales, etc).
Not all publicity is good.
Civil disobedience is not doing something you think is wrong because you can get away with it. Civil disobedience is doing something you think is wrong, and get punished for it so people can see the fallacy of the laws. If people are submitting themselves to be fined for whatever outrageous amount the copyright laws demands, that'd be civil disobedience. I'm pretty sure that's not what people are doing, though.
The benefits of piracy is a sign of bad design in the first place, not the benefit of piracy.
For example, the 'turbo mode' found on the SNES emulators makes playing many SNES games far more enjoyable than originally. This doesn't mean pirating SNES games has some inherent value. It means a feature like 'turbo mode' is a very good idea if it is at all implementable. Clearly you can't just turbo mode stuff like loading time, but there's no reason why you can't be allowed to walk at 4X the speed if you want to. Chrono Cross does this, and it makes replaying the game a lot easier when you only need 1/4th the time to go through something you've no interest of seeing again (or possibly even once).
Likewise I much prefer the 'save anywhere' feature found in almost all emulators over the actual game itself, and certainly I do not know of anyone who thinks being able to save anywhere hurts you (because you can just not use it). This suggests most people would like to be able to save often and frequently. Again it might not be technologically possible to save at anywhere, but this suggests people would prefer game with more, not less, flexible saving capabilities.
If you train your customers that they're rewarded for downloading a crack instead of buying your game, most people will eventually decide they should just download the game instead of buy it.
Episodic content can be just as frustrating as any copyright protection scheme. There is plenty of complaints about buying a game and then having to shell out more for additional content (and people can pirate that too). The only place this works well is on MMORPG because the the bulk of the revenue is tied to some kind of credit card number, not the ability to sell boxes. Games like WoW could very well be free for the box (not that Blizzard would like it) and still maintain most of their revenues because there's no easy way to get around the monthly payment.