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Due to your criteria, you can already toss out about 80% of all JRPGs out there. If you're looking for stories with a "harder edge", I'd say go with anything Yasumi Matsuno-developed, which includes Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy XII, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm leaving out FFXII-2, FFTA and FFTA2 since those have child-protagonists and can be annoying as hell. Dshu already mentioned Vagrant Story, and the others are fairly intricate war stories with fairly mature protagonists. Can't comment on grinding though. I forget if there's any of that in Tactics Ogre. He also usually has Hitoshi Sakimoto as his music front-man, and his music always goes great with Matsuno's stuff. If you can stand more than a few cliches here and there, but want a pretty fun battle system and some damned fine graphics and sound(Masashi Hamauzu get), I'd say go with FFXIII. You have the option to grind, although it isn't particularly necessary. Keep in mind though that if you can't stomach the characters at times, then this game might not be for you. If you enjoyed Final Fantasy X, then chances are you'd enjoy most previous Final Fantasies, as while they have a few cliches here and there, they're surprisingly mostly devoid of any I think. Keep in mind though that there CAN be some grinding in several of them. FFVI is the first I'd recommend. Like Bardic said, Chrono Trigger is probably one of the better JRPGs you can grab. To this day, it surprises me how strangely unique it is. I can't tell if it's due to the visuals, audio, content or if it's more than the sum of its parts. Just a great game. Incidentally, writing out this post helped me to see just what was wrong with FFXIII.

House of The Dead 1 & 2, Blood Rayne 1 & 2, In The Name of The King(or Jason Statham Sticks a Sword up Your Ass), Dungeons and Dragons 2 and Postal. I've seen enough to know that they're pretty much terribad movies. Shaky cam wasn't meant to be taken literally. It was a measure of quality. Have you even seen the synopsis for what he's doing for In The Name of The King 2(son of Jason Statham)? Dolph Lundgren plays Farmer's son sent into the future who becomes a cop, is attacked by ninjas one night and is sent back to the past. While that sounds fucking hilarious, it's for all the wrong reasons. Also, Boll used to be able to turn most if not all of the costs of his movies into tax write offs and deductions under German law for film investment.

Spirits Within and Uwe Boll movies are bad for different reasons. Spirits Within was just a poor transition of a series that isn't very easy to condense into a 2 hour movie format. The biggest problem with Spirits within wasn't the way it was made; it was its content. It was a 2 hour long fetch quest. Incidentally the plot is probably an "evolution" of Sakaguchi's original ideas for FFVII. Thankfully that never came to pass. Spirits Within feels like that competent "Sci-fi lite"(my own term) movie that would probably play on Sci-Fi on occasion. Had it not had the Final Fantasy name, I doubt people would have had a huge shit fit about it. Uwe Boll movies on the other hand are basically "first year film student with a shaky cam's first film" project. Plenty of overacting, bad dialog, terrible scene translations, bad "frathouse" humor, no actual respect for the source material, etc. They are objectively badly made. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy them. I do all the time(albeit ironically).

I always watch Uwe Boll movies when I need a good/bad laugh. To take them seriously, though? That's more than a bit of a stretch. I'd write up a bunch of stuff about what he does wrong in his movies straight out of film making 101, but Uwe Boll movies don't even deserve that. Still, with a few friends and some beer, they make great conversation pieces and/or background noise.

On a side note, the "Playstation Phone", AKA the Sony Ericcson Xperia Play will be officially unveiled on February 13. This is probably more exciting to me than the NGP, assuming that it will be compatible with Playstation Suite(the most important "NGP" feature to me personally) and can also run PSP games. If the latter is true, then it'll probably be a haven for developers who are quite fearful of the insane budgets they may require to develop on the NGP. It'll also be easier to justify as a purchase by virtue of being an android-enabled phone. I can imagine that it'll also be cheaper to buy. The biggest thing of course would be whether the phone will be purchasable unlocked or if it will be tied to a certain carrier plan, which I'm guessing will more than likely be ATT. If the latter were the case, then I'm bum fucked.

I can actually understand what they're saying half of the time. I just can't read the actual text or menus for shit so whenever something isn't voiced I'm screwed. All I know is hiragana and katakana. Also no thanks, already have one borrowed. Glad I didn't pay what Play Asia was asking. My friend probably isn't though...

Try mailing some of the staff over at 1up.com, specifically Frank Cifaldi. He seems to have a big appreciation for gaming history and knows a few people that handles that sort of thing, although I forget who specifically right now.

Looks like we're gonna have to lay down 300 bones on another console if we want a shot at this one. ...Or learn full Japanese.

Well fuck. The Tales of Graces translation group has stopped their translation efforts on both console versions simply because ToG F is being localized on the PS3.

Hell just read the description for the game and play for about 15 minutes. Asbel is your typical plucky kid who gets in over his head. Hubert is is chicken little brother that eventually gets out of it, and Sophie is typical amnesiac chick. I'm not saying it's bad, I like going through cliches every now and again(I play through Lunar 2 regularly enough), but it's there.

Shit, I don't even own a PS3 and I'll probably buy 2 copies anyway just to get Namco to bring these things over regularly. I've played through about 30 minutes of the Wii version, and I liked a lot of what I played, but obviously I can't read kanji, so I couldn't get much further. Along with Xenoblade and The Last Story(which is a crazy breath of fresh air for a Hironobu Sakaguchi game), I think Tales of Graces is probably one of the games I want on my Wii the most.

The money hat says no...

Well I'm sure that must be great for PS3 owners then. Now that I think on it though, it sounds like they're trying to avoid all the fallout they had with the Eternal Sonata and Tales of Vesperia fiasco by just releasing the one superior version of Graces stateside as opposed to a "bait and switch".

And yet not the Wii version. Looks like I'll still have to import this thing.

It isn't a matter of whether or not Sakamoto would have wanted that. He DID want Other M the way it was. He said as much anyway, which is pretty much the end of it.

Hey gais, Kirby Wii.

No, but it does make "everyone" else's collective viewpoints a mite less valid. If anything, Other M's biggest problem is its source material which is bonk in the first place. If people are able to suspend their disbelief that the Mother Brain is quite literally an over-sized brain in a cartoonish container that lords over a group of space bugs, then it should be no problem to deal with a bit of over-acting and PTSD. But I guess I forgot that here on the internet everyone's a robot-in-female-disguise loving hard ass. ...Actually, that last part doesn't sound too bad.

I'm pretty sure that when the creator of a series says that something is or isn't part of the universe that he created, it means it isn't canon.

Fixed. Also Sakamoto already made a statement that the Prime series isn't actually cannon.

Also fjords.

Don't call it a comeback.

Get out of my head! Man, if they added X or Axle along with Vile, my team would be so complete. I guess if they wanted to keep Tron Bonne company, they could add Roll Casket from Legends. One can dream. As it stands, looks like my team is going to consist of Joe, Felicia and probably Zero. This of course assuming that Seth Killian comes out and says Sentinel can't pull off the same cheese from MvC2.

This nearly made me shit a brick. If more than several of my non-fighting game fan friends can stomp on my ass by cheesing with the standard Yipes set, then refuse to play any other fighter with me, that should be pretty telling of the "balance" that MvC2 "had". Also I'm pretty sure that if they were going for relevancy, then neither Haggar, Amaterasu, Zero, Viewtiful Joe, or any Darkstalkers characters would have ever been on the table, but Sakura might have been(not that I'm bitter or anything). I thought they were going for actual balance with the game, but then they went and added Sentinel. If there isn't anything to convince me otherwise, I guess I can expect the same broken shenanigans from MvC2.

...Heard that? That was the sound of balance leaving the room.

This is going to be a pretty big year in gaming for me. Obviously my stance on buying the system is going to be a "wait until all the services and games I care about are released/in development" scenario same as the 3DS, but I'm pretty excited about the system nonetheless.