Media Pricer - the next generation of price comparison

• Released: 4/5/2007
• RRP: £29.99
• Platform: Nintendo DS

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Firstly i should point out that if there was the option I would give this 3.5 out of 5. 3 seems a little harsh for the game has some good bits that make it above average but 4 out of five seems a little excessive for something that will definitely not be to everyones taste. I played this game through and the only thing I havent done is defeat the hidden boss in the ??? cave. (The reason i havent beaten him yet is that i dropped my DS on the kitchen floor and the top screen is broke. I got my value for money from this game as I racked up somewhere between 70 and a hundred hours of play. The game is quite a lot of fun and the job system allows you to customize your party to suit the next dungeon. One of my gripes with this game is that you can only save on the world map! although you spend a lot of your time there it is extremely frustrating to be killed by a boss only to have to start a dungeon from scratch. Aside from having to replay dungeons if you make a mistake there is the fact that the game is on a handheld console that will be played in short bursts on the bus to work and not being able to save and turn the machine of goes against this. My biggest gripe with this is the amount of level grinding that you end up doing, If you are not grinding your way through random battles to get your character level higher in order to beat the next boss then you are grinding your way to higher job levels when you change one of your characters jobs otherwise they are a burden to you during fights until they get their job level up. I accept that levelling up is always going to be an integral part of any RPG but this game seems to force you to do far more than usual with you having to level up 2 different things for each character. Another problem is that the rewards you get for putting in the extra effort to do the hidden areas are very poor (with the exception of eureka but that is more optional than hidden). By beating Odin and winning him as a summon you expect a good high summon but i never managed to have it hit once it was useless, and the hidden boss of the ??? cave is so much harder that the end of the game baddies that I had finished the game with characters about level 60 and at level 75 was still getting beaten in about 2 rounds by the hidden boss. My final gripe is that throughout the game although I found healing magic to be essential I found that offensive magic rarely caused as much damage as my physical attacks and left me feeling the game was a bit one-sided in this respect. I think the main reason i got so much enjoyment out of this game was because a friend also had the game (see danger mouse review below) this way we were able to use the mognet feature to open up the hidden features and talk about our party lineups and tactics we used, without this i think that the endless grinding through random battles to level up would have left me very bored with the game and I may not have put in the hours of it needed to complete the game. Overall, this game misses the great storylines that make the FF series so great from 7 onwards and causes you to feel that there is no adequate reward for your constant levelling up. I would recommend this only to fans of the FF series or RPG fans, casual gamers or action game fans may not be impressed with this game but then it is a cash in on a 17 year old game (and people say that new games are unoriginal)

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