Tales of RPG
Namco has opened up their Japanese homepage for their upcoming GameCube RPG Tales of Symphonia. Together with Giftpia (cover) and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles it gives the GameCube some much needed RPG backbone. Already the GC had games like the "good but they need to iron out some problems" Lost Kingdoms, the "we're DC-ports but don't tell anybody" Skies of Arcadia Legend and Evolution Worlds.
PlayStation 2 however is still both the King and Queen of Cheese when it comes to RPGs. Don't even start about the abysmal future of Xbox in that respect. Apart from some "we MUST make it real-time because we ARE Westerners"-like efforts such as Fable and Sudeki, things are looking very grim. I'm sure those games will be great, but it's becoming far too obvious Xbox is a US-centric system which seems to be ignoring adventure-games and RPG. And if they do come out, they are usually 'simplified' to cater for the real-time aspect and Western philosophy about "what console-gamers like" (which usually translates to "dumb it down, 'cause else they would have bothered buying a PC").
It's bloody annoying; the Xbox has so much potential, yet there are very few games who actually make use of it. The thought of an Xbox-powered full-on epic console-RPG is both mouth-watering and tormenting as it will probably never be.
Luckily, I've acquired some neat little PS2 RPGs to satisfy my genre-hunger; Legaia II: Duel Saga (with some Mitsuda handiwork in the audio department), Ephemeral Phantasia (supposed to be crap but I want to find out myself) and Shadow Hearts (also a Mitsuda score, but more importantly a very fun game all by itself, which seems criminally underrated at the moment). While playing that, I'll be praying for a Xbox PAL release of Metal Dungeon. You, on the other hand, can check out the Tales of Phantasia homepage which was the entire point of this post in the first place.