I am playing on the Wii U's virtual console. So, technically yes it's an emulation, but the payed for, legal kind. So far, the game is a massive breath of fresh air from legend of dragoon, which is also a turn based rpg that I'm finishing up. That game has painfully slow animations in battle, whereas golden sun has fast, scrolling text and rounds of battle that will happen over the course of mere seconds once you've entered commands. It may not seem like a big deal, but I really appreciate it after soldiering through hour-long boss battles in LoD.

As for The Lost Age, if it arrives on the eshop, I'm sure I'll get it. I happened to pick up Dark Dawn on the DS years ago. I can't say when I'll get around to that.

Pretty sure I earned the "Normal" ending. Just so we're clear mine involves Serah dying after seeing the future, Noel and Hope watch as the world descends into chaos I was honestly surprised they would deliver on the bad stuff they alluded would happen at the end. I remember my mouth agape, with no words other than "wh-what have I done!?" It was depressing, unexpected, and made me immediately want to buy the next game.

I think FFXII-2 is a substantial improvement. You can switch leaders mid-battle, the battle won't end when your leader dies, environments aren't made up of long, narrow hallways, there are npcs everywhere, you can fine tune paradigms, get new job classes, and do a ton of quests right from the get go, quests range from puzzles, fetch quests, and exploration rather than finding and killing a specific monster, etc. I feel like the design focus for this sequel was to patch up all the issues people had with FFXIII. With FFXIII, I felt they had a convoluted plot that involved great characters. In this game I think it's the opposite. I felt the characters were not so strong. For much of the game, Noel was whiny, Serah was dense, and Caius appeared one-dimensional. That all changed in the final act, but just about every character besides them felt uninteresting or useless. I also didn't like dumb cameos from characters I did like in the last game. Also, the graviton cores that you need for the plot were terribly done. I spent over an hour looking for them before resorting to google, missing most of them for some stupid reason each time. It sucked because I was looking forward to a reason to revisit areas, which you couldn't do in most of XIII. That sequence stood out to me as an absolute flub in game design, and should not have been necessary to advance the plot.

But yeah, I'm glad I picked this game up again after about a full year of putting it down. I'm still deciding if I want to jump for 100% completion now, or to save that for later, since I had other games in mind to be playing. I marathoned the last eight hours of it last night while watching the final day of AGDQ.

I hadn't ever 100% a 3D zelda because of the tons of collectibles. When I found out TP had 60 poe souls and not 100 like I thought for years, I felt very up to it. The game actually gave me no trouble, so that's good.