Yeah, it does! That's a good way to describe it. It's just a really fun series. Although I admit I play it on Easy because I'm just there to breeze through it and have fun, I don't necessarily want a challenge out of it.

Ohh, hearing that about Mass Effect makes me want to get to it even quicker. (I was gonna play the series sometime after finishing DA:O.) I played Dragon Age 2 last summer and I have to admit, I vastly preferred it compared to what I've played so far of DA:O and what you said is probably why. So if Mass Effect is more character focussed too, I'll probably like it more.

I don't mind not having choices and all. Usually JRPGs get choice so wrong that I prefer NOT to have it when it comes to those, but when it's done right, it can be a lot of fun. I don't like so much choice that I don't know what I should be doing or can't figure out what the developers intended for the character/story, but it is nice to be able to actually role play for once in an RPG instead of just following a fully premade path. But I find that when you have a lot of choices, it means the world, story and characters have to be so open to all the possible choices that they don't get fleshed out as much, so it seems to be a really hard balance to strike. It also makes it kinda hard to talk about the games, too... my former roommates were the ones who got me to play DA2 and even with that we practically ended up playing different games by the end because of our preferred parties, the characters we made, and so on, so sometimes they'd mention something and I'd have nooo clue what they were talking about since it never happened for me because of the character I chose. @_@

I still don't play a whole lot of Western games but I try to slip a few in between JRPGs just to shake things up. It's a nice change! I didn't realize how attached I'd started getting to the Uncharted series (which I only started playing last month) until something went wrong with 3's disc the other day and I thought I wouldn't get to finish it. T_T It started working again for some reason though, so I was able to finish it today.

I'm trying very hard to warm up to WRPGs, but I still find them really difficult to get into. I tend to just prefer action games when I venture out of the realm of Japanese games, haha.

I did 47 or so of the 50ish side quests in my first playthrough. youll be able to get most of them done. garb is a different story tho. those take another round to acquire most of them. I used the strat guide and it helped a lot.

the story made sense to me, but I had done a lot of reading on all the fal'cie and the gods beforehand. I think the game assumes youre reading the datalog extensively, which helps to some degree, but is kinda silly to make ppl read a novel in game to understand it.

the thing to know that isnt explained well, is there is bhunivelze, aka god. he created pulse, lindzei, and etro (who were considered gods by the people, but were the original fal'cie). I dont want to say too much, but that was in the first two, just very subtle, so its not a spoiler, but helps in the hierarchy.