Okay, read through like the last 15 pages and caught up. Comments in no particular order.
On Grandia 2 re-release: Yeah, the hard mode buffs bosses notably more than randoms. The developer more or less said there's not much point in us buffing randoms to the moon because it's so trivial to refill your resources in Grandia 2 anyway so all it would really do is encourage players to run back to the save cone after every battle and that isn't really fun or compelling gameplay. So the randoms aren't buffed too hard, mostly just more HP and speed.
On Star Ocean 3: I really hate the combination of how easy it is to get bonus gauge broken and how glacial advancement can feel without the EXP bonus from bonus gauge that I can never remember if it's double or triple. I think I'd honestly like the game much better if bonus gauge never affected your EXP gains but they were raised by half the bonus you get from the gauge all the time.
On Star Ocean writing in general: Echo Grefter, SO does an okay job of running with the Star Trek tropes. Star Trek is definitely the franchise's biggest outside influence and its writing was often equally laughable or worse, regardless of which incarnation you look at. (Spock's brain, hello?) SO2 definitely makes references to the UP3 and stuff, the catch is that if you play Rena's storyline you miss basically all of them.
On FF1: Android version is so terribad, it's the PSP version without any of its (or Dawn of Souls') extra content but still having lol DoS balance, iOS version's fine though
And now my own gaming. Been on a Super Robot Wars binge lately, playing several of them side by side - OG1 (Ryusei route), J (Calvina with Coustwell), and Z2-1 (ranged spec mech).
SRW OG1: God, I forgot how long Ryusei's route is just utterly saddled with a pile of utterly terrible units. Gespenst MkII-M's are almost worse than empty deployment slots. Almost. Don't have much more than that to say right now; I stopped in the middle of chapter 18, know there's a few more marathon stages coming up. Soon, at least, I can stop deploying the embarrasingly bad units.
Only missed one skill point thus far, in chapter 16. I don't think that one's possible in a fresh run without either some serious good luck or very specifically planning all your upgrades for that stage specifically (or game over abuse, but I consider myself above that). Biggest problem is that getting it forces you to kill a lot of enemies on counters... and those enemies have very long range and prefer to wisely shoot people who can't counter, and most of your ways to get that long of a range don't work underwater (which is 95% of the map). In a replay you'd probably have a much easier time of it with upgrades and stuff.
Kind of wish OGs PS2 at least had a menu patch. I can play SRW games in full Japanese but I'm excruciatingly slow with navigating menus that way (especially seishins).
SRW J: The only one of these games I've ever actually finished before. Unfortunately, I lost the save, so it's a fresh run, not NG+. As mentioned, playing Calvina with Coustwell. Left off when I last played a few days ago in the middle of chapter 27. I had really forgotten just how much of a slog J's midgame can be; all the enemies ever have way more HP than they have any business to. I kind of wish someone would do a romhack of this game to tweak the AI somehow, but that's probably way too hard to do. I know there's a Japanese rebalance hack, but I assume it's incompatible with the English patch and in any case there's absolutely no useful patch notes as to what it does (yes I google translated the readme, it doesn't really say anything specific).
I did the Archangel route this time for the first route split, think I like that one better than the Nadesico's first split because less fighting Boazanians with absurdly high HP. Flip side, you get to fight Grand Chers earlier and those are god-awful too. Second split was Moon route, and from there secrets dictate the rest of the routes so.
As for Coustwell... it's probably the worst of the three protagonist mechs, but it's still a stupidly good protagonist mech so whatever. At _worst_ it's a better Shining Gundam, and that's hard to bitch about.
SRW Z2-1: I kind of love this game, but I wish the skill points were more interesting than all of them basically boiling down to "LTC the stage kthxbye." What I assume to be the OC villains are super annoying to fight though. Just finished... I think it was chapter 13? The last chapter before the routes converge finally, so I'm about to get a bunch of new units and stuff.
