Well, I've posted my Disgaea 3 review.

This was a pretty difficult review to write. The series is getting so complex at this point, with so many fans drawn to so many different things. It was a big challenge to try to hit all of what I view as the main bullet points and do it with some word economy. Even now, it's right around 1500 words long, when I was hoping for closer to 1000 to 1200!

Anyway, I nailed most of the important points except that I didn't mention magicharge, one of the least noteworthy new features. Basically, a hero and a monster can combine for three turns with the monster boosting your attack and receiving benefits. Then the monster is gone from battle. Enemies did that a lot around me but I never did a magicharge throughout the whole thing. It just wasn't necessary.

Anyway, I could tell from reading other reviews of the game online--after posting mine--that other reviewers were having similar difficulty in reviewing the game. I was feeling bad because my writing wasn't particularly witty or anything, but I found that to be an epidemic in all other reviews for the game... and they spent as many words on things (usually) and didn't cover some of the stuff I did!

So yeah, I'm pretty happy with the review. The only things I would change is maybe to add more personality to my language and to shorten it by about 300 words without losing anything I'm saying. Given the breadth of the material I had to cover, I don't think either of those two things was ever going to happen. So... good review, I guess.

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	jerec - September 01, 2008 (03:23 AM) Your writing is fine. It's an easy to read review that tells me exactly what I want to know about the game, and I didn't really notice the length. Yeah, I wouldn't read the review to admire the style of writing, so I doubt you should go using it in any tournaments. But for what it was intended to do, the review succeeded.
	honestgamer - September 01, 2008 (12:42 PM) Thanks for the feedback, Jerec! Folks like you were my target audience with this, so I'm glad to hear that things went as well as I hoped. Writing to win reviewing tournaments seems to have less and less in common with writing to really analyze games. There are a lot of things that might be included in a review if you hope to win a tournament, but not as many of them have to do with actual gameplay analysis as I feel should. Writers like drella, Masters and zigfried who really balance spectacular prose with in-depth game analysis are quite uncommon. I more often see writers that lean too much toward pure game analysis or toward interesting fluff, while sacrificing something else in the process. Something I'm trying to do is find a better balance between the two, but I expect that it will take a long time yet before I'm entirely comfortable with where I've settled as a review writer. Maybe it'll never happen.