The bulk of the content on the disc is the original 80+ hour Persona 3 game, dubbed "The Journey" in FES. You play as a transfer student who quickly discovers that his school is the epicenter of a phenomenon known as the Dark Hour, a "25th hour" during the day where time stops for the unaware and a huge tower named Tartarus erupts from the school, the source of an evil plague of beings known as Shadows. Only once you realize you harness the ability to wield the titular entities called personas do you join a crew of your fellow persona-wielding classmates to climb Tartarus and cleanse it of the Shadows over the course of a school year.

It's Japanese, but you get the idea.

P3's combat may at first glance look like a typical turn-based RPG, but it has a few key differences that make it unique. First, you only directly control your character in the four-person battle party. You can give them general commands to focus on healing or attacking a specific enemy and while it works most of the time there will be instances where they don't quite do what you wanted. Also given that you and your members are made up of high school students that still have studying on their minds, tiredness can set in, which puts the character at a significant disadvantage. This is bad news because many of the fights in P3 – boss or otherwise – are rather brutal and require both adept strategies and focused, healthy party members to win.

The most significantly unique trait of Persona 3 is of course in its titular persona system. Personas come in the form of characters from myth and legend and when equipped on your character give him specific weaknesses, strengths, and special moves. Your character is the only one who can choose from well over one hundred personas and choosing the right one for specific situations is a key part of the battle strategy due to the system of strengths and weaknesses. Hitting an enemy's weakness gives you an extra turn and knocks the enemy to the floor – knock them all down and your party can perform a devastating and satisfying "all-out-attack" that cannot be blocked. Of course, if you get hit by your own persona's weakness you too will fall down and waste a turn, leaving you wide open for attack - the pendulum can swing the other way at any moment in P3, which keeps battles tense.

Don't mind if I do.

P3 does not forget that you are cast in the role of a high school student and the social aspect of which is simulated in its Social Links system. Akin to a dating simulator, the Social Links or S. Links allow you to hang out with your fellow classmates and other dubious characters in amusing cutscene sequences. How you react to their problems is key to how you grow in these relationships and as the S. Links level up, so does the arcana or class of persona they represent, which will give your corresponding personas an experience boost when you fuse them in the Velvet Room. Seeing your friends to the end is encouraged as not only will personas of their same arcana know all of their abilities right off the bat, you'll also have access to fuse a special high level persona that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. When you don't feel like hanging out, you can always study, sing karaoke, or watch a movie – all designed to increase your personal attributes which will allow you access to more S. Links. Everything you do outside of Tartarus has an effect inside of Tartarus, so there is plenty of incentive to keep yourself occupied.

While the bulk of the content in The Journey is the same as the original release including the superb-to-adequate voice acting and strangely infectious soundtrack, this FES edition contains a new S. Link in the form of a particular character from the original, makes certain other S. Links easier to complete, adds a number of new personas, and other things like new cutscenes and costumes. Additionally, you can carry over your save data from the original game and import your personal statistics/persona compendium for a new round in FES, which is a wonderful bonus for those of you who spent hours mastering the fusion system and collecting your favorite personas.

Look after him - he's your baby.

Despite some setbacks in its new content, FES is still a worthwhile experience for those who have already played Persona 3 to death. Its $30 price point is chump change to experience a 80+ hour main game with a dearth of new content and a flawed but playable 30+ hour extra chapter.  Persona 3 is easily one of the best RPGs to come out of Japan in years and FES is without a doubt its definitive form.

A simple glance at the cute-yet-frightening boxart of Plushees for the Nintendo DS and you might be tempted to group it with the multitude of low quality kids' games that have suffocated Nintendo handhelds for years. However, despite its appearance as a stuffed animal themed minigame collection, it manages to overturn poor expectations with simple and light goal-oriented gameplay. Plushees, despite its inadvertently unsettling exterior, is actually a solid choice for the right age group and may very well captivate budding gamers of the eight-and-below set.

Click here for an explanation of our review and scoring format.

Plushees' premise is simple: through the power of imagination or dark magic, stuffed animals have come alive and are naturally in need of love and companionship that only you can provide. To do this you must purchase plushees carnival-style with tickets earned from the game's two main modes, Arcade and Plushee Play. It will take a lot of play, as the 25 plushees you can purchase in the Plushee Store cost anywhere between 200 and 1000 tickets and run the gamut from monkeys to dragons.

Once you earn the plushee of your dreams you can use it in the game's other major mode, Plushee Play. Plushee Play includes four games: Simon Says, Jump Rope, Hide-n-Seek, and Butterfly Catch. Simon Says is like the memorization game of its namesake, only in this iteration you select which plushee acted out the correct command that either you or the computer selected. In Jump Rope you can make your plushee hop in time in two ways, either by tapping it in time or by drawing prompted patterns on the touchscreen, the latter of which is more frantic and fun. Hide-n-Seek might be more accurately likened to a game of tag and features your plushee as it runs around trying to hug other plushees by choosing the correct icon of the other plushee on the touch screen. Butterfly Catch is somewhat broken, as it is very difficult to perceive the depth of the butterflies your plushee is chasing around the screen; luckily, the game is lenient and you don't have to be too close to catch them. You earn points instead of tickets in this mode, but earned points can be converted into tickets, so these games still have incentive to be played. While the games in Plushee Play are a bit deeper than the arcade games, the arcade games still have a simple, general appeal that these lack.

Plushees' presentation is adequately cute. The stuffed animal cast isn't overly sweet, but certainly sport a classic soft, rotund look. When the game uses 3D environments, such as the one used in Hide-n-Seek, it's very simplistic but adequate. Special mention must be made of the techno track in the music selections: this trance-like tune is catchy but seems hilariously out of place given the game's context. The game also features a multiplayer option should you find another player with a Plushees game card.

Of course, given that Plushees is about earning stuffed animals and playing games with them, it certainly won't be appropriate for an older child who has already been introduced to a franchise like Pokemon. While some of the games are generally fun and somewhat addictive, such as Alley Ball or Ka-Plinko, the subject matter of the other modes might only be appropriate for children age eight or younger. But, given the straightforward goal-based nature of the game, Plushees still manages to stand out in a kids' market overcrowded with licensed games of questionable quality - and at only $20, Plushees is even easier to recommend to parents confused by the overwhelming mediocre choices available to young gamers.

What five minutes of One Piece will do to you.

One Piece: Unlimited Adventure is a Nintendo Wii exclusive action-adventure game following the exploits of the Straw Hat Pirates of the popular manga and anime series, One Piece. The overall gameplay of this lengthy journey might not be solid enough to hold its own, but fans of the manga and anime will mine a decent amount of enjoyment out of the title. Though some errant attributes keep it from being generally recommended, it plays surprisingly well for a licensed game, but that's not saying much.

Click here for an explanation of our review and scoring format.

After some misdeeds on the high seas, the Straw Hat Pirates' captain and One Piece's main character, Luffy, is forced to fish aboard their ship as penance for wasting food. He hooks a mysterious orb instead of catching a meal, and this orb causes an island to emerge from under the ship. When the crew comes to, they decide to do what any pirate gang would do and see what treasure the island has to plunder. The absurdity of the plot may only resonate with series fans, but luckily the characters themselves offer some much needed levity in the form of personality, though their at times over-animated nature might put off a few people.

Down with the Navy and its 193 men.

Unlimited Adventure is set up like a traditional action adventure game in the vein of Legend of Zelda. Exploration of the island is key, and of course you'll open up more areas to investigate as you progress. Advancing to new areas is done through the use of Luffy's orb, which for some reason needs to be fed to charge up, amounting to a lot of backtracking and hassle on your part. The barriers the game sets between you and adjacent areas are almost always rock walls that mysteriously explode, so these more traditional gaming restraints need to be taken with a tongue firmly in cheek to be accepted. Unfortunately, once you do enter a new area the game offers little in direction, so you may be wandering around for a while wondering what to do next.

While wandering around, you will run into the militant and evil Navy that surely means more to One Piece fanatics than the rest of us; otherwise they suffice as a near constant fodder for your cast. Once you team up with the rest of the characters, you can change between members at any time with a press of the minus button. There actually is some variance in each character's range of combat. Luffy has the power to make his limbs act rubbery and extend like Mr. Fantastic or Street Fighter's Dhalsim, which lends him some wide-range physical attacks. Usopp can chuck throwing stars from a distance while a little talking reindeer thing called Chopper is only capable of weak short-range melee bursts, but can eventually turn into a powerful, hulking beast. With repeated use, moves become more powerful and new ones become available. Truth be told, the combat is fairly simplistic at its core, but the variety of characters can keep it from being too tedious.

Unlimited Adventure doesn't exactly take advantage of the Wii's unique control options, offering only the traditional Wii Remote and Nunchuk setup. Control is responsive overall, though the game's jumps and attacks don't exactly push the genre's envelope. Camera controls are average, as the Z button on the Nunchuk does most of the camera work. It can lock on to a nearby enemy, set the camera behind you in exploration mode, or be held down and adjusted with the directional pad. The only controls to take advantage of the Wii Remote are the useful character specific moves that are activated with a simple waggle.

One Piece serves up a standard presentation with average graphics. The character models stay true to their 2D roots, but the environments are repetitive and bland. You can at times see an expanse of land, but there's not much to see within the expanse. The sound design may disappoint in that the music, which at best is forgettable and at worst, grating, is accompanied by merely adequate sound effects. But the true crime for some may be that there is no option for Japanese voice acting. This may pain fans, but the English audio is fairly decent and, let's face it – a story about a mishmashed team of character stereotypes with rubber arms and talking reindeer sidekicks calling themselves pirates isn't exactly the stuff of high art.

One Piece does offer a passable versus multiplayer mode where you can select a team of characters from the game, hero and villain. It's passable enough to offer a decent diversion from the main narrative, though it would only keep the interest of series fans, and even then the combat isn't deep enough for it to last for long. The main game also has a few sidequests like butterfly collecting and item creation but outside a few items whose creation is necessary to progress, only the most ardent of One Piece fans will stick through to see all of either mode.

One Piece: Unlimited Adventure isn't a bad game, but that hardly makes it good. It's adequate enough for series fans, who should be able to overlook its relative mediocrity for the chance to play a rather lengthy adventure with Luffy and crew that is somewhat solidly made. For everyone else, you'll be hoping that the adventure isn't quite unlimited.

Ahh - looks, feels, and smells like 1999. Now that's bad fish.

Sega Bass Fishing services Wii anglers with a standard variety of modes. Arcade mode naturally features arcade style stage by stage play – catch a bass of a minimum size within a certain period of time or you're out of luck. Tournament mode plays somewhat differently, requiring prolonged competition with other anglers. Nature trip mode loses the restraints of other modes and allows you to fish at your own pace. Actually catching a fish is surprisingly simple and within a minute or two in any mode you'll be able to reel in a bass, even though it might not be the big one.

The fish you're dying not to catch.

Unfortunately you'll quickly discover that catching fish is not the deepest of activities; you just cast, wait, and reel in, ad nauseam. While the audio cues of the announcer can add some unintended humor and immediate urgency to the action of reeling in a bass, the game's dated presentation with its smarmy textures and simple environments reeks of a shoddy Dreamcast port that Sega didn't feel the need to update for this Wii release. While some parts of the presentation are period turn-of-the-century Sega including the aforementioned overly joyous announcer and some rather out of place female vocals in the options music, any points gained by this quaintness are easily negated by its sloppy visuals.

Controlling the game with the Wii Remote may seem like an intuitive setup at first. The Wii Remote acts as the fishing rod, which you can flick back and forth to cast the line and tug it left or right while in the water; conversely, the Nunchuk reels in the line. The truth of the matter is that these motion controls were essentially ported over wholesale from the game's previous analog scheme, so waggling the Wii Remote or Nunchuk in any direction will have the same effect as pressing a button. That being said, the game does not control poorly, but seems gimmicky.

Some good can be said of Sega Bass Fishing, primarily its lower price-point, which may actually be $10 more than it warrants in light of its pre-twenty-first century origins. If the Wii Remote controls were incorporated more appropriately it would deserve a better recommendation, but its nostalgic Sega presentation can't hide its relative mediocrity.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl can be compressed to a single rule: to knock your opponents off the sides of the screen. You accomplish this by beating your opponents to a pulp to raise their damage percentage. The higher their percentage, the farther they fly, best done with the namesake smash attack. It's really that simple. But just because the concept is simple doesn't mean it's simple in practice.

Something is wrong with this picture.

To match number of characters, there are a few dozen stages to select from, the vast majority of which include interactive elements that make each stage resemble a playground more than a standard fighting environment. For example, the recreation of the 75M stage from the original Donkey Kong features numerous elevators, ladders, and a giant, pixelated Donkey Kong who throws springs, which not surprisingly, are very dangerous when hit. Add in a huge list of variable-changing items like ray guns, explosives, and the all-important Smash Balls which enable character-specific finishing moves and you'll never encounter the same match twice.

The Luigi boogie.

The biggest addition to multiplayer is without a doubt the online component. Though you have to enter Brawl-specific friend codes, doing so grants you access to the best online experience Brawl offers, allowing you to play with as many characters, stages, and options as you have unlocked in the offline game. However, Brawl doesn't include the standard features of most online games: leaderboards and voice chat You can play with random opponents, but this option limits you to two-minute matches. The matches aren't always lag-free but for the most part the game runs smoothly - an impressive feat considering the intense four-player action occurring online. Overall, online battling is a great addition to the game's value, even if it may be a little bare bones.

Traitor.

Brawl maintains the franchise's simple control premise. All character moves are tied to one button each for special moves and normal attacks. Pressing either up, forward, or down in conjunction with one of these will result in character specific specials with the special move button and the smash attacks with the normal attack button. Smash Bros. does not wear the complexities of other move-based fighters like Street Fighter or Tekken but comparing it to those straight fighters is not entirely fair in respect to its less serious atmosphere of random items and non-static stages, which are essential to the experience.

I hope this is as painful as it looks, Little Lucas.

Brawl also features four different controller options. You can use the Wii Remote, the Wii Remote plus the nunchuk, the Classic Controller, or a GameCube controller. The latter is definitely the best choice as not only will it be a natural fit for series regulars who have spent the last 6 years playing Melee but most of the other control types have issues, especially the Wii Remote due to its lack of having a sufficient button count to be a well-rounded choice. Nonetheless, it is possible to play with all of them, which is a testament to how fundamentally simple the game is.

While the graphics are only marginally better than Melee's, Brawl still sports some great visuals. Star Fox's Lylat Cruise stage, set on a space cruiser speeding through a detailed vista of asteroids and ships straight out of Star Wars, is especially impressive – even more so considering that it and the rest of the stages feature no slowdown. As heavy as the action can get, the game runs at a silky 60 frames per second. However, sometimes the graphics can be a distraction. It is all too easy in a particularly hectic fight to lose sight of your character. This can be exacerbated in stages like Earthbound's New Pork City, a massive environment with an almost nauseating purple color scheme that makes it hard to discern the fighters when the camera is fully zoomed out. Add that to the standard flashes and zooms of character specials and items and it's guaranteed to cause an errant death or two.

This'll only take a moment.

Brawl's biggest snag is that getting maximum enjoyment from it will require prerequisite knowledge and experience with Nintendo's characters and history. If the understanding of the absurd gravity of Link fighting Fox McCloud amidst the sewers of the original Mario Bros. game is lost, then these characters might as well be anyone else. Brawl has no shame in flaunting its appeal as a Nintendo self-promoter.

The plot of course remains centered on the Dark Knight Cecil and his questioning of authority and the whirlwind of events that follow. Square Enix has promised however that all new scenes will be added to the story that were written out for its original release but were either technically or logistically unfeasible at the time. Early screens have shown that the game looks to improve over FFIII's exploitation of the DS hardware, as more characters can be displayed on the 3D battlefields. The original version's battles, as mentioned previously, loaded quickly and were over quickly - FFIII DS suffered slight load times that were made all the worse due to the high encounter rate. Whether FFIV will suffer the same remains to be seen. Another addition is that characters are now able to use skills inherited from other characters, the details on which are still scarce.

This of course isn't the first time FFIV will see release on another console. Subsequent re-releases on the PS1, Wonderswan (a Japanese-only handheld), and Game Boy Advance have seen minor additions to the game. But never before has the game been completely remade, so the hope for new content built from the ground up is there. The original game is short but some standards - an experienced player can breeze through the quest in about 10 hours. Let me repeat - experienced, on the original US version's toned down difficulty. Someone playing the game for the first time should see more than 20 hours from the game, which is a solid length for its now portable status.

Final Fantasy IV sees its DS release on December 20 in Japan. There is still no word on a release to the West; however, that gamble is about as safe as betting that Cecil will have to come to terms with himself and save the world from a villain that pops up for the first time in the story's latter act. In other words, yeah, it'll happen.

Er, well, that's how it used to be anyway. The purity of fun has a new benchmark - and its name is Super Mario Galaxy. Super Mario Galaxy sees Mario return to top form in the three-dimensional realm. As can be immediately concluded from the title, this game has Mario soaring in the cosmos attempting to - what else - save Princess Peach from the clutches of Bowser. Along the way he'll defy gravity with the help of a seemingly Peach replacement space "princess" named Rosalina. Rosalina and her gaggle of star people called Lumas inhabit the hub world that Mario will use to explore the galaxies that make up the gameplay of Super Mario Galaxy.