Alanna:
1. Don't hold back, Isfacat. Tell us how you really feel about the game.

2. Only for moderately large values of 2.

3. Ah, Tactics. I'll assume that you're talking about the characters you can create, and not the NPCs. Okay, let's see, this is how I did it:

• For the first few battles, you should stay as a mixture of Chemists and Squires. All your JP should go to learning all of those skills, because they're going to be very useful for a very long time. Squires should learn the JP Up ability, while Chemists should learn Potion, Phoenix Down, and Hi-Potion first. Switch back and forth between Chemist and Squire for each character until everyone knows at least JP Up, Potion, Phoenix Down, and Hi-Potion; this will be useful for secondary abilities.
• Your first character to max out the Squire ability list should change to a Knight. They will be useless for doing more than attacking at first, as the Knight special abilities take insane amounts of JP for this part of the game, but Knights have decent attack power even without the special abilities, so you should be fine.
• Your first Chemist to max out their abilities should switch to a Wizard. Be careful when you attack with offensive magic; sometimes the range will hit one of your characters too, which is generally a Bad Thing.
• Your second Squire to max out their abilities should transfer to a Knight for one level, until the Monk ability becomes available. Monks can kick some serious butt, especially this early in the game.
• Your second Chemist to max out should do a little bit of switching around. If you've been switching back and forth, he or she will probably be at least a level 2 Squire, which will make the Archer class available. Switch over to an Archer until you hit level 2, then toss him or her into the Thief job class. Thieves aren't very strong attackers, but they have some great support abilities, and can make you a very, very wealthy noble indeed.
• Your fifth character to max out abilities can choose any one of a number of jobs. Personally, at this point, I'd probably send him or her to Priest school, but you could also take him or her to Wizard level 2 and then to Time Mage. A number of people think that Time Mages are useless, but personally, I think that they're fun.
• Once your Knight maxes out level and ability, take him or her to Archer school until they hit level 2, then Thief to level 2, and that opens up the Lancer job class, which will let you kick some serious monster pahootie.
• Oh, and remember that Time Mage I mentioned up there? Time Mage level 2 opens up Summoner as a class, and Summoners can stand off in the corner and pick off whole platoons of enemies.
• Someone should take the following path of learning: Squire, Knight, Monk, Lancer -- which opens up Samurai.
• Classes that aren't really very useful until late in the game, or at all: Oracle, Calculator, Geomancer, Mediator, Ninja, Bard, Dancer, and Mime.

Alanna:
Well, as for 1 and 2, I don't have cable OR network TV, and haven't watched TV since 1995 or so, so no, I didn't. ^_^ I'm not familiar with Mudvayne's music; I should check it out. A lot of video game music uses pretty common musical themes, so I occasionally have to stop and blink when I hear stuff on the radio. "That wasn't Uematsu-san playing on WPLJ, was it? ...oh, no, it's just Vertical Horizon." As for #3, the only references I can find all point to The NPD Group, a marketing-research organization that does sales figures for a lot of things, not just video games.

Alanna:
Tell you what, I'll answer this one if you promise not to tell Googleshng that I'm slacking off and answering non-RPG questions, all right? So, um, Goog, just go look over there for a minute, okay?

I have a bit of advice for you: Girls have the capacity to flake out at a moment's notice. So do guys. A lot of times, people won't realize that other people are counting on them, and a lot of other times, people will think that something is less important than you think it is. Think back -- I'm sure you can probably come up with a time in your life when someone was really counting on you to do something, but didn't tell you how important it was, and you wound up thinking that it was no big deal, while to them it was something seriously major.

If I were writing this as a fictional situation, she probably would have forgotten that she said she'd be going somewhere with you, and made other plans without realizing. Or she'd forgotten that she'd made plans with her other friend, and then made plans with you. People do that; I do it all the time, and then I feel horrible about it. And then I'd have you sit down to her and explain that you feel bad when people don't do what they say they're going to do, and the two of you could talk it over, and she would promise tearfully never to do it again, and then you could both ride off into the sunset with Disney characters singing "What a Wonderful World" in the background.

Er, maybe not the Disney characters.

But seriously, situations like these can almost always be resolved by talking it over. All you have to do is say to her, "Look, Insert Name Here, I was really upset when you blew me off for Insert Name Here the other day, especially since I was looking forward to getting that game. I know you apologized, and I appreciate your apology, but I just wanted to ask that you try not to do that again."

And yes, I'm the one with the colored hair. Since October, which was when I moved into a different corporate job with a VP who doesn't mind (and even brags about it to his fellow VPs at staff meetings: "I have an employee with blue hair!"), it's been light blue, dark blue, green (when the blue faded), purple, lavender, indigo (I looked like Miang), and now it's indigo at the roots fading down to a really pretty pale sky-blue. I look like a peacock. I think I'm going to try burgundy next.

Alanna
Hey, (monks sing) IM-PER-I-AL MOG,

Personally, I think that when you become an RPG hero, you're issued a Get Out Of Jail Free card. I mean, think about it: you can just walk right into houses, take whatever you find, and walk out again, and no one ever says anything to you about it.

Then again, if a bunch of people in weird outfits carrying large swords and whips and guns marched into my apartment, I'd probably smile as I handed over my suitcases full of unmarked bills, too.

I'm looking forward to Xenosaga (I loved Xenogears) and Final Fantasy X, personally. I saw FFX at E3, and I was really impressed by it. One of the other games I saw at E3 was Anarchy Online, and I've been giving serious thought to buying a PC just to play it, as there's no Mac port. (Well, okay, I'll add, to make me sound like LESS of a geek, that I want a PC because of a few video-editing programs I know of that are Windows-only. I'm still a geek, though.)

I think that Google would make a much better magical girl than I would.

(PS: Dear IRS. I was kidding about the unmarked bills. Boom shanka, me.)

Alanna:
You can get Griever as a character, but you have to do the special quest. First, you have to go down to Centra, and find the spot in the lower left corner of the continent where Squall stands on it and says "Something seems familiar..." Then, take five steps to the north and three steps to the east, and summon Shiva. She will give you the Holy materia. Take that to the ocean, and put it in the ocean. This will revive Aeris, who will give you the Porno Magazine. Take that to Cid, and he will squawk like a chicken and turn into Griever.

DISCLAIMER: I am lying through my teeth.

Alanna:
Clearly, someone at Working Designs just hates you.

Seriously, though, your best bet to find one would be checking in the software or gaming stores by you, and seeing if they have any copies still left. If not, there's always Amazon.com; sometimes they can find things that are out of print. If all else fails, mug a Girl Scout and steal her copy.

DISCLAIMER: RPGamer.com, its affiliates, and all concerned parties do not advocate the actual mugging of Girl Scouts. No Girl Scouts were harmed in the making of this column. Besides, the Boy Scouts usually are the ones who buy the strategy guides.