@Masa2009:
I'm sorry to hear you find the improvements we did on X360 insufficient. I can assure you that really a lot of work was put into it and find it therefore surprising that you find the changes minimal:
In terms of accessibility, the entire inventory system was revamped for instance and you now don't need to navigate separately anymore between an equipment screen, a stats screen and an inventory screen to boost your character. Considering the amount of things you can do, I personally thought it was quite a cool that the team managed to cram it all in one screen while still finding room for the paperdoll and keeping things readable. In terms of navigation, there's always going to be something that one player prefers over another player, and we tweaked it in function of the feedback we got from play-testers, which obviously is often conflicting, so we know we can't please all there. But to say that we only changed the menu, that's going a bit far I think.
Regarding the targeting cursor, we actually tried the system you described, but on balance, players seemed to prefer more exact control because an approximative system has the problem that when items are close, it's hard to pick the right one. But we do realize that it's also an area where you can't please everyone.
I'm glad to read you appreciate the changes in visuals and camera, and I hope you will find more changes towards the positive as you progress throughout the game.
Regarding the optimizations, you should find that performance has increased and that the game feels more fluid (at least it does to us). The load times it turns out are very dependent on the region of the game and the language you play because of the way the lay-out on DVD works (some things take longer to load) Putting it on HDD should mean an improvement, so I'm not too sure about what the problem is there, except that it can take a bit longer because the game now tries to make sure it has all visual assets in memory after loading prior to rendering the first image. This to prevent those instances where half the art assets were only available at low levels of detail after loading.
The hype around the X360 version we've been posting was based on observing play-testers, some of which had already played the original game, and who reported considerably more positive impressions, but opinions of course differ. In the same breath I'll agree that there's always room for improvement and posts like yours do help us learn what people expect.
I'd also like to add that on a 60+ hours RPG it's pretty easy for a developer to make the wrong choices from time to time
