ETRIAN ODYSSEY 3 SOON

might buy a DS and get this, as I am very gay for old-school dungeon crawl type games

Yeah I can think of a million gam's for the DS I want, I just never got around to buying one. Seems Lites are p.cheap now though.

Page about the shinobi character in a magazine (Famitsu?)
http://i49.tinypic.com/2dc68vk.jpg

The text under the shinobi, clockwise

Male shinobi 1
Female shinobi 1
Male shinobi 2
Female shinobi 2

Light blue text above the battle screenshot

The shinobi's guild's abilities and all their illustrations published!

Battle screenshot

Shiratama used Ninja Arts - Water Mirror!

Lock, Shiratama, Jiraiya
Ajisai, Benjamin, Jiraiya

Green box

Check out the official site!
Currently the fans' popular number one

Table at the bottom

The shinobi's main skills

Smoke's Tip {?}
This skill will bestow an effect that lowers the TP consumption when using skills (points required in skill usage) and causes offensive abilities to not lower even from the back row.

Ninja Arts - Doppelganger {Clone/Copy}
By halving their HP and TP, they can make appear their own copy in a vacant space of the party. The copy will be able to act by itself.

Shadow Stitch
Shinobi specialize in skills making use of short swords. By inflicting an attack to the opponent's body, this skill causes a status affliction seals the opponent's feet by stitching a shadow onto them.

Skill window in the corner

Shadow Stitch
Hawk's Wings
Multiple Drawn Blades
Ninja Arts - Heat Haze
Ninja Arts - Doppelganger
Ninja Arts - Cloud Concealment

There is a party of 6 members visible, but the 6th one is probably just a copy of the 3rd. They are both named "Jiraiya" and have the same amount of HP and TP.

Character voting ranking, posted on the blog on January 4

Downward from the 6th place:
(Because it is sad, the vote tally will have the privilege of being hidden.)

6th place: Beast king
7th place: Farmer
8th place: Ballista
9th place: Princess and Prince
Unfortunately the lowest placement: Warrior

5th place: Monk, 51 votes
4th place: Phalanx, 56 votes
3rd place: Zodiac, 72 votes
2nd place: Pirate, 89 votes
1st place: Shinobi 104 votes

The blog poster mentions they liked the soon-to-be-revealed "pink" design of the ballista that unfortunately lost to the "sheep" {the farmer}. They also mention that the shinobi would not have placed very high if they had not counted the votes for "knee-high" {some fan nickname for the shinobi}. The characters in the 7th to the 9th places apparently had margins of only one vote.

On the blog on January 7,

{...} each job's individual abilities converted into numerical values from the planner Watanabe Masaru's impressions. (This is based only on Watanabe's opinions.)

{I'm not sure if his name is read as a "Watanabe Masaru".}

The characters are ordered like this:
Princess
Warrior
Phalanx
Pirate
Shinobi
Monk
Zodiac
Beast King
Ballista
Farmer

... while the stats are ordered like this:
Physical attack
Attributive attack
Defensive power
Support ability
Action speed

The blog is here:
http://sq3-blog.atlusnet.jp/

A separate page for the character voting results here:
http://sq3-blog.atlusnet.jp/blog/2010/01/post-d9e1.html

A separate page for the stat estimations:
http://sq3-blog.atlusnet.jp/blog/2010/01/d-afe5.html