played a
lot of old games this year. as much as i miss the arcades, i don't miss commuting, and those plus being on my own computer all day for work have all combined to significantly shake up my playing habits, which i'd really say was for the better. and the state of my life and some other factors have led me both to want to check out some old favorites and some things i'd been curious about for a long time...as well as a few new things. but those don't go here anyway.
anyway, without a doubt, the game that really captured my heart and attention the most this year so far was
Romancing SaGa 2. absolutely couldn't stop thinking about it from start to finish, then spent a month or two trying to convince myself not to play it again so soon, but finally did it anyway.
Frontier is a set of great, short jrpgs in their own right, and i even really have mostly enjoyed
Unlimited so far, not to mention last year's
Scarlet Grace: Ambitions being the push to really get me interested in seeing the series through in earnest, and i haven't finished
Legend of Mana yet, but it's definitely been a compelling, certainly delivering a lot of the strange and unexpected things i always hope for playing a game for the first time....but RS2 is, well, both such a fascinatingly confounding mess and an incredibly rich, unique JRPG crystallized around an entirely original concept, that i can safely say i've never played anything that made me feel the same way.
although, right up there as well would have to be
Mr. Driller Drill Land, one of the games at this point i'd have to say i've waited the longest for a chance to experience. getting a fully localized port with a couple of nice modern amenities on the switch is really a heck of a thing, one of those times where i almost can't help but wonder how it even happened.
not sure i can resist a final shoutout for
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, which is not by any means a new game to me, but one i hadn't revisited in many years. i wasn't sure how i'd feel about it at this point, and the suspicion that i'd forgotten a lot of how to play made me think it'd be hard to enjoy. it turned out the opposite was true, and while it did take a bit to get back in the rhythm of it, i've already put another hundred hours into it. even if i don't doubt plenty of it is just nostalgia, especially stuff like the voice acting which really lights my brain up now despite the fact that it's mostly unbearably corny, i really feel like it's a game i love more fully than ever, and even a lot of the stuff i really hated doing before are things i can really enjoy and look forward to now. (although the beginning of the game is still quite a trial on the higher difficulties...) but like, the menu and UI elements are so sexy. the font for all the battle numbers...the music, everywhere in the game just makes me thrilled at how much i love it...i mean, the rendered graphics have aged terribly and it's seriously frustrating to not know how to progress through dungeons or get stuck on bosses before you know all the good strats to get broken stuff, so i can't really recommend it.
but i'm still all about it. and i think because of that, more than any other game, it represents this year for me, a time that i've had a lot of opportunities to reflect on my life and all the people and experiences i've had on the way. (although
Final Fantasy VII, which i also revisited after some time and really loved kind of feels like it represents every year at this point, in a way...) but i guess for me part of what SO3 represents is one of those connections to my teenaged self. it was a time i was really distanced from pretty much everyone in my life emotionally, spent a lot of time on the internet, and never went out aside from school and other obligations. and now i'm almost twice as old and living through some corollary of that, physically separated from so many people i care about (in ways that i no longer feel are scary or superficial for me), shut-in and uncertain of the future for all now and almost more terrible reasons. it's weirdly comforting to see all this stuff and remember how i felt about it then, especially.
in a way i guess i'm really moved when i think about it, realizing that i'm still the same person in a lot of ways, and thinking how far i've come when i really had no idea how i ever would. and it's a comforting thought right now especially, since there's a lot to be worried about, and it's once again a point where it's hard for me to visualize what my life will be like in ten years, or what i think i could even
want it to be like.
and while it's not really a deep thought in the grand scheme of things, there was some stuff i really wanted to do and never managed to back then, so if playing a stupid playstation 2 game for another 200 hours sees me through something she really wanted back then, that seems like a pretty good outcome too.
i thought this was going to be short, but whoops
