The title is a double entendre, because I'm dying of a mysterious illness. That's not the subject here though, I just thought that would be funny. Rather, I wanted to do some housekeeping and hold myself accountable, inspired by another Giant Bomb thread about finishing your video game plate.
Four months ago, I mentioned in my questing blog that I finally started tackling my backlog dark horse, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony. Every single time I've started that game previously, I almost immediately put it down. Still, at the time, I had given myself until the end of the year to beat one more game; a gross exaggeration of time needed, I thought at first. Well, I regret to inform you that I haven't finished the PSP version of this Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) and I don't think I will get it done in the week or so I have left in 2021. A non-trivial factor of that is the death part, but more realistically it is all the other usual distractions that have taken me away from the Sony portable. I'll mention those in a bit.
Lunar started off pretty strong. As a first impression, this JRPG is a lot more palatable than most in the same era. Story progresses way smoother than its peers, there are fewer instances of arbitrary stopping points and even grinding isn't a necessity, for the most part. You can absolutely just hop-skip your way through and that's very rare in this otherwise very defined genre. On top of that, Lunar is anime as all hell. Every story beat gets capped with a video cutscene, which is pretty impressive. The baddies in this game are also baddies, you know what I mean? When I loved playing Lunar, I made steady progress; averaging at a risky PSP recharge every two days. As an aside: Check your batteries frequently, because they might not be doing so well.
Around the same time that I posted the blog, however, I started contracting whatever abject bullshit I have now. That event made times where I could play a little more difficult. More than that, still, was Lunar's slow venom itself that did me in. Now that I had less stamina to spend, the JRPG-y-ness started popping it's head out. Around the turn of the second act, the game no longer thinks that breezing your way through is cool anymore. Reject modernity, embrace tradition! Instead, Lunar throws in an old fashioned labyrinth dungeon. Then it does that same thing again. In total, there are three of these grueling mazes and you do them back-to-back-to-back. Ouch. Even with full lucidity, that would've drained any motivation I had to play. I'm no stranger to obtuse dungeon crawling, but that's quite the brick wall to smash on your head like that.
So, whenever I felt less inclined to inch forward, I played some of the usual suspects that I go to whenever I need to distract myself. We all get that urge to just click some buttons for a while, right? At first I played Pokemon GO, which updates surprisingly frequently, until I couldn't stand up anymore. By that time, Pokemon Unite came out on mobile and that gave me an alternative to League of Legends: Wild Rift. I went all-in on that game, until I couldn't stand playing solo anymore. I'm too old to babysit other people's children in online games. Moving on, I dove back into Monster Hunter Stories, which is still an amazing and overlooked gem. I don't understand why more people didn't play it. Fast forward to now, when I bought Kingdom: New Lands and got deep into the Super Auto Pets hole. Both of those are a good time as well. I'll make sure to write about all of them, one day.
About a dozen "distractions" later, I had to stop making excuses for myself that I was getting back to Lunar any minute now. The PSP is still right here next to me on my coffee table, but it might as well be in space. It's safe to say that I haven't touched the JRPG since, despite being more than halfway through. I'm enjoying other games and I suppose that's okay. Maybe I'll pull another NeverDead and suddenly complete it over a year later. I really thought I was going to do it this time though, heck! I even lined up an entire new backlog, for when I was done. Did I mention that I bought every Pokémon game in a ridiculously feverish haze? I just own those now, even though all of their save batteries have died. Also check your Gameboy cartridge batteries, I guess. There's a lot of battery checking when you like old video games.
I'm sorry that I'm a fraud, a charlatan, a filthy casual who can't even finish one tiny JRPG, like some sort of adult baby person. For now, consider Lunar: Silver Star Harmony to be in the aptly dubbed pile of shame. It joins Dragon Quest V on Nintendo DS, whose cartridge I lost in a random DS game case somewhere, as well as 3D Dot Game Heroes and about five more classics that people keep telling me to play. In my defense, it takes quite some time to run daily objectives in this month's biggest MMO release. That MMO is Fantasy Life Online. What big MMO did you think came out this month? It's the Fantasy one, right? Fantasy Life is currently running a Christmas event where you get attacked by angry snowmen. Except the translation in that game is ever so iffy, so the monsters are called "White Devil" instead. Defeat the white devil! It's a creed we can all rally behind.
There are a ton of really cool video games out there and only so much time to play them all. At some point, I'll grow towards some sort of acceptance that I won't play the thousands in my backlog, but I've really only begun the grieving process. I'm bad and I should feel bad. And you know what? I do feel pretty bad.
Blessed holidays to my all of Giant Bomb family and may the new year bring in a tide of change.
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