I'm sort of at a loss as to what game to play next after finishing Alpha Gaiden. I spent a month and a half on it and now that it's finished, I feel a tad directionless. For some reason, I'm not eager to start up Final Fantasy X again although I desperately want to finish it at some point. I think my final decision will probably be made Saturday night because I have the three days after that off. As nerdy as it is, I'll probably spend the vast majority of that time hanging out at home and playing video games--or failing that, I"ll spend that time trying to figure out what game to play. . .
I've tried to establish a trend recently of focusing on finishing games in my backlog instead of taking on new ones. There's no real tangible reason for this other than making my stats on Backloggery look good. I also feel that all of the 39 unfinished games listed there deserve to be played and completed. If I could one day get to the point where I only have 2-3 unfinished games at a time in my backlog, that would be amazing. A pretty sizable portion of those games are reasonably time-consuming to complete though, so I imagine it's going to be some time before that happens. Plus, let's face it--I'm not great at following my own rules about not playing new games. Sometimes games come out that I just have to have.
One game that's been on my mind a little bit is Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. It's a game that I haven't touched in many years. I really liked the PlayStation version of Lunar: Silver Star Story and figured the sequel would be similarly good. It turned out to be a really good game if I'm remembering correctly, but I also ran into some issues emulating it. I believe I ran into some framerate issues in a certain dungeon and I lost motivation because the dungeon also had a really difficult boss. Unfortunately, I can't remember a lot of the specifics. I'm wondering now if newer versions of ePSXe might have fixed those issues or if maybe I could use a different graphics plugin to circumvent the problem.
The idea of playing a classic RPG from that era sounds pretty good to me right now. There is the option of Dragon Quest III or Lufia II but I think I'm in the mood for something slightly more plot-driven. I recall really enjoying the funny dialogue in the Lunar games and I feel like I don't see that enough these days. I don't have a problem with voice acting, per se, but if it's not extremely well done it can detract from the experience. Some of the voice acting in FFX is stilted and awkward, for instance. All the same, though, I miss being able to read dialogue aloud. It's something I did a lot when I was a kid while playing games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. It was always a lot more fun to do in games with well-written dialogue.
Reading dialogue aloud is not something I do very often anymore. I remember having this aspiration to be a voice actor before I realized that I don't have that great of a voice and it's not a realistic goal to have in the first place. Aside from that, I rarely give a game my undivided attention these days. I multitask a lot while playing games--and if I'm being honest, it does detract from the experience a bit. I think if I paid more attention to games I would enjoy them more, but sometimes my brain doesn't let me. I either get bored or I grow dissatisfied with how little I'm getting done with the time I'm using. I voraciously consume all different kinds of media, so devoting my time to one thing when I could be doing multiple things seems like an inefficient use of my time--even though efficiency shouldn't matter when all I'm trying to do is have some fun.
Having fun isn't the only goal for me though, now that I think about it. There's more to it than that. I like to absorb all of this information and digest it so I can compare it to other things, so I can write about it, and so I can talk about it. I like the idea of being really knowledgeable about a lot of different pop culture phenomena. For instance, I became fascinated with the idea of watching through the entirety of the original Star Trek series. I wasn't particularly interested in Star Trek and I can't say I derived a great deal of enjoyment out of what I did watch, but I loved the idea of being knowledgeable about it and being able to use that information to relate to others and understand more about popular culture.
In this case though, I just want to work on a game that's really fun to play. Of course I'll write about it and draw conclusions about it--but mostly, I just want to have something to play that's fun. We'll see how Lunar 2 goes.
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