A couple of years ago, I decided to go on a marathon of playing games from my backlog. It was somewhat erroneously titled the Backlog Eradication Marathon because it did no such thing. I did however manage to complete about ten games that I'd left off somewhere near the end. In a lot of cases, it made me wonder why I'd stopped playing them in the first place because for the most part they were really enjoyable games. Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga was really fun and had a surprisingly difficult final boss. Golden Sun had fantastic gameplay but really tedious dialogue. The last game that I completed as a part of that marathon was Front Mission 4. HowLongToBeat.com tells me the game should take roughly 37 hours to finish but I have no idea where they got that figure because it took me well over 80, not counting all the times I had to repeat missions.
I am currently flirting with the idea of doing another one of these marathons, although I can't imagine I'll make progress quite as quickly as I did last time considering how comparatively limited my free time is these days. After pruning some games I didn't feel needed to be completed from my Unfinished list, I've ended up with a still relatively sizable list of 39 games, the vast majority of which are relatively lengthy RPGs. If I wanted to pad my statistics a little bit, I'd go ahead and tackle Catherine and Limbo after I'm done with Lunar 2, but we'll see if I end up being in the mood for that.
Some of the games on the list are difficult for me to play at the moment. My PS2 is broken and PS2 emulation has thus far been relatively unreliable. I'd really like to pick up on games like Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga and La Pucelle: Tactics, but it can be a pain to get them to work correctly. PSP games have similar issues, although I did manage to play all the way through the remake of the original Persona game on a PSP emulator. I haven't had similar luck with Persona 2: Innocent Sin, unfortunately.
It might be smartest for me to focus on PlayStation games for now as there are a few games left for me to finish there and I feel like I could probably be in the mood to play any of them. After Lunar 2, I could pick back up on Vagrant Story, Vandal Hearts, Front Mission 3, or Tales of Destiny. I think these are all pretty decent games that deserve to be completed. There are a few other PS1 games that I wouldn't mind finishing that are not currently on this list as well, like Breath of Fire III, but I'm going to try avoiding that until I've finished other games that are higher priority.
Clearing out my backlog doesn't really accomplish anything meaningful, but I think it would satisfy some of my obsessive tendencies while also giving me quite a bit to write about. Still, this stuff is really time consuming. It took me an extremely long time to get through Super Robot Wars: Alpha Gaiden and some of these games are likely even longer than that. I'm thinking of Front Mission 3 in particular. I think there's a decent chance I finish or come very close to finishing Lunar 2 tomorrow night, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. I do have this habit of getting distracted.
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