Semantic Nonsense: Not new year’s resolutions supplemental

While I previously called out Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 Golden for the sake of getting to the Persona 4 Arena stream, they aren’t the only games I wanted to clean up this year. I’ll mention the rest now in the hopes that by letting you know about them, I’ll feel too guilty to not play them.

First, I want to advance far enough in Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball to make sure I don’t get locked out of the rest of the story, such as it is, because I didn’t work my way through the remaining DLC.

Next, I have a couple of games I started before the pandemic that likewise need finishing. The Longest 5 Minutes shouldn’t take much more to polish off, but Digimon World: Next Order I have completely lost my rhythm to, and I’ll have to ease back into it. While I still have a ways to go in Digimon, both of these games combined might equal to half the time time investment in either of the Personas. Personae?

I have no intention of streaming any of the games listed so far, so I should name drop a few games I DO want to stream this year. Looking back at my streaming history, we can break it down into some particular trends.

One game that should tick a few boxes is Chasm. It’s a Metroidvania, randomized, quirky indie title that needs to be cleared from my backlog. I know it’s hard to imagine that there are any more trends to be taken care off after that, but the show must go on.

Handling both retro titles and “play random games from a miniconsole collection” streams will be Atari 50, but you already knew that as it is coming this Saturday. And I’ve likewise made no secret that 3D Dot Game Heroes will be this year’s 2D Zelda clone of choice.

While I was considering doing back-to-back years with Four Job Fiestas, I decided to boot that into 2024 (even though the jobs have already been selected). We already have a back-to-back follow up this year with the second annual Detroit: Become Button challenge. Furthermore, there are still gaps in the channel’s Final Fantasy series coverage that need filling. As such, I’ve opted to do my first-ever run of Final Fantasy III beyond the 3 or 4 times I played only the first hour of the game.

Finally, I also know for certain that my tradition of defeating previously undefeated Castlevania titles will continue this October with Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. And there is still one more left in my collection after that that needs vanquishing, so we won’t be done with Castlevania Halloweens just yet.

So that’s 11 named games in total that need to be defeated for my first time, which sounds rather ambitious for me to do in one year. But I guess the moral of the story is you can’t meet a goal you haven’t set.

But such a list merely serves to cover up a deeper dread. It stirs up the specter of backlog anxiety.

For all the long RPGs that made the list, there’s others that haven’t. My languishing, half-finished playthrough of 2021’s Game of the Year, Bravely Default II didn’t make the cut. Heck, for 2022’s Game of the Year, Pokemon Legends: Arceus I’m nowhere close to half done.

My save in Dragon Quest VII has been halted ever since a story-mandated change in party composition happened right before a boss everyone had leveled up the wrong vocations for. And that’s also the roadblock to continuing on playing other games in the series, as IV, V, VI and XI sit on my shelf, unused.

Despite Final Fantasy III making the cut, Final Fantasy is almost as bad. I steadily made it to Wall Market in FF7R before a personal tragedy (which was far more personal for someone else for at least a fraction of a second) shortly before the pandemic turned me off to a lot of life’s pleasures for a while. But that was no excuse for previously not getting around to Type-0 and Final Fantasy XV.

Heck, on the subject of half-finished RPGs I intended to completely finish also includes South Park: The Stick of Truth.

I would say the next-most glaring pile in terms of hours to play might be my “I’ll get to it when I get to it” of Zelda games, going as far back as Windwaker. Add on to that Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild

I’m also behind in visual novels. I haven’t touched Ace Attorney 5 and 6, let alone the The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. And as somebody who raves about the Zero Escape series being life-changing, my pre-orderd copy of Zero Time Dilemma remains unplayed.

Beyond that is where things get really stretched. Similar to the odd dichotomy of loving the Persona series while having played too little of it, I’ve played most of the Fire Emblem titles long enough to know I like them, but in so doing have amassed six of them that I never started in earnest. And the same goes for another pile of the Mario RPGs. And Yakuza. And even the Operation Rainfall games.

I sometimes wonder if I simply get interested in too many things. Perhaps my discipline is far too short to be able to pursue everything that catches my eye. Perhaps I’m just getting myself into trouble, setting an unreasonable expectation I couldn’t possibly follow though on.