Breaking the Habit

A little less than a year ago, so during the Christmas holidays, I was thinking about all the games I had played that year. I realized that since just about every one of them was on the 360, which keeps track of not just when you last played them but when each Achievement was unlocked, I could fairly accurately construct a list of every game I played. This was also the year I got a GameFly subscription, so between the two sources I compiled a list of 63 games I played in 2008, 53 of which I finished, and 5 which I deemed unable to finish such as Warhammer Online. After showing Slevin the list, he constructed a list of his own. Upon further discussion we realized we could probably do the same thing for 2007. I did so and saw I had played significantly less games that year, only 25 that year, 20 of which I finished. There's actually a few reasons I played so few games in 2007, but I'd rather not get into them.

Since I was making this list at the end of the year, I naturally saw the increasing pattern and thought I could best 2008 in 2009. I wanted to finish more than 53 games, the goal I vaguely thought about was 60, but I would be content with anything over 53. As of now I'm at 48 and am quite confident I'll pass 53, but most likely won't hit the 60 I was originally on track for.

So now that I've had you read all that back story, let me get to the point. The combination of a GameFly account, which is most worthwhile when you beat games rapidly, and my goal to finish a fairly exorbitant amount of games has resulted in me plowing through about a game a week. That's fine, I have no problem with playing that much if I can find the time, but it also meant that any game I had a decent amount of time invested in had to be finished. I hated the idea of spending 5 or 10 hours on a game and not being able to add it to my finished list for any number of reasons. This of course led me to finish some games I thoroughly did not enjoy, such as Majora's Mask or Velvet Assassin.

Until one game finally made me realize how ludicrous this had all become. I have spent around 40 hours playing this game, and am on the final boss. I can't beat him without several hours of grinding, either leveling my current party or leveling a healer class I never needed until now to catch up to my current party. I can't do this very easily in the final dungeon without straying ridiculously far from a save crystal, and the game has a tendency to freeze on my Xbox. This basically makes grinding impossible and I think I'm finally willing to accept that I can't beat this game.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the game is absolute crap. I knew it wasn't for me early on, and discovered after about a third of the way through that it wasn't going to get any better. The story continued to get more and more ridiculous and incoherent while the pacing got more and more grueling. It pretty much turned into a few hour dungeon crawl followed by almost an hour of nonsensical plot revealing cutscenes with some of the worst dialogue and acting I've ever seen.

I know this just sounds dumb, but I've seriously been blindly determined enough (or maybe just stupid enough) to play games I've despised for several hours all year long. It's not as bad as it sounds, because I generally won't play a game unless I know I will like it, but I still have probably spent at least 50 hours playing crap. 80% of which was probably this game alone.

This raised an interesting question for me however. I've always been of the opinion that a game, book, movie or whatever should be judged as a whole. It's served me well in the past with games like Mass Effect and The Darkness. I didn't really like either game going in, but ended up really enjoying them by the end. Same with a few books, Dune in particular, which is now one of my favorite science fiction books ever. It starts off quite slow, but it's quite necessary and completely worth it in the end.

So where do I draw the line? The game that I decided not to finish was an easy decision because I knew pretty early on it was only going to get worse and sure enough, it did. I'm on the final boss and I can safely say I have no idea what's going on and no huge amount of boring cutscenes after the fight will make it any better, but what about the games like Mass Effect? With my new willingness to quit games when I don't like them I could easily quit potentially great games in disgust before I ever really figure them out, but if I want to quit the game in disgust, how can it possibly be worth finishing? Maybe disgust is too harsh a word, Mass Effect was never that bad, I just thought the combat was clumsy and the story wasn't terribly engaging, but by the end I really enjoyed both. Star Ocean 4 on the other hand, the previously mentioned game that I arbitrarily left nameless until now, was freaking terrible and it was quite obvious it wasn't going to get any better.

So I guess I should thank Tri-Ace for creating a game I hated so much that it broke my habit of finishing every game I start. Or maybe I should thank Microsoft for making their early Xbox 360's so shoddy that I can't play the shitty game for more than an hour without it freezing. I might have actually tried grinding in an attempt to beat the final boss if it weren't for the game freezing far more frequently than it's inconveniently placed save crystals.

Either way, it's crappy design that made this all possible, which I find fairly amusing.