February 17, 2004

• Beyond Final Fantasy

  
  

  or Great-Grandma’s Hemi-Semi-Demi-Great
  Dream Guide to Video RPGs

  
  

  Doug says there are lots of young people on the forums he frequents who are more obsessive about Disgaea than I am.  Maybe so, but I’m obsessive enough for me.  More than obsessive enough, apparently, for Doug too.  He teases me about the size of my “party”, my army, the Demon Horde as I lovingly call my ragtag troops.  Doug also made a half-amused, half-disgusted non-verbal grunting comment when he noticed that my game clock had gone to 999 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds, and stopped.  I didn’t need words.  I knew what he was saying.

  
  

  I was just as obsessive, or more so, about Final Fantasy X, even though its game clock stopped at 500 hours.  I’d played FFVII and FFVIII a lot, too, in their turn. 

  
  

  I had so much fun with FFX (and, incidentally or not, fell absolutely in love with the voice actor playing Auron) and its weapon-modification system, that I battled the biggest baddest fiends in the Monster Arena over and over again to get the items I needed to modify my mages’ staves and power them up so that I could use them to mug the ultimate boss, Nemesis, to death… over and over again (and getting still more items in the process…). 

  
  

  It was in FFX, in the Sphere Grid, that I first began to dream-game.  I’d wake from one of those dreams frustrated at first because the actions I was taking were suddenly not working.  Then I’d realize I didn’t have a controller in my hands.  Gaming without the controller only works in dreams, I’ve found.  Now, I’m dream-gaming in Disgaea, on the geo-panel puzzles.  Why I only dream about the Sphere Grid and Geo Panels, I don’t know, but I never seem to dream the regular game battle sequences.

  
  

  I mentioned my gaming during the FFX obsession to an Australian friend on one of the fibromyalgia forums, and she told me a friend of hers had just started a new gaming BBS site.  She sent me the URL and I checked it out.  The kids there, all young males, were in a discussion of how to beat Nemesis, and I told them how I did it.  For my efforts, I got tagged the “FFX Guru” and one of them offered to create a graphic signature for me.  I sent him the URL for a pic of me holding my first grandchild.  He took the image of me from that shot and put it in Auron’s arms–the image above.

  
  

  Believe me, it had already crossed my mind that falling in love with some anime dude who was undead to begin with was ludicrous.  The ultimate ludicrosity of it all really dawned on me when I saw that image.  It shook me away from the PS2 for a while, and away from the gaming forums even still.  Something about being the game guru for a bunch of teenage Ozzie boys was too much for this Alaskan great-grandmama.  I’ve decided to indulge this vice more privately now.

  
  

  But seriously, I bless Sony and Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) and Atlus for those games and the console to play them on.  They make my “downtime”, the endless-seeming days of my periodic ME/CFIDS exacerbations, not just bearable, but even sometimes enjoyable.  The few minutes at this keyboard yesterday that it took me to write the “Beans” blog left my neck and shoulders in fiery pain the rest of the day.  Then I spent the rest of my evening in Disgaea with my cute cartoony Horde of demons, got out of myself and forgot, until I reached out for something or turned my head, the pain.

  
  

  A night of sleep made the pain go away, and it hasn’t come back from today’s keyboarding, so that’s okay now.  Doug has just gone to bed and Greyfox isn’t up yet.  The sun is coming up–we’ve just passed the nine-hour-day landmark, well on the way toward that old midnight sun–and I’m going to get some breakfast and then settle down in Couch Potato Heaven until it’s time to get ready to leave for town.  Remember, kiddies, when you’re awake, you need the controller.   Maybe I’ll get around to writing down my dream-gaming tips another day.

  

  • 1:17 pm
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