Earlier this month, I finally finished Trails In The Sky 1st Chapter, the JRPG remake I’ve been plugging away at for, well, a long time. This is notable in part because if you play a game in this kind of piecemeal, episodic fashion, it’s liable to transform into such a fixture of your life that you won’t really be sure what to do with yourself afterward. But also because I had already microdosed “afterward” by putting Trails down for several weeks. This was not (entirely) intentional.
It is not uncommon, of course, for people to prolong their experience with a game, book, TV show, or other piece of media they enjoy by taking a brief (or long, or permanent) break just before the conclusion. When I was a kid, I did that with multiple Final Fantasies, as well as Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Not so, much more recently, with Trails. Instead, on an otherwise leisurely weekend afternoon in April, I made it to what the game signposted—to an almost comical degree—as the final confrontation. It would be a bittersweet moment, I thought, considering what the game had come to mean to me, but also I was ready. I’d seen and done pretty much everything. All available meat had melted in my mouth; I was chewing on a ragged, used-up bone.
So I locked in for what I thought would be a climactic showdown, and for the most part, it was. Heroes strengthened their bonds, villains revealed their true intentions—all that good stuff. Then the boss reached its last stage. Initially, this did not strike me as a serious issue. I was overleveled, and I had figured out which stats and spells basically broke the battle system’s turn order dozens of hours prior. But this boss had some heavy artillery up its sleeve—including an attack with the word “genocide” literally in its name—and so what I assumed would be a victory lap turned into something much more touch and go.
After around 50 minutes of cursing and dejectedly sighing “it’s over,” only to repeatedly pull myself back from the brink, I had just one character left on his feet, and I realized that the boss (and its cronies) would down him in two turns. He could not reach other party members to revive them. So I had just one option left: Deal enough damage to the boss to win the fight before the boss could do the same to me. And man, I got so close. Basically, if I’d stayed alive for another turn, I would’ve won. But I didn’t. Irritated on account of the fact that I sure felt like I’d put in enough effort to earn a win by that point, I put my Lenovo Legion Go S down and resolved to have a nice evening out with friends despite my humiliating failure.
The next day, I looked in the handheld’s direction and quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t feel like committing to the full fight again. The day after, same thing. A few days later, same. This cycle repeated for somewhere in the ballpark of a month. Because I put my Legion Go S into sleep mode so I wouldn’t have to fight the boss’ earlier forms again, I didn’t play anything on it—my main gaming console these days—for the whole intermission. Trails’ final boss transformed into an oft-put-off chore, an albatross hanging around the neck of my ability to play video games.
This compounded on itself. After a few weeks, I started to fear that I’d grown rusty, meaning that I’d definitely lose again on my next attempt, wasting even more time. So I’d finish work or what have you, decide that there simply weren’t enough hours in the evening, and then sit in front of the TV and scroll on my phone for way more hours than beating Trails’ final boss—even if I’d lost once or twice—would have taken.
The worst part is, I was actually pretty sure I understood what I did incorrectly on my first attempt. So when, around a month after this very silly psychodrama began, I finally decided I’d had enough and picked up the game again, I swerved past a few hair-raising moments and cruised to a relatively straightforward victory. What followed was excellent: heartfelt culminations of multiple character arcs plus a final, wild twist that perfectly set up the next installment in the series. As the credits rolled, I was left tearfully pondering two questions: 1) [SPOILERS]? And 2) Why did I wait so long?
On a rational level, I know the answer: There is something uniquely discouraging about grasping at the outer edges of victory, only to have it unceremoniously snatched away. As far as I was concerned, I’d done enough, and I felt insulted that the game was forcing me to do it again. Moreover, I can see how real-life obligations and perceived constraints surrounding them led me to boot a beloved game’s final moments off my priority list for more than a month—at the expense of other games, no less. It all makes sense. But man, I feel like a colossal idiot about it. Just dumb as rocks.
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