At the current moment in time, I'm close to the end of two different RPGs on my XBox 360. I'm at the save point before the final dungeon of the indie game Breath of Death VII, while I'm in the final area of Star Ocean: The Last Hope's main plot. I played both games last night in sort of an unfocused manner. In Breath of Death, I completed the final dungeon of the game's third area and then walked to my current location. Instead of tackling this dungeon, I just wandered around outside fighting a few battles before saving the game and moving to The Last Hope.
Considering how gargantuan areas in this game are, I had no hope of finishing it last night. Still, the amount of progress I made has to be considered kind of minimal. I traveled through two reasonably large outdoor areas on the charmingly named Nox Obscurus, reached a save point, decided to call it a night as far as gaming was concerned and watched Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes until deciding to go to bed.
Barring death at a frustrating time (ie: a random encounter a good ways into the dungeon), I would have beaten Breath of Death last night if I'd stayed with it instead of jumping to The Last Hope. But I've noticed a trend over the years in that, regardless of how obsessively I might have been playing a game, I move more slowly as I approach the end. While I'd been using Breath of Death as a side project to play for an hour or so at a time AND had met that requirement when I turned it off last night, I still found myself wondering why I passed up the chance to finish the game then and there...especially since it wasn't like I made major progress in The Last Hope. It was about 90 minutes to two hours with it where I didn't even advance far enough to get to the next 30-minute chunk of cinematic dialogue.
This happens to me a lot. Regardless of how obsessively I might find myself playing a RPG for the majority of the main quest, my progress will nearly always slow down over those final hours. It started with Chrono Trigger. I blew through most of that game very quickly. I'd come home from work and play it until it was time for bed any night I could...until I reached those final bosses. The last one beat me the first time I went up against it and it took a couple weeks before I played the game again. Over the years, I noticed that trend repeating itself with regularity, as for one reason or another, I'd wind up taking some sort of hiatus from a RPG or, at the least, limping to the finish line after blasting through so much of the game at mach speed. So, why do I do this? After much thought (roughly a handful of minutes, at least), I've come up with four possible reasons.
1. The "I don't want this moment to end!" syndrome. RPGs are probably my favorite genre, so it's obvious that I'd find many of those games to be memorable in some way. Maybe it has a great combat system, cool character customizing abilities, a neat story, awesome soundtrack...or something else. For whatever reason, I would be having a great time playing a game and then reality would set in, telling me that I'm only a couple hours from the end. The excitement would fade, only to be replaced by a certain sadness that, when the credits have rolled, things just won't be the same. I could play it again (and have with some of these games), but when you know just how things are going to unwind and what you'll be confronting, it's different. Instead of mentally placing myself in the game and letting myself be absorbed by a world of fantasy, I'm just playing a game.
2. I work for a newspaper. When putting pages together, you have to essentially fill holes on a piece of paper with stories and pictures. Precision is a necessity — if something doesn't work, you have to either find a way to make it work (trim a couple paragraphs off the story, eliminate a photo...or add an additional one). In some ways my work life bleeds over into aspects of my home life. I've noticed that when I sit down to an evening of gaming, I like to have this image in my mind of EXACTLY how that evening will be filled. If something happens to disrupt that, I kind of enter this "Well...what now?" state of confusion. So, if I have four hours allocated to gaming and I beat the game I'm playing two-and-a-half hours into that time, I'll wind up in this state of indecision where I'll be thinking there's not really enough time to start up another game...so I'll wind up just looking through a bunch of titles before shutting things down and spending the rest of the night surfing the net.
Fortunately, only two of these reasons have to do with me possibly being really, really crazy! The other two have more to do with the actual games, themselves. Both concern how, especially considering optional dungeons and side-quests, the RPGs of today are much larger in scope than those old Dragon Warriors of my youth.
3. I'm drowned in excess. Let's look at The Last Hope, for example. There are a ton of item creation/finding side quests that encourage backtracking. You keep getting new rings to dispel magical locks on doors and treasure chests, giving you another reason to repeatedly visit everywhere you've been. There's an optional dungeon you can access while playing the main quest and a couple more that get unlocked afterwards. Oh, and there's also an arena containing enough fights that you could spend HOURS just advancing through its ranks. I've put around 80 hours into this game. No matter how much I may like a game, after a certain number of hours, I will get to the point where I just want to wrap things up, which causes playing it to feel like work, which causes me to put it up for a few days, weeks or (in some cases) months. An interesting aspect of this is just how few post-game optional dungeons or super-challenging bosses I've actually beaten. By the time I get to the credits, I'm ready to move on to something (anything) else, so I wind up with a beaten game that never actually gets COMPLETED. In nearly every case, my attitude is that after I "take a break" from that game, I'll be re-energized and ready to take on the REAL challenges. I don't want to say that NEVER happens, but off the top of my head, I can't think of any games where I did accomplish those optional goals. It's rare enough when I can actually say I made some sort of effort to do so like I recall doing in Star Ocean: The Second Story, Parasite Eve and Vagrant Story. I made it a decent way through the post-game content in those three before losing interest, which is more than I can say about most games.
4. There's not enough to justify that "excess". Once again, let's look at The Last Hope. If you go to the monster collection screen, you'll see that the entire game (mandatory and optional places) contains around 150 monsters. As you play through the game, you'll notice that number might as well be 30 or 40. There are a number of bosses and a small handful of repeating enemy palettes. While more advanced versions of a particular enemy design aren't EXACTLY the same as far as their abilities go, things are close enough that your battle plan usually won't change all that much if you're fighting a kobald on one planet, as compared to the variety that was on the previous one. With The Last Hope having an action-oriented battle system, this gets really noticeable. I was walking around Nox Obscurus and noticing that every single battle I would get into would consist of nothing but upgraded versions of old foes. When you're playing something that can last for a long while (such as the 80+ hours I've put into this one), it can become tiresome to essentially fight the same bats, lizardmen, birds, apes, etc. for however long it takes to beat the game.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say concerning both Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Breath of Death VII...whenever I get around to beating them.
