On Collecting Video Game Series

This is an idea I got from a conversation I had with my brother last time I had a chance to spend some time with him.

The general gist of this conversation was that we, as a species, have this way of collecting things in a series or group, and there's some sort of psychology to it. This can apply to just about anything, from rocks to socks to books to video games.

The example for that last thing he used was the Final Fantasy series, asking if I still had the ones we, or later on, he bought when we were kids. I said yes, but I never finished any of the more recent ones because the eighth installment in particular put me off that sort of thing. I get more into that in the Text Play I did of the game a few years back now.

The whole thing got me to thinking about my gaming life and experiences, especially since high school. It's kind of an interesting thing, and will hopefully make for good reading. At the very least, it'll give me a chance to get some thoughts out there that I didn't have much chance to at the time.

Even though the conversation moved on to other topics rather quickly, it did get me to thinking about my life as a gamer since high school, and given the chance, I might have told more stories about it then, and I'll be talking a little bit about them here.

See, since I got out of high school in 1996, I've been trying to at least cut back on the amount of gaming I've been doing. I'm not sure if it's good news or not, but I've had at least some succes to that end over the years.

There will be four distinct eras I'll be talking about here, since things have changed over time, roughly every five years between 1996 and 2010.

The first of these five-year spans started in the fall of 1996, when I went off to college for the first time, where I was supposed to be studying to do this whole writing thing professionally, as a newspaper reporter. That was in part because I never really gave up on gaming, even then. Sure, the first couple years, especially, most or all of what could have been called “my share” of the gaming stuff was in storage at my parents' house while I was at school in another city, and what little I did spend on the subject from the middle of 1998 to 2001 was aimed more at continuing to play the games I already had rather than getting new stuff.

During this time, my brother was still at home the first two years I was at college, still getting new systems and games. I know he got a Playstation when it first came out specifically for Final Fantasy 7 because I remember playing it on weekends when I was home myself. As he tells it, and as I would find out for myself later, he wound up getting the next two games in the series and a few others for the system in the course of the next couple years, even when he was starting college himself.

Aside from FF7, I didn't get much or any chance to play any of them until a few years later, on account of still being at a different school until 2001. Part of the reason things didn't work out so well for me is because I was still playing NES and SNES games in my dorm room when I should have been studying and getting out more instead. It wasn't a good choice, to be sure, but it's the one I made, and I've been trying to live with that as best I can since.

2001 was kind of a year of change for me, as a person. My time as a full-time student at that first school came to an end when the fall semester of 2000 ended, and I spent most of the next year trying to find work that was somehow related to what I'd been going to school for. Even though that didn't exactly work out as intended, either, there was a period of time when I had what might be called a “more professional” job than what I've wound up with since. I'm sure I did more gaming than I probably should have that year, too, but I more remember the job hunt and the 9/11 attack than just about anything else.

This was more or less the same time my brother started taking his higher education as seriously as I probably should have been the whole time this year and left all the console gaming stuff to me. For most of the year, it wasn't much of a factor for either of us, though moreso for me. At the time, I was busy looking for work, or taking one last class at my first school and graduating with what they called a Liberal Studies degree, which I guess is a half step above a Gen Ed degree. I can't say it's been much of a help in terms of career, but at least I've technically got a four-year degree.

Not long after that, in early 2002, I found myself back at the food service job I've had since then. I'm not going to badmouth it too much. It's been fairly consistent work, and largely full-time, more or less, in the years since. As far as the gaming stuff I was doing in this part of my life, I still wasn't really buying anything new, per se. It was more like the status quo from the four or five previous years, where most of what I spent on gaming was on maintaining my ability to play what I already had, which now included the Playstation games I'd kind of “inherited” or “adopted” from my brother.

Around this time, I also started on an associates' degree in medical transcription at one of the local community college while I was living with my parents.. That worked out a little better, on account of I wasn't doing as much gaming as I might have been doing between 1996 and 2001, simply for lack of time between the classes, a more-or-less full time job, and the responsibilities I had at home. By the time I was done with my coursework there, I'd managed to get a degree that was actually in something and even a little field experience.

Admittedly, I still somehow managed to make more time for gaming than I probably should have, because of something I've mentioned in the Text Play of Final Fantasy 9 that I'm working on as I write this. I'm at a point in the game now that I've only made it to once before, and I'm pretty sure this is when I did it. Part of the reason I put the game aside at the time is that it was getting towards the end of this part of my life, and things would be changing again.

I'd have to find my diploma from the associates' degree again to be sure, but as it stands, I'm inclined to think my actual graduation date on that was 2005. It might have been 2006, but I can't remember exactly when I finished the required coursework for that.

Either way, by spring of 2006, I had moved into the apartment I've been in since. I was still keeping gaming on kind of a downlow, because the first few months, especially, I was looking for one of those supposedly more professional jobs in the field I'd just gotten a degree in. I'll admit that around this time, I did start doing more gaming again, mostly on account of the fact that I was starting to get it into my head that I was probably going to be in food sevice for long enough to call it an actual career.

During this period, I actually wound up with two new, or at least newer, systems after having avoided them for the better part of a decade. I didn't exactly go out looking for them, mind you. They came to me more by chance than anything. There was a contest at my day job that I somehow won without realizing I'd been entered, and wound up with a Nintendo Wii as a result. It's been an OK system since 2006 or whenever it was I got it, but the selection of games really didn't interest me that much, so I probably would have passed on it had it not been for the contest.

Within the next year or so, I also got a PlayStation 2 off an Internet buddy who needed some cash, and I decided to be a sport and buy it from him. I might actually have gone out of my way to pick one of these up at some point, had circumstances and reality been a little different. There were at least a couple Final Fantasy games that came out for the system, the tenth and eleventh in the series, I think. I was still enjoying the seventh and ninth installments, at least, and there was at least one moment where I might have picked up number 10 second-hand as well. I remember it well because it was a moment I liken to what the character Worf must have been going through in an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation called Parallels. The story was that Worf was coming back to the ship from leave or something and wound up falling into one of the various and sundry singularities that these shows are known for, and as a result, would shift between quantum realities seemingly at random. I'll leave the reader to find out the details of the episode because I need to move on here. In my case, I remember standing at the rack in the gaming store, with the disk in my hand and considering the decision like it was way more important than something like that should be. It was kind of like, at least for that one moment, the entire course of my life was going to be altered by the decision of weather I was going to buy and play a stupid video game or not. I sometimes reflect on the situation and wonder what would really have happened if I'd bought the damned thing instead of putting it back, and in a lot of cases, I realize that the biggest difference is that I'd probably have written that last bit as “...if I'd put the damned thing back instead of buying it” instead.

Now, because this was at least ten years ago as of the time I'm writing this, my memory of exactly when this happened is sketchy at best. I'd wager it was sometime between 2009 and 2011, but regardless, it was pretty near the beginning of the Angry Reviewer era on YouTube, and there were several that I followed, including one who went by the Spoony One, who had picked up his fame from being one of the first, if not the first, to come out and just say what quite a lot of us, at least in North America, were feeling about Final Fantasy 8: it actually kind of sucked. At the time I was considering buying FF10, I think he may have recently started a review of the game, making it clear from the start that his conclusion was going to be pretty similar to the one for Eight.

From there, I think we're into what I'm calling my “Present Day” era of being a gamer. Over the course of the last ten years or so, things really haven't been that much different from what they had been since 2001, really. Even then, I'd been adding additional titles and items to my collection. They'd usually been along the lines of “Why the hell not?” purchases when I'd happened into the second-hand gaming store while I was in the area for whatever reason. That's how I came into possession of the Final Fantasy Origins and Final Fantasy Chronicles collections, for example.

The one big difference is that for the first time since I got out of high school, I was psyched to get a new-release game. There was a Ghostbusters game that came out in 2009 that had all the original cast members from the two 1980s movies voicing their in-game characters, and I'm glad to have supported it by picking up a copy. The one big regret I have about it reveals one of the reasons I'm not so much into modern gaming. This ties into what I was saying before about having both a PlayStation 2 and a Nintendo Wii. Both were still the current generation at the time, though it was more or less the same time that the next systems from both Sony and Nintendo were at least set to come out

An important thing to know here is that the PS2 still used traditional controllers while the Wii was one of the first to use motion-sensitive controllers. I got the PS2 version of the 2009 Ghostbusters game because my preference was, and still is, really for traditional controllers. I never really got into the game at the time because my experience was that it seemed better suited suited for the Wii's motion controllers. I'm pretty sure sure I've got it in my collection, so I should probably give it another shot to see if my opinion has changed, and maybe look into the Wii version as well.

A more recent change on that front has been the introduction of Nintendo's latest system, the Switch. This is another first for my post-high-school gaming career. I'm actually considering buying a Switch because there are at least two games for it that I'd kind of like to try. One is called Trials of Mana, which is the latest entry, I think, in the Mana series, which I've enjoyed since the first SNES title, Secret of Mana. There's also one called Animal Crossing: New Horizons that looks pretty good, from what I've seen so far. I don't know if I'll actually make any of this happen, but the desire is there all the same.

I think in the end, that may have been what my brother was talking about. We humans have this odd way of wanting things in a series or whatever more for the sake of having sets of like items than anything. For example, Final Fantasy 8 was not an especially good game, but I have it in my collection anyway. Most of what I've heard about the games that have come out since the ninth has not been especially good until number fifteen came out. The new Mana game I mentioned above might not be so great either, but I'd still like to at least give it a shot.

I'm not sure if I'll manage to make any of that happen, of course, but the desire is at leas there, for good or ill. We'll eventually get a chance to see what happens when things finally start to head back towards more familiar territory.

Here's to wanting groups of things and maybe even getting some of them.