I Haz A Sad

Not the kind you might think, of course, which is a good thing.  Better yet, a little free-form writing will more than likely help me get through.

And now that I think about it, words like "sad" and "depressed" don't really describe what's going on in my head right now.  They could very well be part of it, sure, but they don't cover it entirely.  If we throw in "bored" and "lonely", things do get a little more accurate.  And I suppose we may as well add in a healthy dose of "nostalgic", as well.

What brought all this on tonight was finally deciding to take a half hour to actually watch a video that YouTube had been recommending to me for quite some time, called "Complete History of Final Fantasy", embedded here:


 Basically, it's an in-brief history of the first twelve or so Final Fantasy games.  I always start to pine for my younger days a little bit when I watch things like this, simply because I spent far too many happy hours playing the games in this series as they were released here in North America.  Or, at least that's how it was through the first nine.  And even that's not entirely accurate, because the "real" second, third, and fifth titles in the series were never officially released here until they were put into compilation titles for the Playstation well after the fact.  To my knowledge, Final Fantasy 3 has not yet seen an official release over here.

A good deal of these conflicting emotions comes from the fact that there's a part of me that would just love to go back and experience all these cool things for the first time again that is directly and equally conflicted with a part of me that would just as much love to go back and keep 15-year-old me from ever picking up that controller for the first time, because I know that all those happy hours rank high amongst the reasons I'm in the situation I'm in at the moment.

Even though the first game in the series got a North American release, I played Final Fantasy 4 first.  I say a little bit more about it in this 2008 piece I put on DeviantART and should probably re-post here.

A funny thing is that while Final Fantasy 4 and FF6 make me nostalgic for high school, the seventh and eight installments make me feel the same way about my early college career, even though I never really had decent shots at either of those games or the ninth until a few years after that, when my little brother got out of gaming, for the most part, and let me have his Playstation when he finally started taking his own higher education seriously.

Thing is, this is where the part of me that realized I was spending too much time gaming started to develop.  Granted, I was still young enough for youthful naivete to make me think I could get away with being that stupid and unfocused with my time, but I must admit, I still knew, deep down, that I was probably hurting myself in the long run.

And like I said in my post on the 14th, I really should get to work on fixing things.  Having something of a plan for when I'm not at work does make that a little easier.  The smart thing for me to do right now would probably be to go to bed so I can have a little more rest for the day ahead.  Thing is, though, I think I'm going to act like the idiot 23-year-old I was when Final Fantasy IX came out and go play video games for a little while before then.

Who knows, it might even be a Final Fantasy game...