Sometimes you want to go where you’ve been before. Whether
that’s an old school, work place, or song is completely up to you. Where you
want to be may also be somewhere you don’t really expect; the smells that hit
you when someone is cooking a dish you hadn’t had in years. Today we aren’t
fighting anything. We’re curling up in a nice warm blanket made of spheres and
forced, horrible laughing. Take it easy.
Final Fantasy X hit
Playstation 2 in 2001 and quickly drew in a huge audience. Of course I had been
into the series since the 16-bit era because I’m cool like that. These gorgeous
graphics, easy to use battle system, and fully voiced characters there was a
whole new layer to Final Fantasy we hadn’t seen before. I’m not here to talk
about that. This game is pure “put your brain on hold and let’s go” from start
to finish and it’s on the Vita. Pick it up and go. Suspend the game when you
need to. Plug in headphones to save others from the Tidus laugh and Rikku –isms.
Every One Wins!
Now imagine sitting on a couch under a warm blanket racking
up sphere levels and plugging them into the Sphere Grid for hours. Trans-Atlantic
flight? What else are you going to do after watching two movies, sleeping for
hours and still having a few hours left until you hit your destination? The
game is relatively easy and has plenty of grind based trophies and that’s not a
bad thing. Have I gotten all of the celestial weapons? I didn’t spend all the
time required to do that a decade and a half ago when it first dropped. Let it
go and do whatever you want to accomplish in the game. Mac N Cheese keeps
really well and still tastes great when you come back to it.
Other games scratch this itch as well. Any kind of tactical,
scenario based game is wonderful to come back to. X-COM, Civilization, and Master of Orion (not 3…) are games that
I install on every computer I own and load up for an hour fix. I wasn’t
expecting to find Final Fantasy X the
kind of comfort food that it turned out to be, and I think I’m enjoying it more
than the first time I played it.
Great. I’ll be back in an hour or so after a
couple of missions in X-COM.
