neurological dryer lint

the flash, indeed.

i had plenty of time to fire up pokemon this weekend - after getting knocked out during poker on saturday night (a picture from which, displayed above, showed up in my inbox mysteriously at midnight); while waiting for people to show up at walt's; and while generally just sitting around. this was the case last night after a stunning sopranos - where, after about seven hours into the game, i hit a wall and found myself rendered totally uninterested.

at its core the game is a very simple RPG, reduced to a complexity manageable by a six year old... you have a party (your little dudes), each has skills with limited uses, experience points, hit points, and you can buy items and heal yourself anytime for free. so in that sense it's about at the level my patience can tolerate; unfortunately it's also very repetitive. i had a few macked-out pokemon in my crew, and i could lay waste to pretty much anyone i fought, but in spite of that i finally succumbed to the condition that prevents me from enjoying nearly any RPG anymore - leveling up.

specifically: i have a hard time wandering around in the same 8x8 square, waiting for a random attack to occur, fighting mobs of enemies, just to build up my characters in preparation for the upcoming plot point. this was the reason i recently bailed on FF3 on the DS - spend two minutes on the storyline, half an hour walking around trying to get enough money and experience to get your party ready for the next big element of the storyline, go through that for a few more minutes, spend another half an hour building experience... it's just not entertaining.

tack onto that the hopeless situation you put yourself in if you build up the wrong skills or buy the wrong weapons, and get to a place in the story you can't get past, and you have to start over... ugh. how is that appealing to anyone?

what works better (for me) is the KOTOR or zelda setup where your stats increase along with the story automatically, so you're never stuck and things flow a little more smoothly.

i have no idea how i managed to play through all three final fantasy legend titles back in the day. i guess i was a little more patient when i was eleven years old? or maybe the concrete of my likes and dislikes wasn't as solid as it is today.