To all the PS2 games I’ve ditched before …

To all the games I’ve ditched before,
That now sit on my closet floor,
Was sad to move along,
I dedicate this song,
To all the games I’ve ditched before.

So, my time with the PS2 has left a string of ignored games behind me.  Some of them, I never even started.  Some of them I started, liked, and then dropped for some reason.   Allow me, then, to walk down memory lane and detail my biggest regrets:

Ah, Fatal Frame 2.  I played your older sibling and, well, was in love.  We went all the way.  And that should have happened with you, too, as you were so much like your sibling and yet had even more.  We had good times, you and I.  But, then, you decided to test me.  You took the camera away and made me run through your ghost infested halls armed with only my wits.  And that frightened me, both in the fun sense that you crafted so well and in the unfun sense of “I’m going to die repeatedly doing this and have to backtrack from an older save point many, many times.”  And I just couldn’t face that, even when I managed to replace my wits with a walkthrough so that I was no longer unarmed.  So, I had to move on.  Someday, I may return when I gain courage or knowledge, but for now, you sit on my closet self.

Fatal Frame 3, you linked back to both of your siblings, and promised to tie it all up into a neat package.  I should have liked you.  I should have played you more.  But you didn’t grab me out of the box and, well, my wandering eye kicked in and you were left behind.  That I had to turn to the Internet to understand you in the first sequence didn’t help either; I’d rather not have to keep my computer running to play a PS2 game.  But that might be just that I couldn’t see the obvious.  Anyway, you’re still on my mind, but you aren’t in my PS2.

Ever Grace, you were the first.  I bought you with the console just to see what it could do, and you were fun.  I had the time to play you, and you’ve been around longer than anything else.  And yet, I think I only explored a small part of who you were.  Maybe I was confused about where to go and what to do, and maybe I could have saved you if I’d had a walkthrough to follow.  But, my eye wandered and you were left behind.

.hack, .hack, .hack.  Were you one game with four episodes, or four games?  However it stacks up, I think I might have gotten through the third game, or at least part way through it, before simply stopping.  There’s no real reason for why I just stopped; I did enjoy the game and think I wasn’t stuck.  Maybe I’d just seen it all too many times before; maybe I needed something fresh and new that you couldn’t provide.  Anyway, I thank you for the extra anime disks and for getting me into .hack//Sign, and hope that we can both move on.

Suikoden V, in terms of characters and personalities, you’re a game that I should have wanted to finish, in the same vein as I did finish Suikoden III.  While you didn’t have the tri-view system that drew me to S3, you also had one of my favourite characters in pretty much anything I’ve ever played.  And then my normal walkthrough reading revealed what happens to that character if I didn’t get all the stars.  And then I found out how hard getting all the stars was going to be.  And I didn’t want you to depress me but I didn’t want you to make me have to play the game reading a FAQ the whole way.  I should finish you … but, well, that might never happen.

Silent Hill 2 … you had the potential to be delightfully creepy, and I got a fair ways in you, but at the end of it all just dropped you.  And that meant that I strung along Silent Hill 3, and never actually played it.  I hope the same doesn’t happen to Shattered Memories, but it’s looking that way.

Yu-gi-oh, Duelists of the Roses … I didn’t finish Forbidden Memories because, while it was fun, it focused too much on fusions and so I would have had to play with a massive text file open just to remember them all.  You kept that and added in special abilities and moving around.  Being more complicated than a fun game that I quit because it was a bit too complicated for casual gaming can never win my heart.  I still yearn for the simple fun you and your sibling can provide, but don’t have enough ink to print all that out.

Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks … you never made it out of the shrink wrap.  Even if supposedly you messed up the lore, I had to have thought that you might have been fun to buy you, so why did I never open you up and take you out for a spin?

Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts: Covenant, you got dropped for the same reason:  I really enjoyed you, but you had a long, in-depth story.  This is good; I like long and in-depth stories.  But it just gave me too much time for my wandering eye to kick in, and for me to get distracted by a new shiny.  And by the time I worked my way back to you, I’d forgotten what I was doing.  And when I restarted, new shinies dragged me away again, and you seemed more irritating than I remembered.  You’re on my call-up list, but that list is pretty long.

And here are some of the rest that I regret not playing: Disgaea 2, Suikoden Tactics, Haunting Ground, Clocktower 3, Mana Khemia, Growlanser Generations, Summoner, Obscure.  And there are a number of others.

Next up, my apology to the PC games that I’ve loved and left without proper closure.