Summoning

Last night, after much hemming and hawing, I finally began to play Shin Megami Tensei IV. Why the long wait since I mentioned starting it July? Mostly because I'm an idiot, apparently. I only wanted to play through the introduction and found myself, four hours later, finally tearing myself away from it because the 3DS battery was giving me the blinking red Morse code of "turn it off and go to bed." Even now, several hours removed, I want to run right over to my handheld wonder machine and get back to demon fusing.

That's not a feeling I get very often anymore. I find that it's probably because I'm getting older and have had enough video game experiences at this point that very little surprises me. So why the strange excitement to play (and, therefore, expound upon) SMTIV? Maybe I'm like Don Draper and only like the beginnings of things (in that non-infidelity sort of way), I guess. Everyone likes new games that they just start, I suppose. But when I think about it, and remember my mindset last night, it seems as though this new(ish) 3DS JRPG is scratching an itch that I've been having for months now.

Myself, I'm something of a lapsed JRPG apologist. For years I would defend them to anyone whom would listen, and if you took a peak at my library of games, you'll probably find a 60/40 ratio of this specific genre vs. a mishmash of everything else. But the vast majority of them are from the PS1-PS2 era --something of an Eastern role playing Age of Fire. It represented the better part of 10 years of my life where I was learning how to clearly identify the aspects of what made video games good and bad. Nostalgia aside, the trajectory of qualities I appreciated in the games within the genre has followed a slow, steady descent that's basically hit a subbasement sewer system in this current generation. Am I saying that gameplay for a JRPG these days is necessarily bad? No, I enjoyed playing Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy X-2 on the merits of their combat alone. But as the last 10-15 years have gone by, the writing commonly found in these games began to bottom out, and as I get older, I cannot, in any way, justify sinking the time required to play one of them with a story that basically talks down to me. I have felt this way since finishing Final Fantasy XII; not the best, or even most compelling plot in the series, but it was one told in such a way that my intelligence and good taste weren't insulted. Since then, it's been a rapidly drying sea of pandering idiocy.

2009, then, was the year that I basically threw in the towel. BioWare released Dragon Age: Origins, which finally gave me the interactive storytelling I never knew I wanted, and Atlus published FromSoft's Demon's Souls --perhaps my favorite game of this generation-- that stripped away what had felt like unnecessary bullshit for years. Both were meaty, satisfying experiences from different sides of the RPG continuum that, essentially, ruined the traditional Dragon Quest/ Final Fantasy need that fueled not only a large chunk of my video game buying, but almost embarrassingly bigger chunks of my free time.

Last night, as I am wont to do around this time of year, I had a serious jones to play some Final Fantasy XII, but I can't; my (second) backward-compatible PlayStation 3 died on me about a year ago, and I'm stuck looking at around 50 games that are basically doing me as much good as a pet rock. Because I couldn't think of anything else to do with myself, in went SMTIV, and back came the memories. It was a tidal wave that I don't want to stop, and at this point, my expectations for the rest of the game are so high that it can only possibly let me down.

But it's only been about 4 hours, so who knows? Either way, I'm more excited to find out than I have been in years.