It's hard for me to think about what to write about FFX--so much has been said about it over the years! And if I'm honest, so many of my thoughts are so tied up in the experience of nostalgia and of playing it when it was new and I was a young teenager. So in lieu of anything massively interesting to say about its mechanics (which I love), or Blitzball (which I love) or the story (which I love) or the characters (whom I love), I'll just relay some anecdotes from my freshman year of high school in the fall of 2002.

The first in-real-life girl I ever felt anything for (I wasn't out yet, not for a long time) and that I knew I felt things for and I were in that girl's bedroom. We had met at the statewide anime convention earlier in the month and only then realized that we were going to be going to the same High School. We were both nervous and both ended up talking about how what we talked about at the convention was how cool Lulu and Yuna were and how annoying we thought Blitzball was. She turned on her PS2 and loaded her save; it was at the Shoopuf landing. I felt my heart flutter as she ran around.

The first time I ever truly had my heart broken was by the dungeon master of the first D&D campaign I ever played in; I was a sophomore and my Wizard's name was Yunalesca.

The first time I was ever stopped for photos by multiple people in an anime convention hallway and had multiple cameras snapping away like the paparazzi was me cosplaying Rikku; I cut my hair so short my mother cried. I was a Junior in high school.

I love Final Fantasy X. It made an impact on me. I think you should play it if you haven't.

I remember a conversation I had at 2am in the con suite at Anime Iowa 2004 about FFX-2. I was cosplaying as Rikku and the other girl I was talking to was cosplaying as Lum.

We started talking because I was chatting with my friends and she came over and told me that I, too, must be as upset at her about “the new final fantasy,”

I didn’t really know what she meant—I LOVED X-2–so we started chatting and ended up smack dab in the middle of what I remember being at the time a raging debate: is this game fun for girls or is it patronizing?

The only online space I exist in where people talk about video games is unlike any other I’ve ever really been in in my whole internet life, and it’s a space where people give genuine credence and recognition to like, fashion games on the DS and whatnot. I cannot stress how unlike the rest of the internet that is, especially back when X-2 was contemporary.

At that time, girls like the Lum cosplayer were aghast at X-2, the word “ditzy” got thrown around, so did the word “embarrassing,” In that time, being a girl who liked video games meant wading into pretty awful places: game stores where they hate and leer at you, online spaces where they hate and leer at you, and games themselves where they hate and leer at characters like you.

To like games as a girl in the early aughts meant you had to learn to deal with never getting to play a game with strong women and you had to learn to deal with men who would make fun of the games that did have strong women.

And some women learned how to deal with those things by demanding nothing be feminine. It was a defense mechanism; our femininity was a curse in nerd spaces, so why embrace that curse?

I get it, and I wish I could remember Lum’s real name—we hugged after the chat and she said she would give X-2 another shot.

I love X-2 very much and I’m glad 16 year old me got to play it.

I don't know what I could possibly say apart from the fact that I stared, mouth agape at so many moments.

This game is just jaw-droppingly cool. It OOZES cool. I am just utterly floored by how cool it is. You know that scene in the Simpsons video game episode where Millhouse turns on Bonestorm and is like, blown away by the game coming from the TV? That's how I felt from the first second this game came on.

Cannot possibly praise this game enough.

I am Cyborg Humanity.
Cyborg Animals.
Cyborg Flowers.
A Cyborg World.

Finally finished a save I had started like 10 months ago which now allows me to put it right here in the ol' Backloggd.

I'm 36 at the time of writing this, and I went to tell y'all younger folks about something called Shareware. Back in the day, we kinda sorta had two different types of Not-The-Full-Game experiences: demos and shareware. A demo back in the day was what a demo is now; a limited, small chunk of the game. And then there was shareware, which was ostensibly the entire game, but you only got to play a portion of it until you paid. Think of it like a sort of Freemium thing that we've got nowadays.

Anywho, to a kid like me--and I would imagine lots of PC gaming kids back in the day--shareware made up the bulk of what we experienced: the first levels of Commander Keen, the first chapter of Doom, the bits of Escape Velocity before you get blown up by a Parrot. You'd get these games from various discs (floppy discs, mind, but sometimes CDs) and just play whatever came your way.

It was the shareware of X-Com that more or less completely changed the way my brain worked.

There's a concept in TTRPGs, particularly in LARP, called "bleed." Bleed more or less refers to the degree to which you like, feel like your character(s), or the degree to which you're fully emotionally invested in them. There are low-bleed players and high-bleed players, and while I don't necessarily think that high or low bleed necessarily equates to something like immersion, I think there is a way that high-bleed folks can feel more attuned to their characters and games.

I've always been an incredibly high-bleed player, not just of TTRPGs, but of video games too. I need to feel a degree of emotional connection in order to even remotely care. This took the form of me talking out loud to myself as a kid "in character" as, say, an X-Wing pilot while playing X-Wing/TIE Fighter, or as Beatrice the Knight hero in HoMM3 or as the squadron commander of a group of hapless alien-fighting morons in X-Com.

Because of my high degree of bleed, I prefer games that are crunchy; I love when a game gives me levers and buttons and knobs to push and press and pull and manage. I love a base building system, I love an economy, I love to customize things and manage things and name things. X-Com gives you control over everything. The first thing you see when you start a new game is the globe--THE WHOLE PLANET! You can put your first base anywhere you want! Then you've got a whole base to build, you've got things to research, individual soldiers with their own stats and inventories to manage, fighter planes to deploy--it's everything. X-Com hands you an entire world that you get to mess with and says, "good luck!" And then it lets you do it all however you want.

It's simply a masterpiece of a game, and is still more or less unparalleled. The remakes--both 1 and 2--scratch the same itch, but as the saying goes, "you can't go home again."

Nothing will ever be like the OG X-Com.

SO I've done it; after having played video games since I was 4 years old I have now, today, beaten a Castlevania game! In fact, having played this for even more than 5 minutes constitutes the longest I have ever played a Castlevania game!

And it was.....fine! Hahahaha like, really, it was pretty fun; totally fine platformer stuff. I will say it was wildly frustrating and I'm glad I had the ability to rewind in Retroarch because my goodness gracious there's lots of fiddly stuff with those enemies. For instance, that clocktower level?! Oh dear lordddddd I hated that.

I would say fully 2/3 of my enjoyment came from my favorite thing in video games: a wonderful opening and interstitial animated sequences. I love love love LOVE the Mega CD and PCE-CD because of those sorts of things, and this does not disappoint.

Anywho, Castlevania as a series pretty clearly isn't for me, but this was pretty fun. I now "get" Castlevania. Hooray for me.

I can see the faint traces of the magic that people see in this game. I can hear bits of the echoes of the things that touch them or that they find charming. But for me, it came up very, very short.

I got all the way to the sand monster boss, where my game would not stop crashing, which I took as a sign for me to stop trying to force myself to have a good time.

I think I could go on at length if I could talk out loud, but having to formulate my thoughts right now in this little word box, I don't know if I can articulate why it doesn't click with me very well, but lemme give it a shot.

I've heard people compare this game to like watching episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon. People have said it's a hangout game, or a vibes game. I think that's true for those people, but the missing context there is that it's a certain type of Saturday morning cartoon; it's a certain type of hangout. It's a boy's club hangout.

DQ11 feels like the perfect, most magical game dreamed up by three 10 year old boys in 2002 from within a treehouse with a 'NO GIRLS ALLOWED' sign on it.

Just not my thing.

I had waited essentially my entire life to play Shining Force 3. As a Sega child whose favorite game was Shining Force 2, I was able to play SF3...but I learned very quickly that it was only scenario 1! Thus began a lifelong journey to acquire, translate and play the other two on original hardware!

But I digress; we're talking about Scenario 1 here.

It's great! Of course it is! I earnestly love the atrocious voice acting, I adore the chunky graphics and the story that ramps-up over the course of the game. I like how the battles have different objectives and things that are thrown your way--it's just a lovely thing.

The Shining Force games are all like warm cups of coffee for my heart.

I made a commitment to myself when I started this Backlogg'd that I would only log games that I played since starting the Backlogg'd, even if only for a little. Well, I noticed I had this beloved game o' mine on Steam this morning and fired it up and fired my brain back to middle school. Goodness gracious how much I loved this game.

I played so much of 2 when I was even younger (and calling the Rogue units "roo-zuh" (like the makeup) and my eyes popped out of my sockets when I got 3.

It's more or less everything I ever want from a video game. It feels like a comfy blanket, it feels like home, it feels like peanut M&Ms. The GOAT, plain and simple.

Gosh, I hardly know what to say. There are some games--Shining Force 2 is one of them for me--that feel like eating a chocolate chip cookie with a warm cup of coffee all snuggled up while the snow is falling down outside.

Lunar is a cozy game; it goes down so smoothly and so easily. It's so cozy and goes down so easily because of the Sega CD which just so happens to be perfect.

And so is this game. The graphics are gorgeous, the soundtrack is wonderful--including songs that sound like they had one of those slidey-tubey sound things as an instrument.

Also the CD-System animations and the voice over and the lovely and cheesy Working Designs localization...all of it is perfect.

You won't find anything here but the absolute best vibes in the universe. If you don't find early 90s CD-Era animated cutscenes and chintzy voice acting charming, genuinely don't waste your time! But if you do, playing this game will be a very, very lovely time for you.

What else can I say? I love it.

I played Popful Mail for the first time as a youngster. I was 7 in 1994 and I think I got this game a year or two later for my Sega CD. Like with more or less everything they brought stateside, Working Designs changed so much about the game to make it insanely harder than it was designed. Because of that, I obviously bounced off of it.

Playing it now 28 years later I absolutely fell in love. I played an 'Un-Working Designs' ISO that restored the difficulty back to normal but kept the voice acting and localization.

It's quite simply the most charming game ever. The gameplay is tight and fun, the voice acting is genuinely very good and very charming, and the writing is actually laugh-out-loud funny at times. The wonderful anime cutscenes are the icing on the cake. I cannot possibly recommend this game enough.

This was it! This was the one that started it all! And I thought it was super cute! I played it with God Mode and I could (and did) fast forward, so that colors things! I also used a guide that I followed to the letter.

This was a very fun and cute little game. I thought it was neat to see the origin of the “you need a torch or something to light up a dungeon”, I liked that the sprite changed to hold its sword and shield, I liked that your little guy carries the princess, I like that if you stop at an inn while carrying the princess back to the castle you get a little “you were up late!” from the innkeeper, and I like the cute dialog from the NPCs

It’s wild to play the game that more or less created RPGs after a lifetime of playing RPGs; I can see why this game was the face that launched a thousand ships!

Cute cute cute!

(Quick little gameplay note here: I haaaaate hate HATED the puzzle sections. I couldn't beat them. They were so hard it drove me crazy. I died as soon as possible to each one in order to move on.)

It's difficult for me to engage with media about the creation of art sometimes. For the entirety of my relationship history, stretching back all the way to High School I have been the non-artist girlfriend to artist partners (my present-and-forever marriage being the sole exception; neither of us are artists).

In my experience, one can create art with being an artist, but it's a distinction I only really draw myself. Those who are like, capital A Artists--like our gal Kuni in this game--fit this mold of always missing the forest for the trees. They become entirely consumed. In writing parlance, they leave too much of themselves on the page.

Far be it from me to tell an artist how much or little of themselves to put into their work, but for those of us who are around and loving those artists, it can be torturous. I've been Kuma my entire life. I've watched loved ones work themselves to death and judge themselves to death and ruin relationships and push people away.

It's hard. I'm glad these two were able to work it out. I'm glad Kuni found her joy again.