Star Ocean: Til the End of Time is taking Forever!

I spend most of my game playing time playing board games or card games. To me, the fun in game playing is the social aspect of playing with people. I do play some computer console games, however. When I was younger, many of the games I played on my Commodore 64 were dexterity games, like Jumpman and Wizard. They were fun at the time.

Now, I don't have the reflexes or inclination to play such games, and am more interested in thinking about what to do rather than mashing away at the X button. Thus, most of my recent console games are Role Playing Games, or RPGs. These games take quite a bit of time (but not so much button mashing), on the order of 40-60 hours, so understandably not many of them get played in any one year. I do have a real life after all.

I've recently gone back to a game I put aside about a year ago, called Star Ocean: Til the End of Time. I was stuck and got tired of it. Star Ocean TTEOT is a monster of an RPG on two PS2 discs (and that's not just video on those two discs) with an epic-scope soundtrack covering 5 CDs worth of music! I didn't know what I was getting into when I started it, but now, 40-some hours into the game, I realize that I'm probably not even halfway through! Ack!

This length is a distinction of the games made by triAce. Their first two Star Ocean games, made for the Enix empire, were also punishingly long, though I only learned this recently. So, you have to have a certain amount of almost pathological tenacity to play these games.

The problem is that the game has great characters and a compelling storyline, so it's not that easy to abandon.

So now what do I do? Do I soldier on knowing what is in front of me or walk away from my 40 hour investment? It's certainly no Zork.

Well, for now I'll turn off the game. and go make some tea.