There comes a time in every gamer’s life when you can feel yourself about to drop a game. You start skipping text where you used to read everything. Little things start to piss you off. You’re tired of hearing the same songs and sound effects. You still play, but not as excitedly as before. That’s your cue, my cue, to start wrapping things up in Xenoblade Chronicles X before I end up dropping it. Plus I had fun playing Persona 5 Royal at the end of last year, so it would be fun to close out 2025 playing Persona 5 Strikers, which I hear is extremely robust for a spin-off game.
And yet… I can’t bring myself to finish it. I’m suffering from a terrible, terrible case of Last Dungeon Fatigue and I don’t know how to get over it. The stage is literally right in front of me and I just don’t want to go in.
It’s right down the street, just behind the McDonalds.
Wait… I’m getting a signal from my dungeon-dar… Let’s see what the readout says. “Since… the characters swear that this must be… the final dungeon… there must be two or three more stages after this.” Good golly gosh, it’s right! So I’m NOT en route to the final dungeon; this is just another area to explore!
Phew. Oddly enough that makes me feel better about things. The more I play JRPGs, the more I hate final dungeons for being so long and plodding and tedious (they’re all like that. All of them). But if it’s business as usual in Xenoblade Chronicles X, then I’m all for it. After all, despite some early annoyances and some ongoing annoyances, I’ve had a fantastic time with this game. Definitely worth the day-one purchase and worthy of being the only “regular” game i.e. offline game I’ve played this year. I’ve got a busy weekend ahead of me, but I’ll try to finish it before the end of November, God willing.
In other gaming news, Epic Seven has gotten super boring, so I’m planning to pull Swift Flagbearer Sigret, try (and probably fail) to get School Nurse Yulha and then take a log-in only break for a while. At least until headhunt is announced, as well as whatever Smilegate is cooking for us for Christmas. I recently started their new game Chaos Zero Nightmare. I had some thoughts about that and I was going to write a post, but then they released their first update and gave me even more food for thought, so I’ll need to re-think and re-evaluate things. More on either CZN or XCX next time, depending on which one appeals to me more and actually gets played.
