I adore the Persona games. They're beautiful to look at, they're fun, they're complex… There's a lot to love. And I mean that literally, too. Persona games are long. On average, it takes people 93 hours to get to the ending of Persona 3.

On that note, I have a confession to make: I have never completed a Persona game.

My first exposure to the franchise was through the Endurance Run. I saw the entirety of Persona 4 through Vinny and Jeff's eyes, and I fell in love with it. It was clearly a fantastic game, worth playing myself if I ever found the time. But I did already see the entire game. When the time came for me to buy a JRPG, I went with the previous entry, Persona 3. It was mechanically and tonally similar enough, and the slightly darker edge it seemed to have also appealed to me.

I played it non-stop for a few days. It was, in fact, fantastic. But eventually life caught up to me and I found myself spending less and less time with it. It was hard to try to play something I knew I wasn't going to finish for a couple weeks, at least. So eventually, with about 35 hours spent with it, I stopped. It wasn't a conscious decision; not really. I told myself I was going to pick it back up at some point, but by the time I finally got around to booting it back up, months had passed.

I had no idea where I was in the story. I had a vague sense of what happened in the game up to that point, but after playing for about an hour, I realized that all of the details had been lost. I remember none of the character moments, and had no sense of what I was trying to accomplish in-game, either. It felt like I was trying to read a book while skipping every other chapter; I could suss out the plot, but it was far from the ideal way of experiencing it.

So I started over.

Once again, I found myself barreling through the early parts of the game, but slowing down as I got deeper and deeper into it. I made it to almost exactly the same point I made it to in my previous attempt when I put it down again. Maybe that's a sign that the game has pacing issues. Honestly, though… I think it's on me.

I have a habit of this. The list of games I've never finished far outstrips the list of games I've completed. My Netflix queue consists of almost nothing but shows I made it five or six episodes into before moving on. And I don't drop any of these games or shows intentionally; when I leave a game or TV series behind, it's always with the explicit intention of returning to it later. But I never do. I've even done this with movies, pausing the movie and switching to another tab about 45 minutes in.

It could be my short attention span. I have ADHD, and struggle to sit through meetings and classes in my day-to-day life. That would be a reasonable explanation for it, but that doesn't feel right. That doesn't feel like the reason this keeps happening. Why am I able to binge-watch a show for five hours in the first place? How do I manage to sit through those first five or six episodes at all?

I don't think ADHD is the reason. I think… I think I'm afraid of finishing things. I think the idea of wrapping something up intimidates me. When I finish a game, it's over. Sure, I can replay it, but I will never have the experience I had on my first playthrough again. You only have one "first" anything. And I think I'm terrified of denying that to my future self.

It's not rational. But it checks out; most of the games on that "unfinished" list have save files sitting on the doorstep of a final boss fight. If I don't finish them, they're still a part of my life, right?

As it turns out, not really. If I would just finish them, I'd be able to talk about them more in depth. I wouldn't have to avoid spoilers. I could say I finished it. Right now, they're all just floating around in my head, aimlessly waiting for me to have something to say about them. And I want to say those things. But now my list of unfinished things is so long that I'm never going to finish getting through it.