Hello again.
 
It's been a while, I'm sure you can tell.  I've been playing lots of games lately, which has proven quite satisfying.
 
One of the games I said I was going to play was Yakuza 3.  As some of you may remember, I'd received it as a gift despite my making clear I wanted nothing to do with it after Sega's blatant disrespect of the entire North American gaming community.
 
That lasted all of three hours.
 
Part of it was that the game is so crushingly boring in the beginning, at least when you get past the mandatory install at the start and the huge as cutscene only to spend hour after hour babysitting brats that the game proper doesn't give you any reason to care about in the beginning.  Part of it was the clumsy, dated controls, as though the game's designers had one foot in the year 2000.  However, the biggest part of it was that I wasn't playing the game for the right reasons.  I was angry, perhaps irrationally so.  Stewing in my own rage, I couldn't just play the game.  I was constantly reminded of the issues that had turned it into the target of so much of my hate.
 
I come to realize that, no matter how much you want to show up someone, pushing through pigheadedly with something you don't want to do doesn't amount to a hill of beans.  All it does is make everyone miserable.  Sega still has the $60 from the sale regardless, so whether I go through with my planned 60-hour tantrum against my friend is moot.   My friend and I spoke about it in private a few days after my last post, and both decided that the two of us were brash and rushed to judgement way too quickly.   Our differences are decidedly resolved, so any sort of backlash move on my part is simply prolonging something that we've both agreed to put to bed.   In the end, these are games.  The oddity of getting into huge feuds over them aside, their purpose is to entertain, and when one is playing a game purely out of spite, entertainment isn't possible.  It's nearly impossible to enjoy a game that you're mad at.
 
Does that mean I'll never come back to Yakuza 3?  Likely.  The whole experience has soured me to the game, and most likely to the series as a whole.  Maybe when it's not still a sore spot emotionally and I can look at the game on its own merits, but that might be a while.  Besides, I'm still trying to get off my ass and play FFXIII more.  After 16 hours of going off in one direction and looking at hokey characters play through a story I could care less about, I'm almost at the point to where I feel comfortable writing about it.  And no, if it doesn't  get better by the time I get to 20 hours, I'm not going to finish it.  It could be fucking Mass Effect after 20 hours, but no game should force you to endure that much misery.  At least, however, it'll be misery because of the game's lack of quality alone, something it'll take me a long time, if ever, before I can say the same about Yakuza 3.