Obsession ain't so bad.
I awoke early a few days ago. "Early," these days, is 9 or 10 o'clock. I had just finished Super Metroid a couple times, and despite having a couple of games I could certainly play, I didn't have any healthy videogame addiction. I rely on those, see. My mind, when not occupied with something addictive (a game, a book, a forum), tends to focus on, you know, bullshit. I probably get it from my mother, but unlike her, I'm not interested in medication. As a good friend put it, antidepressants would make me "boring." I'd rather sit through it, whether it lasts a few weeks or a few years, than be boring. When I awoke hours sooner than normal the other day, to the sound of my brother cussing at his girlfriend for being "too lazy to go to the doctor," a feeling hit me quite suddenly - a rare, indescribable feeling that told me what I needed to hear to, at least temporarily, fix my brain.

It said, "It is time to play through Dragon Warrior VII again."

So it was. And so, I booted it up, found a memory card with an empty space, and began my new adventure.

For a few years now, I've been unable to play the game. The last time I played through, I put so much work into mastering every (human) class with every character that to play again seemed pointless - I'd just have to do it all over, because this game does something to me that makes me master every class for no reason. It takes hours and hours. The only shortcut is to find a spot with weak monsters that still count. (The underwater portion on the way to the Sky City is excellent, by the way; almost all the monsters can be killed with one RockThrow, and the battles count well into the 40s - maybe further, I haven't tested.) For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it works like this: You can change classes at Dharma Temple. To advance in a class, you have to fight a certain number of battles. Most classes take well over a hundred battles to master, and once you have learned everything from the basic classes, they combine to form advance classes, and those combine to form super classes. This is time consuming. I tend to play a simple counting game with it. There's a witch-looking lady in Dharma who tells you how many battles you need until your next advancement. I remember the lowest number or two and head to my killing grounds. X -> Cast -> Swimmy -> Whistle (this instigates a battle). Fight -> Swimmy -> RockThrow. Gabo -> RockThrow. Melvin -> Fight. Maribel -> Fight. Once the monsters are dead, well. That's 1. Repeat until I hit the magic number. Head back to Dharma for a new number to count to. Without those numbers, the whole process is a little insane. The battles don't take long, mind you; that whole above list I can command within a few seconds, and watching the fight ensue takes only a few seconds more. Still. It's daunting, considering the number of classes.

But the other day, my brain said, "It is time."

Guilty admission number 1: This is only my second time through the game. It is, without a doubt, my favorite game of all time. I only had to finish it once to know this. I didn't even have to start again to remember why. This game requires more patience than most humans can bear. This suits me perfectly; I'm more patient than anyone I know. The first battle in the game, with three slimes who attack Maribel when she tries to run home, is fought after two hours of talking to townspeople and solving puzzles. (An hour and a half if you know what you're doing.) The Temple of Dharma, where your party can finally start learning some decent abilities besides Heal and where the game really picks up, is right about the 20 hour mark. The end of the game? 100 hours, easily, especially if you're a class-whore like I am.

What kind of storyline could possibly stretch that long, you ask? Not much of one at all, really. The Story is pretty simply: The Demon Lord wreaked havoc in the past, destroying the world. You must go back in time to prevent individual disasters from occuring, and then destroy the Demon Lord. This, however, is far from important. Those who complain about the story of the game are a little... fucking stupid. "The story sucks," they say, and I respond, "Which story?"

Each continent is made up of a series of islands. Each island has an individual story, only a handful of which "suck." Most of them, using only poorly-rendered sprites, dated (even for the time) graphics, dialogue, and Koichi Sugiyama's brilliant music, manage to contain stories that are far more involving than, well, anything else I've seen in videogames. They are often focused on individuals within larger events, much like crummy disaster movies, except not crummy. For instance, a kingdom is besieged by robots and is quickly being destroyed. Our job is to simply destroy the robots, but the story focuses on a reclusive scientist named Zebbot, who cannot forget a lost love. He manages to reprogram one of the robots, and names it after his love: "Eri." When we return to this kingdom, several hundred years into the future, we enter Zebbot's house to find a bleached-white skeleton lying on a bed, its robot helper Eri endlessly walking between it and the stove, forever repeating, in all capital letters, "SOUP COLD. ERI MAKE MORE. MAKE ZEBBOT BETTER."

Things like this make me sadly smile, usually. Other times, as in the case of the Pepe and Linda revisit, I sort of cup my hand over my mouth and say, "Awww," because, you know, I'm a big pussy and I attach more emotional value to centimeter-high sprites than I do most humans. It's a living.

My motivation this time around is to create a game that's completely superior to my previous one. This means at least a few monster classes (tack on another 30 or so hours), and beating the crap out of God.

Guilty admission number 2: I've never unlocked the second bonus dungeon. To do so, you must beat the hardest boss in the game - God (yes, God; flowing white beard, big nose, bad jokes, and all) - at least 3 times. I'm giddy at the prospect. I only managed it once my last playthrough, and that was sheer luck. His bad jokes failed to work on me more often than not. (FloraBob, hahaha.)

Shortly after I made my last Rogers tribute post, both Gabo and my hero, Swimmy, learned SwordDanc, arguably the most useful ability in the game. Realizing I no longer needed my boomerang, I went to find tougher weapons for my videogame friends so SwordDanc would be more effective. Just north of Dharma, the disc in the Playstation stopped spinning. Luckily, I had just saved - no big deal. I turned it off, turned it back on, and noticed that the disc wasn't spinning at all no matter what. A few hours later, it still wasn't. How did I see the disc, you ask?

Guilty admission number 3: Yeah, I pirated it. I'm using a bootdisc, with the lid constantly open (and a spring that tricks the PS into thinking it's closed) because it runs better that way. I rented this game long ago and copied it, not expecting it to be the greatest game I'd ever played. Even after the fact, I failed to buy it when I saw it used a few times. $25 just seemed like too much when I already "owned" it. This means that when my Playstation died, I could not switch to the good ol' equally-crappy PS2. My options were to either find the game somewhere or buy a new Playstation. It seemed like a no-brainer. I need to own it, and I don't care for a single one of my other burned games. But first I needed money.

The day after it broke, I had to drive to Newport (about 45 minutes away) to get my tags renewed, as the car is still in my Newport-living grandma's name. They refused to accept my parents' check, so I had to pay the last $25 I had. After Newport, I was planning to scour Johnson City for a copy of the game; that plan was most certainly killed. I retreated home, depressed, with no way to inject sweet, sweet Dragon Warrior into my veins. With the insert credit forums down, the internets just aren't as amusing or time-consuming. Certainly not compared to DWVII goodness. When my mom repaid me the next day, I drove to Johnson City immediately, despite the terrible weather. I needed my fix.

I had once seen a copy of the game in the mall, so I headed there first. Their PSX collection was miserable, so I hightailed it across town to EB games. Their used PSX games surprised me. Months ago, I searched every game store in Knoxville for a copy of Vagrant Story to no avail. In this, a much smaller town, I saw three copies of VS just sitting there for $25 each. (Anyone looking for it? I can get you one.) But I didn't want VS, I wanted DWVII. And guess what they didn't have?

My last attempt was a small pawn shop called Video Trading Company. It's easily the best store for used games in the area, and they have lots of nifty things you won't find anywhere else around here, like NGPCs for $40, old game controllers, multitaps, Turbo Graf-x, Atari, Sega CD, and other rare-stystem games, things like that. I only tried the other two stores first because the owner of Video Trading Company makes me nervous. He's always there; as far as I know, nobody else works for him. He's not terribly friendly, but he warms up to regulars. This time, there was a woman behind the counter with him. She had two parakeets, one on each shoulder, and she was bargaining with him for used and broken systems. I looked for a copy of my beloved game, but alas, nothing. I decided that, unfortunately, I would have to buy a new Playstation. The man tried to sell me a PSOne. I explained to him, "I need a PSX. I'm using a bootdisc, see." He gave me a... look, but he used to sell the things in his store, so I likely misinterpreted it. He had a stack of old Playstations, none of which he had yet tested. I would have to wait for him to individually hook up each one and verify its working order until we found a good one. After a few minutes, I told him, "You know what? Never mind. I don't trust used Sony products."

"Used? I don't trust any Sony products. Those four letters, S-O-N-Y, means it's crap. We have to repair them all the time."

"Yeah, heh heh. Thanks, though. See you later."

I went back to Gamestop and bought a used Playstation, for $5 cheaper than it would have been elsewhere.

Driving home, I wanted to lament the terrible area I live in. The decent part of Johnson City is, if one drives exactly 5 miles per hour over the speed limit the whole way there, an exactly 50 minute drive from Greeneville. Even when you get there, the chances of finding what you want are slim; it's best to go without any specific desire, and just browse the old games. As someone who needs his fix, this is simply unacceptable. But I was unable to care at that moment, because the rain was gone, the clouds were dissipitating, and the sun struck me as profoundly beautiful - a rare instance that I don't curse the day star.

I have since put about 24 more hours into Dragon Warrior VII.

I get completely engrossed in this game. My father will walk in occassionally, ask me if I want to go anywhere, get something to eat, ride along with him on an errand, things like that. Of course I don't. I want to play this game for 14 hours straight. (That was today's run. My record, from my first playthrough, is 20. I might have taken a bathroom break in all that time.) My family will sneak up on me. "Tim," they'll say, and I'll jump and my heart will start pounding. "There's food upstairs."

"All right."

As if I care if there's food upstairs.

AIM will make a sound, and I'll scream at the computer, "What, what do you want? Leave me alone!" When I see it's someone I always enjoy talking to (which is really almost everyone I do talk to), I'll mutter some kind of recantation. "Oh, it's you. Cool. Hi." Then I will balance the AIM conversation and the game together.

A few nights ago, before I reached Dharma, some friends came by. They are all smokers. As they smoked, we watched one of our cats torture a bird. After Nathaniel's front tire put it out of its misery (its brains popped out through its neck - how cool is that?) they tried to get me to go to Johnson City with them, so we could see that crazy new Batman movie the next day. I told them I didn't want to, that they should call me some other time and I'd go. I didn't tell them why. It was, of course, because I wanted to play my game.

Guilty admission number 4: I would rather play Dragon Warrior VII than do anything else in the whole world.

This is bad. It is those who make their hobby their life rather than a part of their life that I largely ridicule as being pathetic. "Gamers," we call them. (I agree with Dhex. Have you ever heard someone refer to him/herself as a "reader"?) A personality should not be defined entirely by videogames - or entertainment for that matter; we are more than what we play / listen to / watch - and I like to think that mine is not. But the fact remains: I would rather play this game than hang out with my friends, chat on the internet, or, you know, sleep or eat or any of those other bullshit time-wasting things that we, as humans, have to do.

If I didn't have church tomorrow, I'd probably still be playing it right now. I should be sleeping anyway, but I wanted to write this. I've been meaning to for a couple days, but I played this game instead.

I wish that sleep only took a few seconds of lovely overture music and I'd awake with full HP and MP. That would just complete the nerdery, right there.