Late to the Party - Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls - Ultimate Evil Edition

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until earlier this year that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls - Ultimate Evil Edition, which I will refer to as just Diablo 3 from hereon for obvious reasons. Today is also the final edition of Season 1 of Late to the Party, and with a game like Diablo 3 on the docket, you know we’re going out with a bang.

Another trinket gone

It’s generally not my style to bring back souvenirs from my extended travel sessions, but invariably I oftentimes come back with a few things I didn’t start the journey with. For example, in 2012 I came back with three pairs of socks that I had bought in Spain to replace some of the ones I had brought with me that had become worn out. From my 2015 journey across Europe, one of the things that got brought back stateside was some sore throat medication I had acquired in Croatia during the time I was temporarily sick. This past weekend I wasn’t feeling so great and needed some sore throat relief, and wouldn’t you know it, while checking my medicine cabinet I came across those Croatian meds. The sight of them triggered a rush of memories from that part of the journey (mostly of feeling miserable but not letting illness stop me from sightseeing) and I got a small kick out of using up the last of the supply. Another trinket from overseas finally got to be seen again, though in this case being discovered meant being consumed and the end of its useful lifetime. It’s somewhat sad that those meds are now gone, as they were something of a mental link back to the 2015 journey, but at the same time they were just meds, and nothing more. I don’t regret using them up and am fine with them now gone. For me, the real mementos of any journey are the photos and memories I collect while I’m there. Those sorts of things I will not so easily part with.

Mandatory Classes

I must be getting old, because I’ve been thinking about what sorts of classes should be mandatory for high schoolers to pass before they can graduate. Lots of people have opinions on this sort of thing, and my suggestions probably aren’t the best, but here are four classes I think every high schooler ought to complete.

Personal Finance
Debt remains one of the great scourges of my generation, the Millenials, and I think part of the problem, in addition to things like skyrocketing college tuitions, is that many of us never got instruction on managing money wisely. I was fortunate to grow up in a household that taught me how to handle money well, but not everyone is that lucky. A class that taught high schoolers about income, bank accounts, credit cards, debt, savings, and other topics related to personal finance would help a lot of teens better prepare for transitioning to adulthood and avoiding financial pitfalls.

World Geography
It’s no secret that Americans are notoriously ignorant of world geography. How many of us could find Afghanistan on a map back when America first started attacking the Taliban? I don’t expect everyone to find every single country, but it would be an improvement if we could at least find the ones that are commonly making headlines, if nothing else to give us a perspective on world affairs. While we’re at it, maybe the world geography class should also require students to learn three to five bullet points of basic information on various countries.

Logic, Rationality, and Critical Thinking
If there is one criticism of my generation that I believe is spot on, it is that we have overemphasized feelings to the detriment of critical thinking. A class on basic logic and rationality would help us better reason through the various issues that come before us, and be less easily bought by appeals to emotion. I’m not saying feelings are bad, but we need to use both our brains and our hearts.

Health and Nutrition
America appears to be slowly beginning to taper off its bad eating and health habits, but we still have a long way to go. What a person eats and does is their choice, but it never hurts to be better informed on what our bodies need to be at their best and how to live healthier lifestyles. Then maybe we can stop being the most obese country in the world and reduce the amount of money spent each year on healthcare to counteract suboptimal dietary and fitness decisions.

Another Photo Printed

The only up side to my current employment is that it is supplying me with an income, which is allowing me to spend money on things I would abstain from if I were still unemployed. You might remember that earlier this year I got one of my better photos printed as a gift to a friend. This month I had another one printed, and it became a Christmas gift for another friend of mine. Below is an image of the print sitting in the living room of the house I’m currently living in.

This particular print is of a photo I took in June 2015 at Lake Tonglen in Alaska, which is near Denali. At that time of year there is 24-hour sunlight up in Alaska, but around the end of the day they get what can be thought of as an extended sunset, where the sun gets low in the sky, but never fully goes down. Normally you only get a few minutes of a sunset’s most brilliant colors, but in Alaska around the time of the summer solstice the pinks, purples, and reds last a lot longer. This was one of the best photos I took on that trip, and I’m pleased to see it turned out so well. One of these days I ought to see about getting some of my work featured somewhere.

Sprinting to the Finish

It is done. The final game of Season 1 of Late to the Party has been finished. Now I just need to write up my thoughts in time for publishing on Friday. With all the stress and time constraints I’m currently experiencing I doubt I’ll be able to produce something that satisfies me, but I’m committed to getting this done by Friday, so regardless of that writing piece’s condition I will be publishing it. Time to sprint to the finish line and hurl myself across to close out 2016.

Merry Christmas 2016

Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, and I decided to publish a Christmas greeting today rather than Monday. I’d like to wish you, the reader, a merry Christmas. If you have the privilege of spending Christmas with friends and/or family be sure to make the most of it. I personally am not able to travel home this year, but on the other hand that means I can spend the Christmas weekend making a big push to finish the final game of Late to the Party, Season 1. Regardless of your circumstances, I hope this is a special time for you and everyone around you. May it be filled with warmth, laughter, joy, and love.

Boulder is Changing

My employer has several offices within the city of Boulder, and at the moment I’m temporarily stationed at the office not far from the central part of the city. The other day I found an excuse to take break from the flagellating my soul goes through on a daily basis there and stepped out onto the balcony area that faces westwards. Surveying the scene before me, I was once again captivated by the sheer beauty of Boulder’s geography, with the majestic mountains forming the background for the fair city. At the same time, it was impossible to ignore the construction area directly in front of me. Below is a photo I took to give you an idea of what I was seeing that day.

Scanning the scene and thinking about what I was looking at, I came to the realization that in my mind I have a romanticized version of Boulder that doesn’t exist in reality. I like to think of Boulder as this idealistic town at the foot of the mountains—insulated from many of America’s woes. The truth is not so dreamy. Boulder is growing, as evidenced by all the construction around town, and due to the restrictive nature of new development it is experiencing some of the problems experienced in places like the California Bay Area. Rents and home prices are steadily rising and pricing people out of the city, and traffic congestion seems to get a little worse each year. In spite of these and other issues, there’s still a ton of things I like about Boulder, and I’d go so far as to say it’s one of America’s best cities, but there’s no denying that Boulder is changing. This fantasy version of Boulder in my head hasn’t existed for a least a decade, if at all. It’s time to embrace reality and exist in the real Boulder, taking the city as it is.

Why PlayStation?

I like to think of myself as console agnostic, but the fact of the matter is that I do the vast majority of my gaming on PlayStation platforms. One of the reasons for this goes back to the circumstances I found myself in during my college days. In my first year of college, one of my roommates had a PlayStation 2, which was my introduction to the PlayStation ecosystem. He also had a Nintendo 64, but the PlayStation 2 was the console I gravitated towards, and after that I stuck with the PlayStation family of consoles. Perhaps if my roommate had owned an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, I would have turned out to be primarily an Xbox gamer.

Since that time I’ve only owned one non-PlayStation console, the Nintendo Wii, but that’s primarily been due to convenience and my gaming interests. Whenever there was a game I wanted to play that was exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem I was able to make use of a friend’s Xbox, so I never had a need to purchase an Xbox of my own. Next year I might finally purchase an Xbox One, but for now I’m content to wait and see how Microsoft’s Project Scorpio pans out. For Nintendo’s part, their first-party lineup of games hasn’t appealed to me as strongly as the first-party games of PlayStation and Xbox, so I haven’t had much of a desire to buy their consoles. The Nintendo Wii was an interesting exception to this, as I, like many other people, got caught up in the novelty of its motion controls, and to the Wii’s credit it did have some good games during its early years. We’ll see whether or not the Nintendo Switch can do something similar. For the near future, however, I’m fine with just owning my PlayStation 4.

The year it stopped

You know, there’s one more item related to Friday’s Pockets Full of Soup post that I decided yesterday I wanted to share. It’s an interesting addition to one part of the story. You might remember that I mentioned how I was verbally bullied by my classmates from 1st Grade through 8th Grade, and you might have been wondering what happened after that, when I got to 9th Grade. I can’t really explain the why, but let me tell you the what.

First, a little more about 8th Grade. That school year was a particularly tough time for me. In addition to all the issues associated with a young man undergoing puberty, I was not doing well in two of my classes, which for a kid who normally excelled academically and had the legacy of two high-achieving older siblings to live up to, was particularly crushing. The mockery by those around me was also at its peak. 8th Grade could not end fast enough, and I was relieved when it did.

Summer came and went, and upon showing up to high school in 9th Grade, I assume the social derision would resume, but it didn’t. No one was making fun of me, and if anything my social standing took a massive leap forward. For the first two weeks of 9th Grade I kept telling myself that it was all a lie, that everyone was lulling me into a false sense of security and the rug would be pulled out from me any minute, but days and weeks passed and nothing happened. I don’t know why, but the taunting stopped. It was as if everyone had all grown up a little that summer and subconsciously agreed to leave me alone. On occasion I would get a mean-spirited comment or two—as much as anyone else got in high school—but the widespread mockery never came back. Everyone just moved on.

Other Things I’m Thankful For

To follow-up Friday’s writing piece and keeping the train of thankful positivity going forward for one more day, below are some of the other things in my life that I’m thankful for.

• I’m thankful that I grew up in a household where my mother and father were married and lived together in the home.
• I’m thankful I was born in and grew up in America.
• I’m thankful that my parents didn’t consider parenthood as some sort of second-class calling that was less important than their careers.
• I’m thankful for friends who have gotten through some rough patches in my life.
• I’m thankful that I have had the privilege of traveling overseas.
• I’m thankful that I’m debt-free and can live contently with few possessions.
• I’m thankful for the majestic Colorado mountains.
• I’m thankful for the privilege of owning a car.
• I’m thankful for video games and the many adventures they have taken me on.
• I’m thankful that I live in a day and age where I can do online writings such as this.

That’s just a few of the things I’m thankful for. If I took the time, I could list a hundred more, but for today I’ll stick with these.

Pockets Full of Soup

One of the podcasts I regularly listen to is Pockets Full of Soup. Hosted by Jared Petty, formerly of IGN, Pockets Full of Soup is a weekly interview/storytelling podcast wherein Jared talks to someone he knows and asks them to tell him about someone they are grateful for. It’s a small beacon of positivity amongst the swelling tide of malice that the Internet is known for, and if you’re feeling down on life, or if you’ve just spent too much time in the Youtube comments section, it offers a brief respite from the malaise of this world. Since I started listening to Pockets Full of Soup the thought has been crossing my mind of doing a writing piece wherein I pretend that I’m one of Jared’s guests on the podcast and answer his common questions. Originally I was going to have this ready to publish on Thanksgiving, which would have been appropriate for that day, but a number of things going on in my life at the time got in the way, and I had writing pieces related to my current employment that at the time demanded to be published. Consequently this writing piece got delayed until today.

I’m Beginning to Understand

At my previous employer there was a woman who served as the company’s accounting manager. She was easily the best employee in the office—showing up first, leaving last, and doing incredibly hard and thankless work, all while also meeting the needs of everyone else in the company. Every single day she trudged through hell and back, and did it all without complaining. When I talked to her she would smile, crack a laugh or two, and act like she was okay, but I knew better. Today, at my current job, I’m beginning to understand what she was going through, though I won’t claim my petty sufferings are anywhere near what she endured. I’m beginning to understand how wretched her days were at the company, and how her smiling, laughing, and acting content both hid how much she was hurting and were also probably a defensive mechanism to prevent herself from breaking. If my current job is beating me down so badly, I can only begin to comprehend her daily tribulations.

A little under a year before I resigned from the company, that woman was fired. Despite being the best employee, one of the owners had held a personal animus against her for a long time, so when she finally made a mistake that owner took the opportunity to be rid of her. All her years of loyal, tireless contributions in the face of constant trials in the end counted for nothing. The company had chewed her up, and spat her out. As dejected as I was feeling towards the end of my time at that company, I can’t claim to know what it’s like to get stabbed in the back like that by one’s employer, since I left of my own volition and on good terms with my superiors. That’s something I hope I’ll never come to understand.

I Should Have Said Something

Many years ago, I was in a Blockbuster looking at their selection of movies. Off to the side I noticed a woman with a small throng of boys go up to the cash register. Those boys looked like they were young teenagers, maybe 13 to 14 years-old, and she was getting them a video game, specifically Call of Duty: World at War. I have played quite a few Call of Duty games in my time, and I know from experience that they are rated M for good reason. Full of bullets, explosions, and staggering body counts, they are not meant for the young and immature, and World at War is also one of the more graphic entries in the series. I am normally not one to step into other peoples’ affairs, but reflecting on this occasion I think I really ought to have said something to that woman. Maybe she would have brushed off my concern, or told me to mind my own business, and those kids certainly would not be happy that a random stranger was warning that woman that they shouldn’t be playing Call of Duty, but it would have been the right thing to do.

I am part of the problem

Something that’s been making the rounds in the world of video games is the news that a number of major releases this year haven’t been selling as many copies as expected. There are a panoply of reasons that could help explain why sales are down lately, but as I was listening to games journalists commentate on this topic it occurred to me that in fact I am partly responsible for this. For a long time I’ve operated under the principle that there are lots of games worth playing, but very few worth actually owning (my current PS4/Xbox One collection consists of only three games: Uncharted 4, Gears of War Ultimate Edition, and Destiny).  In my mind, ownership of a game is a commitment to play it several times over, and the vast majority of games I play I have no interest in ever replaying—not even some of the really good ones. Hence I make heavy usage of Gamefly, a game rental service which allows me to experience a wide range of games for less money than if I had bought all of them, and saves me the storage space I’d have to create for a large collection of game discs. By renting most games instead of buying them, I am not sending any money to their developers and publishers, and contributing the lower sales figures. All that said, I currently have no plans to change my gaming modus operandi, and I don’t really feel guilty about it either (if I was pirating games, that would be a different story). Perhaps this is another example of that proverb that says a single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.

The Last Sentence

Writing a commentary/review on a video game isn’t easy, and for me one of the hardest parts to write for any of my Late to the Party posts has been the last sentence of each writing piece. On a number of occasions I’ve gotten all the way to the end of the last paragraph, having fought a brutal battle of mental attrition to get there, and found myself completely stumped as to what to say in the last sentence. It seems like it ought to be easy—one final sentence with an overall opinion on the game and maybe some sort of flowery prose for effect—but for whatever reason that final sentence often bedevils me. Sometimes I achieve a breakthrough and compose a final sentence that satisfies me, and sometimes I’ve had to just scrape together a really awkward or cliché final sentence and just let it be. And the worst part is, because of my mental inability to see past the flaws of my own work, that bad sentence at the end is all I’ll be able to see when I click the publish button.

Late to the Party - Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until earlier this year that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition. This post was intended to have been published a week ago, however my job had me putting in ten to thirteen-hour days last week, so I simply wasn’t able to finish the game and write this commentary in time for that. But, on the plus side, I can say that I eventually got it done. I guess this is a case of better late than never.

Political Capital

Back on Election Day, my friend Ben over at Free Refills did a writing piece wherein he discussed his memories from the 2008 election when Barack Obama became president. One of the things he brought up was how Obama, who came into office with Democratic majorities in Congress, chose to put all of his political capital into getting Obamacare passed, rather than economic reforms to address the underlying causes of the Great Recession, and the political consequences that may have arisen from this choice. This got me thinking about what issue(s) Donald Trump will put his political capital into once he becomes president, seeing as how he will be in a similar situation to what Obama had in 2008. Will Trump suffer the same fate of investing everything in a single controversial piece of legislation, or will he spread his investments and try to achieve a broader swath of political accomplishments? Trump has Republican majorities in Congress, so theoretically he should be able to get a lot of legislation passed, but then again maybe the Republican Party won’t be unified enough to fulfill Trump’s goals. Also interesting to see will be how much of his campaign rhetoric becomes actual policy agendas, and which of his campaign promises/claims quietly disappear once he’s in office. Trump only has two years to get things done before another election threatens the Republicans’ hold on Congress, so whatever he plans on doing, he’ll need to be quick about it.

First Paycheck

My first paycheck from my current job was deposited into my bank account. I’ve been staring at those dollars that I received in exchange for my services, and thinking about how much I’ve been paying for them in terms of my physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. My life is draining away before my eyes, both in terms of time lost and the toll it is taking on me personally. Maybe if I was earning significantly more money with this job I could at least console myself knowing that I’d only have to be a slave for awhile before I’d have enough saved up to be liberated from this existence, but that’s not the case. I continue staring at those dollars. It’s not worth it—not at this pay grade and not with how much is being taken from me.

Final Fantasy XV Ride Together Trailer

Final Fantasy XV was released recently, and along with it came a new trailer for the game. The trailer, titled Ride Together, begins as you would expect for a high fantasy adventure game, with a series of dramatic sequences accompanied by a fittingly dramatic score, but then at about the 0:52 mark the trailer makes a hard left turn. Suddenly the trailer’s tone and tempo dramatically change and the soundtrack switches to the song Fast Lane, by Bad Meets Evil, featuring Eminem. This curveball was unexpected, to say the least. I don’t normally associate gangsta rap with Final Fantasy. At first I was flabbergasted by what I was witnessing. Then my inner critic was questioning who in the Final Fantasy marketing department thought this was a good idea for the trailer. But as the trailer continued I found myself starting to like it more and more, and by the end I loved it. The musical selection was unorthodox, and on paper sounds like a poor choice, but in practice somehow it works. It’s not the best trailer of the year, but Ride Together certainly is one of the most memorable, simply for pulling the rug out from under the viewer. Below is the trailer if you haven’t seen it yourself.

PSX 2016

I wasn’t able to watch last Saturday’s keynote presentation at PSX when it happened, but I did check out recaps of it later in the day when I had time. There were a ton of things revealed and showcased at this year’s keynote, more than I have time or interest to discuss in detail, but below are some quick thoughts on the items that stood out to me.

* Uncharted 4 is getting standalone DLC titled The Lost Legacy. It will star Chloe (from Uncharted 2 and 3) and Nadine (from Uncharted 4). Uncharted is one of my favorite series in all of gaming, so I’m looking forward to playing this whenever it comes out.
* Gameplay footage from the remastered Crash Bandicoot games was shown. I personally don’t care about Crash Bandicoot, but I know it’s a big deal to a lot of people who grew up playing the Crash Bandicoot games, so I’m glad that people are getting an old favorite brought back to life.
* A sequel to Knack is in development. Knack was the very first PlayStation 4 game I played (it was at a kiosk in Best Buy) and even though it’s supposed to be a mediocre game I’ve been thinking that one of these days I should play it to see for myself. Maybe I’ll include it in the second season of Late to the Party.
* Horizon: Zero Dawn got another trailer. I’m already sold on this game, and it just needs to come out already. Other than maybe a launch trailer, I think this game has sufficient hype behind it to not need any more media for it.
* The Wipeout racing games are being remastered for the PlayStation 4. I played Wipeout HD on the PlayStation 3, and despite being laughably terrible at it, I liked the game’s aesthetic and soundtrack. I may or may not look into this one when it gets released.
* Three PlayStation 2 games—Parappa the Rapper, Loco Roco, and Patapon—are coming out on PlayStation 4. All three of these are games that I missed on PlayStation 2, so it might be worthwhile for me to experience one or more of them to improve my gaming heritage and perspective.
* A new trailer for Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom was shown. I’ve heard from a number of people about how good the first Ni No Kuni was, but it’s never been something that grabbed my attention. Perhaps next year I’ll finally give it a try, and if Ni No Kuni 2 also gets a lot of praise then maybe I’ll play it too.
* PlayStation VR got its own section during the keynote. I don’t think I’m going to be buying a PlayStation VR any time soon, if at all. That’s not because I’m not interested, but because I don’t think I’ll have time to stack even more gaming experiences on top of the few ones I’m able to play right now. Also, I’m not one to be a first-adopter of new technology, so I may just wait for the second generation of PlayStation VR to be released, which I imagine will be during the PlayStation 5 console generation.
* Interestingly, the PlayStation 4 Pro doesn’t appear to have been discussed at all during the keynote, which I suppose makes sense since the people who attend PSX or watched online are generally the type who already know all about it. Sony may have made the calculation that talking about the Pro would have been a waste of time that could be spent showcasing other things.
* The keynote ended with a trailer for The Last of Us, Part 2, and as expected it was a masterpiece of a trailer. While I would have been completely fine if there was never a sequel to The Last of Us, I don’t doubt that developer Naughty Dog can create another legendary game. It was stated just before the trailer played that the game is in early development, so I’m guessing this game won’t be coming out until 2018 at the earliest (2019 sounds much more reasonable, as Naughty Dog doesn’t rush their games).
* Overall, PSX 2016 looked like a very strong showcase for the PlayStation brand. Even if a lot of things in the keynote presentation didn’t appeal to me, personally, it had content for just about every type of gamer, and good content at that. Though relatively young compared to the other big gaming conferences like E3, TGS, and Gamecom, PSX has proven it can stand with the big boys and deliver just as strong of a show as anything else.

The Next Adventure

I’ve been looking for mental anchors to hold me in place in the midst of the storm that has engulfed my existence since returning to the workforce. Lately the dominant anchor has been the thought of where my next extended overseas journey could take me, assuming I’m able to go. I could easily do a third trip to Europe, seeing as how there’s always new things to find and there are lots of places over there I’d like to return to, but I think it’s now time that turn around and move in the other direction. Instead of flying east to reach the West, I will fly west to reach the East. Japan and South Korea have long been places I’ve been curious to visit, so it’s as good a time as any to commit myself to reaching them. I even have two contacts that I could meet up with while I’m out there: an old roommate of mine is on Okinawa and one of my cousins lives in the Tokyo area. Like my journeys across Europe, I would need to do an extensive amount of research and planning before going. Rick Steves unfortunately won’t be able to help me on this one, so new sources of travel advice will need to be procured. The moonshot goal at this point would be to make the journey some time around September of next year. It probably wouldn’t be as long of a journey as either of the trips to Europe, but I’d like to try to get two to four weeks out of it. Anything less than two weeks would be hard to justify, given the amount of money I’m gong to have to spend just on the airfare to get there. Good thing I’m skilled at living frugally and saving up money.

To be sure, whether or not this journey actually happens is all up in the air at this point. It simply might not be practicable to do this or maybe an unexpected personal or world event will make travel impossible. Even if it never happens, however, the thought of it has been helping me get through the days of wage slavery. Every now and then I stop whatever soul-crushing tedium I’m working on and I think to myself a single word: Asia. And yes, I do it in the voice from that time on SNL’s Celebrity Jeopardy where John Travolta is asked to name the continent of Asia. It’s a silly thought, and sometimes it cracks a faint smile on my face, which I suppose is a good thing considering the circumstances.

#Asia2017

Falling off the Pokémon bus

Despite never owning a Gameboy, I was able to play five of the early Pokémon games thanks to an emulator my older brother installed on the family computer. The specific games that I played were Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, and Silver, and in retrospect these were probably pirated copies that my brother had acquired, but my childhood mind wasn’t concerned about piracy—it was just happy to play games that I otherwise would have no access to. I played through each game at least once, but after Gold and Silver I left the Pokémon games behind and never returned to them.

One of the reasons I intentionally stopped playing the Pokémon games was because, in my mind, the Pokémon universe had gotten out of control. In Red, Blue, and Yellow, there were a total of 151 Pokémon. That’s a fair number of Pokémon, but not too much, and at the time I had all their names and basic info memorized. In Gold and Silver another 100 Pokémon were added to the roster, and I was okay with this too. Gold and Silver took place in a different part of the Pokémon world, so it made sense that there would be some new Pokémon that didn’t exist in the region from Red and Blue. However, as the years proceeded and more Pokémon games came out, it became apparent that this continual expansion of the Pokémon universe was never going to end. Each new set of games brought another slew of new Pokémon, and though in each game the introduction of new Pokémon made sense from a narrative perspective, for me it was a torrential downpour that struck me as wildly excessive. Hence, I’ve never bothered to try playing any other Pokémon games, and I don’t think I ever will. It’s not because the games are bad—I loved the five that I played and all the subsequent games appear to have at least been decent, if not good or better—it’s because my feeble brain can’t handle so many Pokémon. Just give me a Charizard and a few others from those first five games, and I’m good.