I’m in a bit of a weird position with Pokémon Legends: Z-A these days. I really enjoy playing the game and have plenty to do yet since I’m not even halfway through the game, but I stopped playing it after my trip and haven’t gone back. A significant part of that is, of course, being sick and spending all my time and attention on Final Fantasy 14 in prepared for the patch that dropped yesterday since it’s not like I wasn’t having a grand ol’ time with Z-A. As my discord friends can tell you, I have been enjoying that game immensely (and was providing regular fashion updates for a while). So what about returning to my home has left me unwilling to even boot up the game? I think a part of it is that it was a replacement fixation for Final Fantasy 14 and, now that I’ve got that back, I don’t need something else to do especially now when there’s so much going on. Part of it, though, is that my brain has filed it into “Handheld Pokémon Games” territory since I have spent 99% of my playtime for that game in handheld mode and now it only pops into my head when I see my Switch 2 sitting out (which I never do because I put it back on it’s dock every time I’m done with it) or when I’m going to sleep since I used handheld Pokémon games as my fall-asleep activity for a very long time. It no longer pops into my head as a waking-time activity or something to do to fill time between other activities. I’ve played it a bit while doing crafting stuff, but having to swap my attention back and forth meant it was really difficult to focus on the game and, even worse, difficult to avoid misclicks on my crafting macros. So now it just doesn’t have a time or a space in my mind since even my “stay in bed on Saturday/Sunday morning” time is being subsumed into “play Final Fantasy 14” time. Even with all that being true, I don’t think that’s the main reason I’m having a difficult time focusing on playing the game.

There was a time in my life when I would drop everything for a new Pokémon game. Not out of rapid fandom, mind you, but because it would be a solid piece of entertainment I could enjoy with or parallel to my friends for a pretty sizable chunk of time. The group chats would be full of chatter about where to find rare Pokémon, how best to hunt for shiny Pokémon, our favorite teams, and so on. This time around, I don’t have any of that. A full half of my friends that I ever had that kind of relationship with are no longer in my life. Some because of choices they made despite my attempts to convince them otherwise, some for reasons I couldn’t even begin to guess, and all of them because I had to make a decision about how and where I was going to spend my time and my energy the last few years and they didn’t make the cut (well, trying to fix our relationship, convince them of their follies, or hold up both sides of a conversation didn’t make the cut). And even of those still in my life, I’m the only one playing this game. They all have good reasons for not playing it (none of them have a Switch 2 and none of us want to play the Switch 1 version of the game), but it does mean that I’m flying solo this time around, enthusiastic support from some of my discord associates aside. It’s just difficult for me to be excited about something by myself. Much easier to stay occupied and busy than take the risks of feeling excited and not having anyone to share it with. (For any of those friends reading this blog post, this is a problem for me to solve, not one you need to. I’m an adult. I can regulate and manage my own emotions.)

Nowadays, Pokémon just feels like a bit of a backburner thing and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It might be my disappointment with a lot of my mainstay franchises (Tears of the Kingdom is still disappointing me, even now) over the past few years, but I just find it difficult to really want to emotionally invest in any of them. Hell, now that I’ve caught up in Final Fantasy 14, I can feel myself emotionally divesting from that, too. It slowly becomes more and more of a thing to do rather than something I feel passionate about. From the outside, I’m sure that probably doesn’t look like the case, especially given the work I’ve been doing for the new patch and how many hours I continue to pump into that game. From the inside, though… Well, as someone who has had severe depression for two and a half decades, I’d probably be dead if I ever let my lack of strong feelings about something stop me from doing what I think is the best or most interesting use of my time. I don’t feel passionate about cleaining my apartment or doing my laundry and yet that all gets done on time. I often feel rudderless and like whatever spark I once had has burned out, such that I yearn for nothing and could watch the minutes tick past with the same interest I feel for all my hobbies. Yet life continues and so must I, so things get done because they need doing or I decide to do them rather than because I feel any particular way about them.

Which feels like a very roundabout way of saying that I’ll get back to Pokémon eventually. I’m genuinely interested in what this game is doing and would like to see the story in its fullness, but it will probably need to wait a while longer until I’m out of New Patch Content in Final Fantasy 14. Just like all my other games from this year that caught my interest, like Dispatch or Wanderstop. Or the games I’m likely about to get for the upcoming holiday season. Or the game I bought while visiting my friends as the next step in my decades-long quest to figure out what game I played for like a week as a ROM on the family computer before my brother deleted all our ROMs because I did something that upset him (probably because I noticed he was using Administrator privileges to log onto my account on said family computer so he could download porn and then told on him to our parents because I didn’t want to be the one getting in trouble for that in our Very Catholic “if you look at porn once, then that image will be in your head and you’ll be sinning all over again every time you think of it which you will do constantly because it will just pop into the forefrunt of your mind and make you think about it because that’s how sin works–it is always tempting you” family). I think it’s one of the Mana series but I actually have to play the games I bought to find that out (and enjoy some really good classic games regardless) and I just don’t feel like doing any of that when I could play Final Fantasy 14 where I’m a part of multiple communities now. Where I’ve got friends who are interested in doing the same stuff I am. Where I can go and find people to talk to or hang out with at almost any time. That’s tough to beat. Not even Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s easy fashion can compete with that.