I was talking to a friend about video games a couple weeks ago and we briefly touched on a game called Lost Odyssey that we’ve both played and, coincidentally, stopped playing at almost exactly the same point in the game. He stopped playing at the last save before a difficult boss fight because he was stuck in the lead up to that boss fight and couldn’t figure out how to beat the boss. I stopped playing immediately after winning that boss fight because, after stopping for the night after winning that difficult fight, my Xbox 360 red-ringed and I lost all of my save data. The reason we never went back to try to play through that game again was because that fight was on the third of the four discs for the game and there was just too much game for us to want to play again. It wasn’t a bad game, but it was just so very long. I definitely enjoyed my experience playing it, but it slipped my mind so thoroughly that I never even looked up how the story ended despite it being almost a decade and a half since I lost my game data and decided not to try playing it again. I probably still own that stack of CDs, since I still have my Xbox 360 hanging around somewhere (I haven’t plugged it in for at least a decade at this point, so who knows if it even works still), so I might someday replay it. Probably not, given how little time I’ve got and how much other stuff I’ve got to read, play, watch, or listen to, but I still think about it from time to time.

For a long time, almost thirty years, Lost Odyssey was the only game that I’d started and never finished. Even when I started buying too many games on Steam, I tended to either never play a game or play it all the way through at least once. I used to have so few games that I eked out every little bit of enjoyment that I could from them, which instilled in me a habit of making sure I played a game all the way through before I started another. The downside to this habit was that, sometimes, I’d go weeks without playing video games because I didn’t really want to play the game I’d started and wouldn’t let myself start something new. Getting over that particular hang-up, along with confronting the scarcity-based fears of my youth and early twenties when new media was difficult for me to come by, helped me get to a place where I didn’t feel like I was wasting money or the time I’d already spent if I didn’t finish reading, watching, or playing something. Now, I’ve got a whole array of games I’ve played but never finished, books abandoned when I realized I wasn’t interested, and shows I’d only ever watched a few episodes of. I think this is probably a more healthy way to live my life, even if I do still occasionally feel pangs of guilt for leaving something unfinished.

Despite all this growth, though, Lost Odyssey feels more like “the one that got away” than something I set aside because I wasn’t interested in it. The story was pretty typical RPG fare: the hero has amnesia, collects a group of heroes, discovers some kind of time shenanigans, and works together with their crew to take down a megalomaniac bent on world/universe domination. There’s a lot more specifics to the game than what I gave here, but it all boils down pretty neatly. Where the game shone, though, was some of the fiction within the game. The main character is actually an immortal who can survive pretty much any awful event the world can throw at him, even if does have to dig himself out from underneath a meteorite that crashed down on the battlefield he was fighting in, but he doesn’t remember most of his history or why he’s an immortal at all. He does eventually learn that truth (along with the fact that, apparently, his offspring are mortals rather than immortals like him), but it is a slow process that only really comes to fruition toward the end of the game (past the point that I’d played). Most of the memories he regains, though, take the form of little light novels that represent memories he’d accumulated during his years of wandering and mercenary work.

These little vignettes show glimpses of the life he lived, the person he’s become over time, and the way he operated in a world that seemed to always be out of synchronization with him. Even though I barely remember any of the major plot beats, I clearly remember several of the stories that touched me deeply because of the level of compassion the characters in them showed each other, the way they frequently juxtaposed tragedy and kindness, and the way the protagonist managed to never lose hope for the world or concern for the people around him no matter how many times he was disappointed by someone falling short of his hopes for them. It was a lot of really good writing and characterization that apparently even won some awards. I put a lot of work into finding all of those memories and would frequently go back to read through them, at least until I lost my save data. The thought of being able to go back, to collect these bits of fiction again, is what calls me back to the game most of all, now that I’ve looked up how it ends (which seems like a fine ending for a game with an adequate story). I doubt I ever will, unless I can somehow get the game on a more modern console or my PC. I’ve still got an Xbox One that I could maybe dig out and try to digitally download it, but I’m not sure I want to play it THAT badly. I mean, sure, I’ve got a spare port on my audio tuner that I could plug it into, but all my shelves on my entertainment center are full.

Clearly, I don’t want to play it that badly, if this little inconvenience is all that is stopping me from playing it. Maybe I’ll plug my Xbox into my bedroom TV and play it the next time I want to have a day in bed instead of lying to myself that I’ll be perfectly content to go fetch my switch and return to my bed rather than just stay on my couch instead. Who knows? Anything is possible, given enough time and a functional Xbox despite not having it plugged in or actually used for a few years now. Having to buy the game again, though, grinds my gears a little bit, but I bet its not more then ten or twenty bucks if I get it digitally, so that’s not a huge deal for my monthly video game/book budget to absorb. Plus, if I actually do go back and play it, I’ll be able to make all kinds of jokes about this being my own Lost Odyssey or how its’ not longer a lost odyssey because I went and found it.