Two and a half months in to Donkey Kong Bananza (it turns out that games take forever to play through if you mostly ignore them and play Final Fantasy 14 instead), I’m almost to the end of the game. I’ve gotten almost all of the Bananas, most of the fossils, and almost all of the unlockable cosmetics/stat boost items. The only things I’m missing are from the area I’m currently exploring so it’s only a matter of time before I get those as well and then fight the final boss. There was a bit of a twist at the end that changed a bit of where I thought the game was going and how it was going to end, but I’m here for it. I’m ready to dive into whatever is coming my way, regardless of whether or not I expected it from the start (though there were hints if you knew enough about the Donkey Kong franchise). Plus, once I finish that, I’ll have the freshly released DLC to play, too. And the Kirby and the Forgotten Land expansion to play, too. Plus Final Fantasy Tactics (which comes out the day before this is scheduled to post) and then probably some other games after that. I’m going to really need to start splitting my time more if I’m going to play all these games! That, or focus down my Final Fantasy 14 stuff, wrap that up, and then take a break from it [which is where I’ve landed as of editing this the day before it posts]. Both are probably good ideas for my well-being, but the latter is growing more and more appealing as time goes on. Not because I’m not enjoying myself or anything, but because I’ve spent nine months sitting in my “office” (a walk-in closet) and it would be nice to spend some time in a more open sapce.

I can’t really take a month off playing FF14, of course. I’ve got too many weekly obligations for that. But once I get far enough through the MSQ that I’m starting to run out of stuff to do, I might just dial down my online time to my weekly obligations and do other things with my time instead for at least a little bit. Read some more books, perhaps. Play through this growing library of Switch 2 games. Go to bed on time for a couple weeks. I don’t know. The possibilities are endless. I just don’t really WANT to be doing anything else right now. There’s still so much FF14 to play that it captures my attention ninety percent of the time. Sure, I still occasionally do other things, but mostly only on the weekends now since even just attending to my nightly stuff can be a pretty significant time sink. There’s queue times, resources to collect, quests to do, a house to maintain, crafts to produce for my weekly obligations, and an island sanctuary to keep up (though I finally hit level 20 on that over the previous weekend, so now it’s mostly about figuring out how to make the most money and what, if anything, I want out of the island at this point). Or I could let it sit for a while and just do other stuff instead. Get through this last (maybe last) level of Donkey Kong so I can return to the surface and start enjoying the DLC. Some of the stuff they included looks pretty fun, especially since it’ll give me a reason to keep messing around in this very fun game.

I expect I could probably get through the DKB and Kirby DLCs in a weekend, if I didn’t do much else, but I’m entirely uncertain of how much of my time Final Fantasy Tactics will take up. I didn’t play the original game and am mostly playing the remake because it’s a game for my Switch 2, part of my desire to play through all the Final Fantasy games eventually (within reason, anyway: I probably will stick to the mainline entries and mostly avoid the expanded universe of niche side games and… movies, I think?), and everyone seems to love it. So I’ve got no real concept for how much time it’ll take, how much time I’ll want to spend on it, and whether or not it’ll keep my focus like some other things did (I’m looking at you, Chained Echoes, whose DLC I also need to buy and play at some point, in addition to finishing my New Game+). Then there’s Pokemon in mid-October, Dragon Quest I & II (HD-2D) in late October, followed by Kirby Air Rider and the new Hyrule Warriors game both sometime in November. I don’t know if I’m going to get all of those, but they’re definitely on my radar these days and spaced about two weeks apart, which means I might wait to buy some of them or just wind up with a pile of games I’m not immediately playing. Usually the latter is what happens since I tell myself that I’ll play it eventually but Dragon’s Dogma 2 begs to differ.

I am rarely hurting for new games to play but have a tendency to buy stuff I don’t need right away because I can and because doing that lets me feel financially stable since I don’t need to save up or wait until a specific time to get relatively small stuff like that. That being said, I’m trying to be not only financially stable but fiscally responsible these days and that means I should probably wait to buy any new games until I’m ready to play them or until I find out that the physical cartridges are limited edition and about to go out of stock. I am trying to avoid digital games, if I can, so getting the physical version of these games is very important to me. I don’t want to lose access to them because of some dumbass trade war bullshit the Trump government pulls that shuts off internet access to stuff in Japan or Nintendo as a whole. I know that seems incredibly far-fetched, but we’re living in a world where far-fetched stuff is becoming every-day. No one thought the US white supremecist movement would come back without governmental opposition of some kind and look at how well that worked out for everyone. No one expected there to be more internment camps in the US and yet look where we are today. So I do feel a little bit like a conspiracy theorist when I consider losing access to my digital library because of some political bullshit, but only a little bit. Life’s full of the unexpected these days and being able to literally hold a little bit of fun and joy in my hands is incredibly important in getting through all that.