While waiting for my laundry to finish up on Thursday, I started playing Final Fantasy I on my GBA. It’d been a long time, of course. I played it through a couple times back in the early 90s when it first came out for NES, but hadn’t touched it until the Dawn of Souls combo of FFI & FFII came out.

All of the time I spent playing on Thursday was spent fighting the Goblins (Imps, on the NES) around the first town, to level up enough to go fight Garland. So nearly all of this time was spent repeatedly pressing the A button, since there’s not a lot of strategy involved in fighting Imps. I have no patience for this. I know I’m not alone in that sentiment, but until recently it didn’t matter. When I was a kid, or even when I was in college, I felt ok wasting a half hour in one area of an RPG, fighting the same half-dozen monsters over and over to reach level [multiple of 5] to comfortably move on. Or pressing the A button over and over to scroll through the poorly-translated text one sentence at a time. But these days, my time, and in particular my video gaming time, is at a premium.

Therefore I declare a new rule for myself: no new RPGs.

I hereby resolve to not play any RPGs that I do not already own. And even then, I probably won’t be playing FFII or Chrono Trigger (which I have because they’re packed with FFI and FFIV, respectively). The one exception I may make is that Nels and I are talking about trying out City of Heroes. And action RPGs like Diablo or X-Men Legends are acceptable, since they tend to be a bit more fast-paced than a Final Fantasy / Dragon Quest type of game.

So, for the rest of my life, or until this rule is recinded, I have only a handful of games to deal with. And only three (Knights of the Old Republic, Final Fantasy Tactics and Paper Mario 2) that I haven’t really made any progress in. But this year — this year is the year that I finish FFVII on the PC. I started in 1998.