http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/i-was-a-final-fantasy-addict
Today, I am a modern, fully functional, city-dwelling adult. I write about food for a living, I own a comfortable sofa, I belong to a book club, and I spend too much money on alcohol. I live in Brooklyn.
...
In order to fulfill my mission I first had to get used to the Nintendo 3DS, which I’d never picked up before. It’s a nifty little system, but it’s not nearly as immersive a platform as a console hooked up to a TV screen. The console’s job as a piece of machinery is to pretend it doesn’t exist. An RPG on a glorified flip phone, it, instead of feeling like a virtual otherworld or a movie in which you have the privilege of playing a character, just feels like what it is: a game.
...
Bravely Default doesn’t really scratch the same itch as the RPGs I used to love, but I don’t know that anything could. I don’t think I have that itch anymore. I have a job that challenges me. I have good books and fancy cocktails and television shows that keep me entertained. I live in a city that’s full of astonishing beauty and irredeemable villains, in roughly equal measure. But playing the game has certainly made me feel a real nostalgia, not exactly for those old games themselves, but for how fiercely absorbed in them I was. I’m not sorry to be living a complicated, fascinating, grown-up life that I find more interesting than any all-consuming role-playing game. It’s just that sometimes I miss saving the world.
Go ahead and give the full article a read, I just included the snippets that stood out to me. IMO the article is awful, the woman writing it is a year older than me but she seems very misled on what it means to be an adult. Parts of what she talks about are true, you are much busier as an adult and it makes me really miss my college years when I had unlimited gaming time. Other parts are just silly, like being too buys watching TV and making cocktails to possibly be bothered with playing video games.
Most of the article is pretty cringe worthy. It's mostly about her history of being too embarrassed to admit she was a gamer and believing she transcended to adulthood in college when she spent her time hanging out with cute boys (notice she says roommate not husband in the article so you see how that panned out). Not really sure how this counts as a review of Bravely Default or how she got picked for it.
These are my favorite comments on the article:
PUZZFEUD
about 3 weeks ago
… is this a review of Bravely Default or a manifesto of how much an “adult†you are because you don’t play video games anymore?
stephanecd
about 3 weeks ago
Seems to me like your view of what it means to be an adult is extremely childish and stereotypical. Gaming is just another form of entertainment and fooling yourself into believing that it is something to be outgrown is nothing but pandering to outdated social trends. I’ll just leave these words from C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia for you to hopefully learn something and help you actually grow up: “Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.â€
Today, I am a modern, fully functional, city-dwelling adult. I write about food for a living, I own a comfortable sofa, I belong to a book club, and I spend too much money on alcohol. I live in Brooklyn.
...
In order to fulfill my mission I first had to get used to the Nintendo 3DS, which I’d never picked up before. It’s a nifty little system, but it’s not nearly as immersive a platform as a console hooked up to a TV screen. The console’s job as a piece of machinery is to pretend it doesn’t exist. An RPG on a glorified flip phone, it, instead of feeling like a virtual otherworld or a movie in which you have the privilege of playing a character, just feels like what it is: a game.
...
Bravely Default doesn’t really scratch the same itch as the RPGs I used to love, but I don’t know that anything could. I don’t think I have that itch anymore. I have a job that challenges me. I have good books and fancy cocktails and television shows that keep me entertained. I live in a city that’s full of astonishing beauty and irredeemable villains, in roughly equal measure. But playing the game has certainly made me feel a real nostalgia, not exactly for those old games themselves, but for how fiercely absorbed in them I was. I’m not sorry to be living a complicated, fascinating, grown-up life that I find more interesting than any all-consuming role-playing game. It’s just that sometimes I miss saving the world.
Go ahead and give the full article a read, I just included the snippets that stood out to me. IMO the article is awful, the woman writing it is a year older than me but she seems very misled on what it means to be an adult. Parts of what she talks about are true, you are much busier as an adult and it makes me really miss my college years when I had unlimited gaming time. Other parts are just silly, like being too buys watching TV and making cocktails to possibly be bothered with playing video games.
Most of the article is pretty cringe worthy. It's mostly about her history of being too embarrassed to admit she was a gamer and believing she transcended to adulthood in college when she spent her time hanging out with cute boys (notice she says roommate not husband in the article so you see how that panned out). Not really sure how this counts as a review of Bravely Default or how she got picked for it.
These are my favorite comments on the article:
PUZZFEUD
about 3 weeks ago
… is this a review of Bravely Default or a manifesto of how much an “adult†you are because you don’t play video games anymore?
stephanecd
about 3 weeks ago
Seems to me like your view of what it means to be an adult is extremely childish and stereotypical. Gaming is just another form of entertainment and fooling yourself into believing that it is something to be outgrown is nothing but pandering to outdated social trends. I’ll just leave these words from C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia for you to hopefully learn something and help you actually grow up: “Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.â€
