(no subject)
The anxiety comes and goes. Admittedly, it's been kind of a tough week, though. We had an acquaintance who had been pulled out of school at the tail end of high school by his parents and not allowed to graduate - which was a few years ago, now - who we were encouraging to get a GED and try to enroll for Fall Semester. He missed the deadline, his father unexpectedly died, and now his uncle is trying to strongarm both him and his mother into moving out of state, to the middle of nowhere, and finally cutting of any other support structures he's managed to develop.
He's financially dependant, but not a minor, though any attempt he's made at autonomy has been aggressively undermined. They're looking to move over the weekend, but he's been working with us to stay behind and move elsewhere. The plans are solidifying quickly, but there are things we don't know yet that we need to know, and that, unsurprisingly, introduces complications I'm not comfortable with.
This is a thing that happens from time to time. Someone needs to go somewhere else, which is perfectly normal, but because some of the people in the equation are... erratic, you have to keep it quiet within the existing social unit. That gets really stressful.
Kay's working long hours this week, and one of our cars is in the shop, so it's not really possible for me to run errands, and I had been trying to play Metal Gear: Solid with Kay around, but that's not really happening. Since I'm by myself, then, depending on what I feel like, I'm either treating Fallout 4 like an intense dollhouse building session or playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin. Fallout's been getting the most play, because it's pretty mindless, and I'm mostly playing when I don't have the energy to do much else. IS reminds me what an intentional grind the franchise, and anything else by Atlas, tends to be.
The early Persona's were very much a product of a certain design philosophy by Atlas - people complain about the grind, but it might be better to think of the series as a kind of Jungian Pokemon. The high encounter rate and fiddly nature of the earlier games are intentionally designed to facilitate collecting demons and leveling them up, and the game encourages talking to every single person by including unique dialogue for all of them, so most of the game is spent not advancing the plot but systematically moving from one place to the other and interacting with every person in the city, then grinding equipment and collecting persona.
Obviously, this is a play style that doesn't mesh with everyone - even most people, frankly. People signed up for the character development over time and trippy plots, and were unhappy at the mechanical repetitiveness of the series. I don't think, then, that the game designers went in the wrong direction starting with Persona 3. They retained an emphasis on talking to everyone, but they put the game on a timer and redesigned it with a dating sim feel in mind. I haven't played 5 yet, even though I have it. By all accounts, it's very good. It's not that I don't appreciate playing through the early games - it's sort of a legacy game that I'm doing to have played the whole series - by I think that it's the kind of thing that younger players would have less patience for, and I don't blame them.