I’ve never been a determined New Year’s person. Well, maybe I should make that clear. I’ve tried resolutions over the years, but I’ve rarely, if ever, followed them. My resolutions were either too broad (“Be a better person”), too unrealistic (“Write a book even though you have no ideas for a book or are not interested in writing a book”) or literally impossible (“Listen on swearing so often “). I’ll try again this year, and I think I’ve found a smart way to succeed: I associate it with one of my favorite hobbies. How could I fail, right?
More specifically, I will try to broaden my horizons in 2020. When I play in my free time, I tend to go for sandbox-style open world titles. I won’t stop playing them (resolutions shouldn’t be punishment, right?), But I’ll try to discover some genres that I don’t play as often as I used to. I see two pretty obvious goals.
First I will try to run through a newly released JRPG. This is a genre that I loved from SNES / PlayStation in the early days, but which I haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about in recent years. I really liked Blue Dragon, and it was probably the last thing that really caught my eye. I played Persona 5 for about 10 hours, but I stopped playing it because I think I had to check something out and never got back to it. So yes. That is my first goal. Play through a JRPG. Credits and everything.
Next, I want to tackle something I’ve never really slept with. Kyle and I used to enjoy our general aversion to grid-based combat. There are certainly exceptions – he loved South Park: The Fractured, But Whole, and I really liked the XCOM restart – but my interest almost always comes to a standstill when the fight begins and characters eagerly await my orders. In 2020 I will try to play something new with this type of fight.
You know, now that I look at these two resolutions, I realize that I should probably have played Fire Emblem: Three Houses in 2019. Damn it.
Anyway, enough about me and my resolutions. Do you have something you want to try in 2020? Or are there habits (like collecting a backlog) that you would like to slow down in the coming year?
