#456

Not smoking cigarettes. Working on perfect pull-ups and playing the trumpet instead. Got to Final Fantasy X, which is helpful. Looking forward to X-2 and XII. 

The Final Fantasy games I first played and played the most of repeatedly as a kid and teenager were Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy XIII. I did play Final Fantasy VII but stalled at a certain point near the end of the first disc--my resolve broke. I beat it completely, but much later. 

Played around with or just straight through some installations, including Final Fantasy Legends on the Game Boy Color and I and II on PC emulators. Barely started III and V and XII and XII: Revenant Wings, but quit them. Got maybe halfway or better through VII: Dirge of Cerberus--or maybe it's one of those where I got to the final boss and quit without fighting it because I didn't want it to end or didn't feel like I'd done enough side content. Did that with X and XIII, actually--hovered before the end. Played the Tactics DS one but not all the way to a complete, same with Tactics on the PlayStation and Crystal Chronicles a couple of times. Maybe some others I'm not remembering at this moment.

Not this time. This time we're clearing as many as we can, folks. Strap in.

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Big part of the great joy and satisfaction of this big kick is of course the amazing, world-class, genre-defining and massively influential art and music of it all, and the stories, which are remarkable in many important and silly ways, and in general the great return to oneself of engaging with a familiar set of rules and imaginary geographies and economies, all of which shaped who you are as a person.

For the ones I did play, I played the fucking shit out of. I beat IV twice on my Super Nintendo, on which it was incorrectly ported as Final Fantasy 2. Weird, remembering that, and some of the miscommunications with fellow fans that happened to result. The consistent--and understandable--rereleasing of IV on various platforms with various tweaks has nicely erased that old confusion. Anyway I beat it like four more times, once on the PlayStation and three on the GBA. Kind of feeling ready to beat it again. It's a great game with a story I can't objectively qualify as it set so many of the parameters I judge stories by, particularly in a progression-based fantasy setting. 

Lost track of how many clans I took to post-game completions in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. At around two hundred and fifteen hours each time. I have probably logged eight to twelve hundred hours of play onto my battered, yellowed GBA cartridge. Maybe I should be buried with it. 

At the top of the reasoning element is certainly meditation--on the story as the journey as a story expressed infinitely in fractals and spheres and indeed, most especially and elegantly, in crystals and crystalline structures. Music as facets of a crystal, as crystals in the jeweled hilt of a crystal sword. Infinite masks of the hero, infinite shadow selves to overcome. Infinite paths, infinite combinations, one endless repetition of the same path and the same fight and the same movements on a grid--a grid that is perhaps a sphere, or houses spheres. Infinite random numbers generated to be roughly the same and compared infinitely for infinite outcomes that are just one or zero. Lives and dreams and death dreams and the wheel of fate turning beyond the end of infinite time, which is but one moment suspended in eternity. 

At the base of all that is the brute code, the random sets that make the individual plathrough, the greasy mechanics, the terrible and beautiful grind. O, blind, muscular goddess Grind! That blunt, murderous python whose coils are such steely sweetness. How rich and greedy-making like warm milk to the hungry babe is the feeling of making the numbers go up, and the numbers attached to the numbers go up, and to arrange the synergies of those numbersets with complementary numbersets and so make of your tools a sword to cut through the oppression of the world and its manifold horrors for the big payoff, for freedom and truth and justice and hope and love. 

One ought not deny themselves this kind of play for too long, I think, if one becomes accustomed to the nutrient of it. I believe it does something for the mind and spirit that is quite powerful. If nothing else, to nurture the patience, foresight, and preparation that a truly elegant and complete playthrough requires is helpful, moreso if it can be applied more broadly in one's lived efforts. The grind can sharpen one--that is its ultimate purpose and best outcome. There is no false feeling of power. There is only the outcome derived from its willing itself.

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The obvious problem with things is that the perfect thing to celebrate nine days or a year or five years without cigarettes is a reward cigarette. That's fucked up--but undeniable. 

Not today, though. Not today. That's our only hope.

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This has been the "Utile Negations" and "Incremental Work" post here on Factually Pointless. Join us next time for who the fuck cares.

--JL