It’s Thanksgiving, one of the more fraught holidays on America’s calendar, which we nonetheless celebrate by partaking of a bird that’s not very good. Most of us – minus Luke, who lives in a country with much more interesting birds – are off for the day, but we still wanted to give you all a place to chat.
If you’re in the mood to discuss recipes or juicy family drama or what have you, go for it, but here’s a more gaming-related prompt for those who aren’t feeling the festivities:
As temperatures cool and skies gray, we all feel some desire to disappear into our caves, homes, or too-expensive apartments and hibernate for the remainder of the year. Alas, capitalism does not accommodate or even really acknowledge this distant echo of humankind’s humble beginnings, but there’s at least something to be said for curling up with a suitable game during the season’s long evenings. What kinds of games do you feel yourself drawn to this time of year?
For me, it’s JRPGs. Like clockwork, I always start a new one sometime around October or November. I rarely finish them, but I enjoy settling into games that tend to be both intimidatingly colossal and comfortingly formulaic. The holidays have a sort of drawn-out rhythm to them, and so do JRPGs. Their casts of characters similarly come to feel almost like a sort of family over the course of dozens of hours. JRPGs, implicitly if not explicitly, are Christmas movies.
This year I’m playing Trails In The Sky 1st Chapter, the new remake of the first entry in the beloved Trails series, and it’s really hitting the spot. Its opening hours adhere to a pace that I would call slow, bordering on sleepy, but in a small-town sense rather than one that has me saying “OK, let’s move things along.” I feel like I’ve really gotten to know my main characters and the place that raised them. The final side quest of the prologue sees you bid farewell to the town of Rolent by helping a childhood friend come up with a new recipe for her family’s tavern by enlisting the aid of another childhood friend who works on an idyllic farm, and that kind of sums up the whole vibe: Everyone is very caring, considerate, and hardworking. The game believes in people and the enduring power of our bonds. It’s an extremely welcome change of pace after a day of bleak headlines and doomscrolling.
But Trails In The Sky does not strike me as saccharine. Estelle, the main character, is a surprisingly nuanced take on the shonen archetype of a battle-hungry idiot with a tragic backstory, and now, at the outset of the game’s first real chapter, the world’s larger political machinations are starting to seep (back) into her life. I’m excited to see where it all goes. Maybe I’ll even finish a JRPG, for once.
How about you? What kinds of games do you play during the fall and winter?
