VGC Day 29: Unexpected Love

Welcome back to our 30 day video game challenge! If you’d like to catch up with the other days, click here.

Wow! Our penultimate “day” of the 30-day Video Game Challenge! Thanks for sticking with me through the last 28 days weeks of video game questions! Today the challenge asks:

Day 29: What is a game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving?

What an interesting question. I’ve usually played a game with the expectation I would like it, so more often than not, if I was “surprised” by what I thought about it, it was because I expected to like it and wound up being disappointed, or outright hating it (cough War in the North cough).

But then I remembered…

A Short Story

About 15 years ago, my aunt, of all people, told me about this game called Final Fantasy X on the Playstation 2. Ironically, she’s a pretty religious person, but she encouraged me to play the game because it had a wonderful story and lots of religious themes. I politely thanked her for the recommendation and quietly decided to not play it.

My reasoning was fairly shallow (as is most reasoning when you’re a teenager). For some reason, prior to this I had gotten into my head that I would hate Final Fantasy games. All of them. Because… reasons? I really have no idea why Final Fantasy was the target of so much ire, because I had never played any of the games, the one person I knew who played Final Fantasy loved it, and I’m not really one to hate something for no reason. But there you go.

As my brain matured a little more, I realized that was a really silly thing to think, but by the time that happened, Square Enix had released Final Fantasy MMCLXXVII* (this is a joke) and I just felt too overwhelmed to even try jumping in.

So I recently put up a very scholarly poll on Twitter, which resulted in information overload after I asked which Final Fantasy game is the best one for a series newbie to start with.

All of this to say that I started playing Final Fantasy IV, which seems pretty cool, Final Fantasy X, which has the most annoying main character I think I’ve ever had the displeasure to control, but a good story, and Final Fantasy XIII, which… I’m actually really enjoying.

I guess that means that I never thought I’d play or ever appreciate a Final Fantasy game, but I’m enjoying my foray into the series quite a bit!

So the moral of the story is don’t judge a game by its case, and try something new when you have the chance! You’ll never know where you’ll find your next fun adventure!

What about you? Have you ever expected to hate a game and then loved it? Did you ever avoid a series because of a random reason? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you soon!
~ Athena

*Kudos to you if you knew this was a real number in Roman numerals, and bonus kudos if you read what number it was!

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