Sakura Spirit - 20/20 hours

It's finally done. Over the years, only a few games have made me cry. Brothers tugged at my heartstrings. Super Mario 64 awed me with its incredible 3D world. Sakura Spirit flooded me with relief that the damned thing was over.

I think I've learned an important moral lesson from this experience, though. You shouldn't let resentment eat you up inside. Sometimes, in life, you are confronted with unpleasant experiences, and they will seem monumentally unfair. But approaching it as one aggrieved, whose dignity has been outraged won't make a demeaning chore any less difficult. You don't have to forgive, and you certainly shouldn't forget, but you mustn't lose sight of your own power. If you have to do something, do it. The fact that you are able to keep your poise under difficult circumstances will be a rebuke to those who did you wrong.

Do you hear me, Jared? You didn't break my spirit.

Or maybe I'm being overly dramatic. What, really, is Sakura Spirit's big sin? It's tedious, but so is Ship Simulator Extremes. It's got a puerile approach to sexuality, but it's not as offensive as Ride to Hell: Redemption (provided Sakura Spirit's intended audience is male virgins who are very insecure about their heterosexuality and are desperate to have their inchoate sexualities affirmed by non-threatening digital puppets who act as a surrogate femininity in order to ease them into the idea that women will not castrate them for expressing attraction, but you know what, I've just been assuming that subtext is so obvious it can be read as text). It doesn't offer any significant decisions or require any skill, but neither does The Lord of the Rings, and I'd have been happy to read that for twenty hours.

Really, it was no one thing. Sakura Spirit just happened to have a perfect storm of factors that ensured it would trigger an immediate and visceral loathing in this particular reviewer, and that's not something I can blame on the game.

Modding Sakura Spirit helped me a little. There were times when I was so engaged in writing that I almost forgot what I was writing about. And bug-checking my mod did force me to play the first fifteen minutes of the game about a dozen times, so it wasn't an entirely fatuous excuse. Unfortunately, I could not quite figure out how to package my mod in a way that would allow me to share it without pirating the whole freaking game. I thought I might make a video or slideshow about it, but my early efforts proved to be really tedious (to watch, not to make - I actually really enjoy crafts), so just imagine something hilariously irreverent. It won't match up to the reality, like at all, but I'll feel flattered by the thought.

You know what, though? I'm happy. With Sakura Spirit behind me, I've passed the low point of the blog. Looking ahead, there's nothing on the list that worries me. I've survived the worst-case scenario, and it wasn't entertaining enough for people to want me to repeat it.