Yomi - 11/20 hours

I love games with a lot of characters. I mean, a lot of characters. I'm not kidding here. The more, the better. Dozens is best. This is so much a thing for me that I even enjoyed Chrono Cross, despite the fact that most of the characters are nothing more than a special move and an accent. I think I may like games with multiple characters even more than I like games with character customization.

But there's a paradox to having multiple characters. The more there are, the fewer (in terms of percentage) you tend to use. The game requires a certain degree of mastery in order to overcome its challenges, and to attain that mastery, you must focus on a few of the characters over the others. Either that, or it's like the Bioware rpgs, where you've got a dozen shipmates, but you can only take two of them with you at a time. One of these days, I'm going to play a game that forces you to use all of your dozens of characters more or less constantly, and I'm never going to want to play anything else.

In the meantime, I've been having fun with Yomi. My current approach is to pick a character for each session and just play a dozen practice games in a row against random opponents. I learn a lot in the process, but I miss the variety.

I've also gotten some opportunities to play against human opponents. It's pretty fun and requires a sharper strategic acumen than matches against the AI, but I'm neurotic enough that it brings with it its own set of worries. I have a natural emotional reaction to losing too frequently, but then I feel guilty about having that reaction. Then, when I win, I worry that I might be winning too much, and I feel guilty about that. It's not a big thing (and indeed, I'm a little embarrassed that the people I've played against may read this and think I'm making it weird), but I am who I am, and I have this strange social anxiety. I'd prefer to just alternate between victory and defeat, but that would be an unnatural situation, and thus is probably too much to hope for.

The plan going forward is to play Survival mode. I'm not sure what exactly that entails (the game has no tooltips, for whatever reason), but I'm sure it will kill some time.