Funny story time. Back in the year 2014 I was facing a trivial, albeit strong bit of personal conflict with myself. I wanted to get back into MMOs for some reason, but I didn't really want to upgrade my PC and had no real interest in picking up one of the console options or playing something super old either (Predating WoW old as that doesn't run on this, my office computer) and as I got closer and closer to this I was also thinking about finally digging into Bayonetta 1 and 2, which were soon approaching. 2014 was a golden year for buying games digitally on Nintendo platforms, it was the height of the DDP program so I was getting money back left and right, it was also one of the best years for Club Nintendo deals where you register certain products you got stuff back and it was the year that Best Buy ran two separate deals for 20% off of Nintendo eshop credit, so I was buying a lot of games for both the present and future.
Bayonetta 1/2 come out...and it's basically the largest download available on the Wii U. This was a good year before they started preloading games on the system so that night I was bored and because the first 20% deal at Best Buy had started, absolutely flushed with credit, so much so that I had maxed out what you could have on the system and had enough to empty it out and max it again sitting right there on my desk, along with at least 50 bucks in the DDP. So I was pretty much buying everything with any pedigree in hopes of playing it down the road. Bayonetta was going to take another hour or two, and I remember really enjoying the Treehouse Live presentation of a fairly old Japanese 3DS game that they were finally bringing over two years later. A game with a lot of cutey crafting and real time battles. Fantasy Life. So I figure, eh, I'll grab this and play it while waiting for Bayonetta to download, maybe pick it up in six months or so as my 3DS backlog was gigantic at that point from the great year of 2013 and the pretty okay year of 2014. I start the game up and I am hooked almost immediately. I play it for the next month straight and never even open up either Bayonetta game.
Fast forward to the end of October 2016. I've decided to buckle down and play a ton of games in my back catalog before yet another Nintendo system comes out in March. By my standards I do a good job in November and a great job in December, knocking out some really big games along the way and barely buying anything to replace it with. I finish W101 in very early January and give myself at least a fighting chance of finally beating Bayonetta 1 and possibly 2 before DQ VIII comes out. What could possibly stand in my way of getting that done?
My friend, who bought the same game around the same time I did, finally gets into Fat Nasty Life.
Now when I say I played Fantasy life, I really played it. It has the second highest rate of play time per session in my tracking file, behind only ZTD which I basically beat in one shot. It's the only game on the 3DS where I've run out the battery, including one time frantically buying an extra charger just to plug it in while staying at my sisters. I beat the DLC more or less. Maxed all the jobs. Did almost all of the quests. But I wasn't max level. Didn't have all the best equipment for every job. Haven't maxed all of the skills. I...almost have now. I mean, I didn't need to do it to play with my friend; I could already beat almost everything we fought in one hit, mine every fish, saw every ore, catch every tree. Make any recipe he could use for the next sixty hours. Give him a stack of healing items better than anything he could make without being in the post game. But instead of playing Steins;Gate while on break and Bayonetta when I got home I just played another thirty hours of Fat Nasty Life. The game that made me forget about MMOs (this game has a simple but very satisfying crafting loop, or more accurately a web) forget about Bayonetta twice, and forget about getting anything new done on my backlog for two weeks. I've done it all and will still play with this friend as he suffers through his own addiction with it because I can speed up his path but it looks like Bayonetta is going to slip pretty far into the backlog.
DQ VIII should take me a month or more, which will get me to the Switch Launch. Zelda might take a long time as I like to relax as I go through those games. By then Mario Kart will be out. Maybe I'll get deep into Isaac or Man God save me, Stardew Valley will be out. Oh and they're remaking my fourth favorite FE game in May. Oh, that will get me to E3 where they might announce dates on stuff like Xenoblade 2, a sequel to another game that owns my soul whenever I pick it up.
TL;DR. I will never play Bayonetta because Fantasy Life keeps getting in the way.
