I’m abysmal at finishing things. Inevitably, everyone who suggests I read a book or, God forbid, watch a TV show will be immediately disappointed when I anxiously start babbling about the fact that I still have to finish Buffy, or Daredevil (not Born Again, the original show), or She-Ra (not the original, the reboot), or the completely random and obscure 80s sci-fantasy space western anime I picked up on a whim last week, or the show everyone says is fantastic but to me feels like the equivalent of watching paint dry. I have three books on pause right now (The Two Towers, The Last Unicorn, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), not including the one I’m technically still reading (Legends & Lattes) and the series of manga I’m actually reading instead of reading that book (Fullmetal Alchemist). And the real problem is not that I can’t finish anything, it’s that I want to finish everything.
Realistically, there’s no feasible way to watch every TV show on Earth. That’s a concrete statement. Yet somehow, my warped little mind shrieks at the idea of not trying to complete that impossible task. Every time someone I love tells me about something they love, I want to experience it. I want to know what connected with them. I want to learn more about them through the fact that they really like the objectively terrible Star Wars prequel movies.
As bad as this problem is with my book-reading and TV-watching habits, it’s infinitely worse with my video game-playing habit.
For one thing, I’m terrible at video games. I have awful hand-eye coordination, likely because I was raised on Pokémon games rather than ones that require actual tactile skill to play, but even in my Pokémon days, I was liable to get distracted and forget I was playing the game. I would cry when my Pokémon fainted (which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a core mechanic of the game) to the point my brother had to help me beat the final stage of Pokémon Emerald by letting my Azumarill faint. The few times I tried to play something slightly more complicated, I confused myself completely and gave up within an hour. I attempted The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a game I borrowed from a cousin to run on our geriatric Wii console, and failed to get past the literal first mission in the game. It was a mission to save a cat from a tree, meant to teach the player how the controls work, and I completely failed to find the cat, which is kind of like taking a leap of faith across a 6-inch gap, somehow ramming your foot directly down into the earth, and snapping your ankle like the world’s stupidest horse.
Still, I couldn’t give up on gaming. I’m persistent. Determined. Stubborn. The world’s stupidest horse. Something about the medium drew me in. It was entirely unlike anything else I could get my hands on, and I was starting to get bored with the books in my school library. The sheer breadth of art styles and genre differences yawned before me as I gaped, afraid to look the abyss in the eye.
In 2019, we got our first proper gaming console: a Nintendo Switch. Prior to this console’s introduction, the gaming ecosystem of our house predicated on our father raiding the lost and found at his work to give us a single GameBoy Advance, the single copy of Pokémon Red that someone had left with the console, the almost-certainly fake Pokémon games our mother bought in an Ebay lot, and the aforementioned geriatric Wii, for which we had no games except the Pokémon Rumble demo, Guitar Hero (minus the guitar controller), Just Dance (who cares what number), and Netflix. Which isn’t a game. Our home internet was awful, so we couldn’t rely on online play to supplement any of our experiences, either.
My siblings and I saved up for months, pooling our money together for just enough to buy handhelds with a backlit screen: 2DSes for my sister and I, and my brother’s coveted 3DS XL. His screen was so much bigger than ours. We spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing Pokemon games together (the only kind we were really interested in). On one memorable occasion, my brother and I spent six solid hours curled up beneath our father’s office desk while he did paperwork, trying to figure out how to find an incredibly rare Pokémon (eventually, he found one; I wasn’t so lucky).
Our 3DSes were consoles we were incredibly proud of. We considered them truly ours, since we worked for the money to buy them, but they had limitations. We had to buy all the games ourselves, which meant we only had a collective total of four or five games, all of them Pokemon titles. In contrast, the Switch came with an impressive swath of games, and for the first time, our parents would foot the bill for most of the games.
They bought us three games on Christmas Day; symbolically, there was one for each of us, but the first game we all wanted to play was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I was the only one who knew anything about the gameplay. I had gotten into Let’s Plays on YouTube to compensate for my own lack of skill and access to games. Together, we took the leap into the most gorgeous game any of us had ever seen. We spent hours that Christmas Day sitting in the living room staring in awe at the TV screen.
To this day, I haven’t finished Breath of the Wild. It’s been six years since we started that game and I still haven’t finished it. Not necessarily for lack of trying—I have over 80 hours in the game and I absolutely love playing it. Another game I got on Switch called Spiritfarer has suffered a similar fate; I’ve started it 3 separate times on 3 separate consoles (family Switch, PC, and my own recently-acquired Switch Lite) and have spent a combined 60 hours playing it. Not a single one of the saves are completed.
My brother was always better at games than I was. He just got them in a way that I didn’t. He blew through Steam games when we built ourselves PCs for Christmas in high school, and in an attempt to keep up with him, I bought game after game, hoping I just hadn’t found the one that would magically make me good at them yet. He would try and coach me through games, unaware that these well-intentioned tips were just making me feel more and more incompetent. Eventually, I gave up. I didn’t finish a single game in high school, though I bought more than my fair share of them (a Summer Sale shopping spree from which my Steam library has yet to recover). I resigned myself to exclusively watching Let’s Plays of games I really wanted to play, because, well, I was never going to play them, let alone finish them. I just wasn’t built for this hobby.
I’m not sure exactly what changed. If anything, I think even my own self-deprecation couldn’t get rid of how much video games interest me. Even after I gave up, after I used my now-dusty computer exclusively for writing and using Discord, I would stare longingly at my Steam library and wish I had enough time or energy or skill to play anything.
I was home for winter break in my freshman year of college, a great time for unsuspecting young adults to get hit with an overwhelming tsunami of nostalgia. I saw my brother’s childhood 3DS just sitting in the dusty plastic drawer we stuffed all our games and cables into. Its black plastic was scratched like it had been in the possession of a bobcat—of course, it had been the property of a 12-year-old boy who carried it around in the pocket of his basketball shorts 24/7, which is comparable. I shot him a text, asking if it was functional, and he gave a lukewarm answer.
“It’s gross,” he said, “and I think the touchscreen is broken. Maybe the buttons, too.”
I stared at the little console. Gross I could work with—I could clean it easily, with some supplies. The touchscreen and buttons were trickier. I would have to replace those, and I wasn’t sure where I’d get the parts.
I blinked. That was a big jump from “I haven’t played a proper video game in about 3 years” to “I can probably fix a 3DS with YouTube videos and online guides.” Was I even going to use this thing?
Well. Nobody could use it the way it was. The thought made me sad. This faithful companion that had given us so much joy was just rotting in a drawer. Our mother would probably pawn it on Facebook Marketplace in a few months and it’d be picked up by some asshole scalper wanting to sell it for 200 bucks.
Phone in one hand, crusty 3DS in the other, I texted my brother again.
“Can I try to fix it?”
“Yeah, whatever.” His response was characteristically nonchalant.
I did monstrous amounts of research before I cracked that thing open. I ordered a repair and cleaning kit with Christmas gift money. I watched hours of YouTube repair videos, troubleshooting every possible thing that could be wrong with it. I learned what a ribbon cable was and how to avoid breaking its clasp. I learned how to homebrew the console—basically, how to install custom software that overrides Nintendo’s restrictions and restores access to the defunct eShop feature of the console.
I was terrified the whole way through. I didn’t want to break the poor thing. I still didn’t even know if I’d use it, but I knew that I wanted to. My game tastes had expanded beyond Pokemon. I knew there were games I’d love to play, and somehow, I thought that if I could just fix this abused little brick, I’d be able to play them. I stopped thinking about whether or not I was going to use it after a while and I focused solely on fixing it.
After about a month and a half, with some lucky help from a new classmate who lent me a broken 3DS he had for parts, I got it all working. In the end, I had taken the buttons out, cleaned them, replaced the shoulder buttons, replaced the bent back plate, swapped the grimy touchscreen out, and broken the camera (not an intended fix, it’s just really hard not to break the camera when repairing the touchscreen). I cleaned the whole thing and held my breath as I started it up, waiting for the little blue light to flick on.
When it did, I was overjoyed. I’d put so much time and effort into fixing something I would have called a lost cause when I was 12.
I texted my brother again, looking for permission to homebrew it. Homebrewing is quite safe nowadays, but there’s always a risk of bricking the system if you’re not careful, so I wanted to double check.
To my surprise, his response was, “you can have it.”
“Really? You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I mean, I was gonna tell you that if you fixed it, you could have it.”
I had a 3DS. I had a console of my own, the first since I was 13 years old. Not only that, but it was one I could take with me and play between classes, or in bed, or in my house’s communal area. I felt the yawning chasm of possibility again, and this time, I took the fastest path straight down. I leapt right into using the device I’d spent so long working on.
At first, I used it to play games I played in childhood. It was a good test for my repairs, but it didn’t appeal to me the way it had when I was 11. Pokémon Moon was fun, don’t get me wrong, but after all that research I did to fix the thing, I realized there were more games I was interested in; for one thing, the Legend of Zelda series.
After failing to get started in Twilight Princess and failing to finish in Breath of the Wild, I was scared of the Zelda series. In my mind, they just weren’t meant for me, but, well, I’d already done one thing that used to be impossible for me. Surely now that I was an adult, I'd be able to kick Ganon’s ass at least once, and there was a title I had my eye on. When I was 11, one of our family friends had a tricked-out 3DS, and one of the games he had was The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. I spent a good hour sitting in the yard trying to get as far as possible before he came back for his 3DS. Something about that game captivated me—the bright colors, the fun music, the... deeply melancholy reflections on good and evil. All things designed for normal 11-year-olds to be normal about.
I downloaded it in February of last year. I started playing it the day after I downloaded it, when I had some free time after an exhausting class, and I had a great time. The puzzles were challenging but not impossible. I’ve had a hang up about looking up walkthroughs for years, a remnant of my brother’s attitude towards them, and to my surprise, when I looked up a walkthrough for the first dungeon, I was actually using the right solution to the puzzle, I just wasn’t timing it exactly right. That walkthrough saved me a lot of wasted time; since I thought what I was doing was wrong, I would have just kept throwing things at the wall until something stuck.
Slowly, I became more receptive to the concept of walkthroughs. Most of the time when I was stuck on a puzzle, I had already figured out how to do the puzzle, I just didn’t know some small detail, like how to time it or that I needed a specific item. It was nice to explore the world with the knowledge that I could solve the puzzles, and if I got stuck, there was no harm in looking something up.
And then I climbed to the top of the Tower of Hera, where the first proper boss fight was. This boss, whose name I don’t know, was supposed to be simple. I got the gist of how to beat it very quickly—if there’s one thing Zelda games are good at, it’s telegraphing their bosses’ weak points. I had to hit the red gem on this weird hamburger-worm looking thing’s tail until it died. Simple. Self-explanatory.
I rage quit after the fifth time dying to this boss. It was absolutely a skill issue, but if there’s one thing I knew, it was that I wanted to have fun playing this game. If I wasn’t having fun, I wasn’t going to keep playing, I promised myself that. I decided to come back to the game later.
It was a full year later before I got around to picking the game back up. Whoops.
Last month, I was feeling the Zelda itch, for reasons I didn’t know (later, my friend Liz told me it was Zelda’s 40th anniversary, which was a nice moment), and, even though I was nervous I wouldn’t be able to beat that stupid boss, I decided I’d try again. If I didn’t try again, it wouldn’t get done (obviously), and I wanted to finish a Zelda game.
I died once. Fine, sure, I expected that. It had been a year since I last played. I needed a second to warm up.
Again. Okay. Cool. I got closer that time. Third time’s the charm, anyway.
Third time was not the charm. Time to start punching walls! Wait, no, don’t. Don’t do that. I’m having fun. This is fun. Just go again.
Fourth time was the worst yet. That’s not a saying, but it should be. At this point, I pulled up a video to see if I was missing anything about this boss. I got an eyeful of a comment section insisting the boss wasn’t even hard.
Fifth time wasn’t better. My fun was waning fast. I got up to do my laundry and stew in the knowledge that it was a skill issue.
But I didn’t put the game down for good. After I put my laundry in, I came back to the 3DS, sitting on the black table in my living room. I took a deep breath and inspected the contents of my inventory. Maybe if I nabbed more items, I would have less trouble with this fight.
Somehow, I knew this was my only shot to beat this boss. If I gave up again, I wouldn’t be able to gather the courage to come back. The fight was tough. I burned through all the healing items I’d prepared, and on my last bit of health, I got the boss in the red. I just had to clutch up and hit it a few more times. Nothing in my entire life has felt as good as hitting that stupid burger snake so hard it died. I felt like I had just beat Dark Souls. I got up and nearly yelled before my rational brain caught up to my ape brain and reminded me that all my housemates were asleep.
I haven’t finished A Link Between Worlds. I still haven’t finished Spiritfarer, or Breath of the Wild, or many of the other longer games I want to finish eventually. But just last weekend, I beat the final (and most frustrating) dungeon in A Link Between Worlds. I’ve been regularly playing for a month now, and my work is about to pay off. It feels a little silly to say that I’m nervous to face Ganon, but I’ve never faced him before! I really feel like Link, a humble blacksmith’s apprentice who oversleeps thrust into greatness by circumstances he fears. Ganon is an unknown to me—not only is he the final boss, he’s also the last obstacle preventing me from finishing my first Zelda game, and my first 3DS game in nearly a decade.
I started playing Hades with my housemates after they heard me swearing at a game made for 10-year-olds. One of them asked me to do it, giggling, a wicked smile on her face. Hades is a notoriously difficult game. We’re all aware that I’m not going to be great or even good at it anywhere near immediately, but I gave it a shot anyway the other day, and I found it surprisingly fun. I’ve had this game in my library for years at this point. It’s almost unthinkable that I’m actually playing it now. Who knows if I’ll finish it, but I know I’ll keep playing it until I’m not having fun anymore, and it’ll wait for me until I have the space to finish it properly.
I know I can do that now. There’s no rush to finish everything. I can play however the hell I want to play. However bad I am at it, it’ll make me feel better than scrolling on TikTok.
This is a bit of a mortifying one for me to put on this site. It’s still in the process of revision after workshop feedback from my classmates. It’s my first stab at creative nonfiction (you’ll notice this is a theme across my portfolio on this site), and it’s a bit more personal than I usually like to get. However, it’s important for me to get out of my comfort zone sometimes (as it is for all writers), so I bit the bullet and kept this unrefined version published. It’s not ideal, but until I get around to fixing it up later this week, it’ll stick around. Creative nonfiction is tricky for me. I tend to forget details and descriptions, sticking solely to the most basic recollection of events in dry sequential order. I’m going to refocus the piece as best I can and spend more time developing my narrator’s relationships with other characters in the next draft.