Taro, 2017 | Playstation 4 | 4 min read | Minor Spoilers

“I’m not sure you can call it one of your favourite games of all time if you haven’t finished playing it yet.” my partner says during a nonchalant conversation we have one afternoon, I think about Backloggd. “You never know, the ending can ruin something entirely.”

If you’ve already read my first Status Update (I know, cringe), then you know I only got to about the final leg of 9S’s first portion of the game, as well as two non-joke endings. I had to put it on hiatus it because I moved back to university and I was playing on my brother’s PlayStation 4, something I couldn’t bring with me to my halls even if I had a TV screen to hook it up to. But I already was telling anyone who cared to know that it was one of my favourite games. I’ll be honest, that’s mostly due to its mesmerizing environment that massively appealed to me as well as characters I found instantly loveable with equally as cool designs. It also has the option to use plug-ins that makes a poor gamer like me still find lots of enjoyment and satisfaction out of participating in an immersive storytelling experience, despite entering with no real skills or experience beyond Nintendo DS titles and being a rubbish Player 2 in Star Wars Battlefront.

Three years later, and with slightly more of an education in Yoko Taro titles due to my actual video game enthusiast boyfriend, I found a few moments to pick up the game again. “I don’t have much left.” I kept reiterating to him whenever we bought it up, “I just have A2’s section to do, so I’m like 2/3’s the way through.” My boyfriend (who had now played the game for himself and in a desperate attempt to not give away the naiveté of my statement) just kept prompting me to get back to it. “The ending is the best bit,” he was saying, “Like, I enjoyed playing through the first two endings, but it wasn’t until I got to A2’s part that I was like oh, this is really good.”

This wasn’t entirely new information to me, since I’d had a brief conversation with a stall holder at a Comic Con who’s favourite character was A2 – in a pitying sense I got the impression – so I knew there had to be something coming.

Although, you can imagine my surprise and almost horror when I reboot up the game and – while on call to my boyfriend who is flabbergasted at how I manage to have roughly fifty hours on record and am somehow not to A2’s portion yet – I complete 9S / 2B’s final sections. I was happy to discover that the controls were easy enough to pick up on again and I finish off what is a particularly heart-wrenching section of the game. Then I am greeted with the opening credits of the game.

I was ✨ shooketh ✨.

That’s right folks, apparently the first fifty hours that I have been enjoying so much to credit it as one of my favourite pieces of media was more-or-less an extended prologue to the actual game. I had dropped off three years ago at probably the exact moment that everything hits the fan.

In the interest of being spoiler-free, I won’t go into detail of the specifics of what goes down, but I’m hoping other Yoko Taro fans besides my partner can get a laugh out of my extreme naiveté and irony of leaving my “favourite” video game at the exact moment when it apparently begins for real.

Now all I have to wonder is if that one stall holder from about two years ago watched me walk away from his stall that was selling YorHa stickers and thinking “She has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, silly thing.”

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