Things "accomplished" this weekend:

• met up with friends for a Gloomhaven session
• hot pot dinner with more friends!
• Kingdom Hearts 3 play-time
• dim sum outing with people
• returned library book/picked up on-hold book
• picked up luggage from family friend
• moved Kira and myself to the parents' home

I'll have some time to clean my apartment tomorrow, pick up tampons for Joy and Alison, and go to try and feed Grandma.

In unrelated news...

I DID NOT PAY $80+ DOLLARS FOR EEYORE TO NOT BE IN THE LATEST KINGDOM HEARTS GAME!!!!!

I realized today that I have lived just over half of my life in between the time when I first played Kingdom Hearts in high school, to when I officially started Kingdom Hearts III today.

Half of my life. I'll let you do the math.

I have never been a dedicated video game enthusiast. I have enjoyed the occasional multiplayer game because it's fun to play with friends, especially when things descend into utter chaos as they are wont to do! But it has always been hard for me to find the motivation to play single-player RPG-style games because I am: a) not very good at video games and b) not that inclined to invest a lot of time into grinding. But Kingdom Hearts hit that rare sweet spot for me (and many others, seemingly) of being a dynamic game that required only slightly more skill than just random button-mashing, had some pretty darn cute original character designs, and appealed to my hopelessly Disney-loving heart.

And I mean, it was mostly the Disney-nostalgia. The storyline in the original game was fun, but by the time I failed through a very short portion of the "Chain of Memories" game and decided not to continue, I was already going "I don't care much about this weird story-telling, I just want more Disney!" The more the team dug their heels into these incomprehensible storylines by releasing all sorts of games that were most decidedly not the third (official) installment of the franchise, the more I had convinced myself that even if they got around to finally releasing it, I was well beyond the point of wanting to play it. Sure, I'd forgiven them for foisting an unwanted Roxas on me in the first hours of Kingdom Hearts II (full disclosure: I nearly cried when his part of the story was over because I'm not heartless, ba-dum-cha!) I even managed my way into finishing the game 10 years after a false-start (see: my refusal to spend a lot of time grinding and properly leveling up Sora would come to bite me in the ass, who knew?) But that was it, I was done. I mean, what kind of audience is going to stick around when they'd been promised a follow-up that never materialized after over a decade?


Well! Joke's on me. I put out a call to friends to see who would be willing to let me play it on their game consoles within a few days of its release. Nostalgia has a strong pull, okay? The friend who did ultimately let me commandeer his PS4 for the night commented that he wonders if there's even an audience for it after all this time. To which I countered that if it could draw me - a self-proclaimed non-gamer - back into the fold, I can only assume it was able to do so successfully with many others.

Anyway, here's hoping the game will live up to the kind of anticipation that follows a wait like this. 

And Eeyore had better be in this game, is all I'm sayin'.