I recently read a couple of articles on finishing games and backlogs. The first one was by Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster called “Let It Go: Finishing games is optional” which, unsurprisingly, suggests that you should stop playing a game if it’s no longer fun and not push through just to say you’ve finished it.
Having to see the ending for the sake of playing “in the right way” or chasing some muddled notion of getting “value for money” turns games into a chore at best, a task to be cleared before I can move on to something I’m looking forward to, and at worst into content to be consumed. In these sorry examples it doesn’t matter how I feel, so long as I’ve obediently devoured exactly as much product as my personal guilt or the hobby at large deems to be the correct amount.
Then I read “On Finishing (And Starting) Fewer Games” by Mike aka The Works of Egan which referenced Kimimi’s piece and talked about being more conservative with starting and finishing games to avoid overwhelm:
I need to have at least a little more discipline in sticking to what I’m playing, and not being swayed by marketing constantly. But I do also need to learn to let games go. To let games come and go! Putting a game down doesn’t mean putting it down forever (Heck, right now I’m playing something I stopped playing last February). And playing more than one game at a time is fine if you’re playing what you feel like playing and not biting off more than you can chew.
There were elements of both articles that hit home but it also made me realise that a lot of my recent experiences with games have felt significantly different.
New gear, new me
Last year I made a pledge to play more games. It wasn’t one of those new years resolutions where I set a target because I didn’t want to commit myself to anything. But I realised that I was on the precipice of gaming as a hobby rather than immersing myself so I wanted to dedicate myself to playing some new games. Up until 2025, most of my experiences had either been Pokémon-focused or meandering through different series without any taking a consistent hold. What helped was getting some new handhelds, such as the TrimUI Smart Pro and the Legion Go, so I could also enjoy the games whilst tweaking the graphical output.
Even before that though, in 2024, I’d started a VGM series called NOQUEST where I sampled the Dragon Quest series soundtracks as a way to reaffirm my enjoyment of the series. While I still haven’t played much beyond Dragon Warrior Monsters and bits of Dragon Quest VIII and Dragon Warrior Monsters 2, it allowed me to appreciate a lot more about the games. It also inspired me to get Dragon Quest XI (and that PS4 Pro) and of what I’ve played of that, I’ve enjoyed it too. But as you can see, I’ve drifted through without anything truly sticking.
So the logical thing to do was to start playing through every Final Fantasy game from the beginning.
What? Yes, despite everything I said, I felt like Final Fantasy was the series to sink my teeth into. Perhaps all that DQ music had desensitised me and I needed a break? Truth be told I had previously tried playing Final Fantasy VI in 2022 but didn’t get past the first hour and thought “why not start from the beginning?”. And with my trusty handhelds, I made it through I, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and IX last year. It was overall a great experience, with some games better than others but IX was the cream of the crop.
In the end, I completed 16 games in 2025 and left a few unfinished including Expedition 33. I felt a great sense of accomplishment having seen my way through so many games when the most I’d usually get through was one or two (and they’d often just be Pokémon games). And I honestly have the log part of my backlog to thank for that.
Backlog brings me closer to the gaming
I was skeptical about spreadsheet-ifying my gaming experience because it felt like an unnecessary abstraction. Was I going to end up spending longer on formatting a sheet with games and scores than playing the actual games? And how many games would I put on there? The answer to those questions was no and over 200.
Yes, over 200. Absolutely ridiculous number; I’ll never get through them. But that’s fine. I’m not phased by it one bit. I genuinely don’t see it as a daunting task nor do I plan to get through those games at any kind of pace. So why have that many in the first place? Well, I won’t take you on a road trip through my weird and wonderful neurodivergent brain but I get panicked if I have a list of media to get through and it gets too low. I feel like I’ll have run out and won’t be able to find things to replace it. That does sound like a problem but I can’t afford a therapist to dissect it so I’ll live with my digital lists of games.
The key thing about my backlog is that it actually draws me closer to gaming. I can look at the list and the consoles they’re on and wonder what the experience would be like (ordered by How Long To Beat completion time which, again, will make people wince and goes completely against the articles I quoted earlier on). And if I have time or I’m feeling curious, I’ll give it a go and see what it’s about. While I get choice paralysis in a supermarket, I don’t get that with games which seems weird but I’m okay with it (and no, this is not copium).
As a kid, video games seemed so cool but they were always out of reach. I got consoles far into their lifespan and couldn’t afford the new ones. I’d go to friends’ houses and live vicariously through their experiences; FIFA 2000 was reserved to a few hours at my friends house on a Saturday afternoon, eating Mars bars from his parents’ shop on the ground floor. Or playing Super Mario World and Super Soccer on my other friend’s SNES, feeling like a king. But all I could do was play on a PS1 in 2001 on a portable 70s black and white TV because I wasn’t allowed to plug it into the big one downstairs. I didn’t even get a Game Boy until 1998 and that was only because of Pokémon. Such was life.
Now I have the option of playing any older game I could ever want and that notion alone is comforting. The financial and moral restrictions are no longer there now that I’m an adult with a bit more disposable income after bills bills bills. But let me move onto my other point about finishing games.
Chore no more
Something I spoke about on Bluesky a few weeks ago was how cheating can be a good thing if used wisely. I don’t care for maxing stats to 999 and doing infinite damage with every hit and that kind of thing but maybe I want a cash injection to buy one or two items. Or maybe I don’t want to grind for hours so I’ll boost the EXP. I even save scum and use save states. The audacity! Having the ability to do that makes playing games and finishing them a lot easier for me and my time and, specifically, it means I can actually finish games.
I have a tendency to leave things incomplete. As a music producer, I have a lot of unfinished project folders and they’ll probably remain unfulfilled but with games where there is an end in sight, I can get myself there and not diminish the joy of the journey. Excluding where cheats have softlocked me1 or wiped a save file (not happened in a while because I’m more careful in my old age), I’ve not felt like cheats ruined my playthroughs of any games so far. The stories were still told, the cut scenes still continued, the graphics remained beautiful, the whimsy left intact.
Having that freedom to play a game on my terms and still immerse myself in the environments and personalities is what made finishing games so much better. There were of course frustrations but I did get there eventually. The landings nearly always stuck and the lead-ups were worth the wait.
However, that’s not to say every game I’ve finished was an enjoyable experience. A few Game Boy games I played last month were slogs and I went against what Kimimi said about dropping a game when it wasn’t fun anymore. I was too locked in and needed to get something out of it. Again, something for a therapist.
Games in bloom
I realise that I haven’t referred back to the garden analogy in the title. There’s a lot of talk about digital gardens on the internet. These are websites or parts of websites that host expressions of knowledge and note-taking, like how you’d plant seeds in a garden and tend to the flora that grows. For me, my backlog fills that niche. I can refer back to it, update whether I’ve finished a game, remove games that I don’t want there anymore, and have a log of what I’ve done to go with the memories I’ve created.
But I think between everyone else’s experiences, it all boils down to what we’re willing to tolerate, what we want out of the journeys, and how want to feel at the end. And that is going to be different for everyone. No matter how good or bad a game is, there’ll be someone who finds charm and enrichment by the end—if there is an end.
We can make our own endings and have tales to tell when we’re done. Or keep playing until we can’t anymore. I find that a lot of discourse focuses on the negative elements of video games: poor design choices, flawed mechanics, boring characters and stories, too many cut scenes. I get that we can’t all be pleased but why focus so much on the bad stuff when you can play a game you do like? Why do you need a remaster when you can (re)play the original? Or a sequel? Or a spiritual successor?
And that’s where I align with the ideas posed in the aforementioned articles. If we focused more on joy rather than completionism for the sake of it, we’d have a much better time and we’d learn to let things go when it truly didn’t serve us. In my case, my backlog and most of the games I’ve played have done that and viewing my backlog as a garden means I can continue tending to it no matter the weather.
- Funny story, I actually owned Final Fantasy VII on that PS1 I mentioned earlier and softlocked myself with my Xploder CD. But instead of restarting, I gave up and got rid of the game. It would take about 25 years before I played it again (properly) ↩︎