Replaying Old Video Games as Self-Care

It started with the innocent discovery of the Kingdom Hearts bundle on my fiancé’s Xbox One.

Growing up, our gaming consoles were shared by the family, but technically came as Christmas and birthday gifts to my younger brother. So when I left, they stayed.

What’s one thing an AmeriCorps-then-graduate-school budget doesn’t tend to accommodate? A $300 gaming console. For years when I got the gaming itch, I turned to the only game my PC could (basically) handle — The Sims.

And then, I moved in with an Xbox One. (Okay, technically I moved in with my fiancé, but this isn’t about him.)

Since they date back to high school, most of my video game memories are linked with trips to GameStop. Perusing the shelves lined with games in their cases remains my association with the search for my next gaming experience, so I’ll admit I feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer potential of at-your-fingertips downloads.

Maybe it’s due to this sense of overload, or because of my gaming gap, but when I turn to video games, it’s often for nostalgia. As much as I want to reintroduce myself to what I’m sure is a new, cool, exciting world of gaming, right now I’m drawn to pick up where I left off.

I often hear people talk about re-watching their favorite TV shows in times of stress or when they need something comforting. I think people like the predictability of knowing how something is going to end, especially in times where life feels terrifyingly unpredictable. Like during a global pandemic, for example.

When I watch something I know by heart, I can step back into familiar territory and know that the characters will do just what they’ve always done, in the world they’ve always inhabited. It’s comforting to have that level of certainty exist somewhere, even if it’s just on a screen.

Unlike yet another rewatch of The Office, though, replaying video games brings with it the possibility of something familiar but not identical. I can make new choices, try new techniques, level up characters in different ways.

That, and… as much as I loved these games, I didn’t actually ever finish most of them. I can count the number of games I played through to the end credits on one hand, and the rest hang over me as a shameful regret.

That is, until now. When it occurred to me I might be able to buy these games again, for our newer console, I realized that I — and the power of the internet strategy guides — could finally finish these games.

I could combine the nostalgia of revisiting with old friends like Sora, Kairi, Yuna, and Wakka with a sense of accomplishment at finally discovering what lay past the points of no return I’d hit in the past.

Like this week, when I finally reached the boss fight with Yunalesca in Final Fantasy X, where I’d gotten so hopelessly stuck I gave up entirely. Because I re-played the whole game in anticipation of this moment, I came into it more than prepared, and beat her on the first try.

For me, revisiting these games is the perfect balance of familiar comfort and the entertainment of something new. I know what I’m getting in terms of characters and what I remember of the overall plot, but the gameplay itself requires an active participation that watching TV does not. It keeps me occupied, more completely swaddled in that security of the familiar.

Which is why, in spite of hoping to read more this year, I find myself returning again and again to Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts. Returning, in other words, to worlds with predictable rules and parameters of possibility.