Game Started and Trying Out an Easy Way to Pick What Game(s) to Play (and why haven't I done this earlier?)

So I'm really bad at picking what game(s) to play next. I know a lot of people can very easily go "I want to play X" or at the very least "I want to play this sort of game". However, I very rarely ever feel like that. I just want to play games. I have games. What game? I could play this, or that, or that other one... and then I get tired and end up playing nothing. I have made weird arbitrary systems to pick stuff, but I usually end up abandoning them since they tend to take up too much time.

Then I discovered HWTB's Random button. I've tried using random # picking before, but only on Backloggery (while I like the site, I don't think it works super well for me) and with my own attempts at making giant weird spreadsheets that was just a pain.

So yeah random! I think I'm going to try this out for a bit maybe. I have some guidelines for myself though so I don't get tempted to just endlessly reroll and achieve nothing.

The Guidelines
- If there is something specific I want to play, just play it! Probably obvious but I still need to tell myself that anyway so I don't feel bad about it. I rarely get the want to play something specific anyway though ha.

- If it's a series, just play whatever I need/want to play next in that series. So basically don't play the last game in a story heavy trilogy of games if I haven't played the first two.

- If the game can't be played, give it a good try to fix it, but don't stress out about it if I can't. I am very uncertain about how well some of the weird janky games will run, so there's probably going to be a few that refuse to work. I also have a few games where I don't have the system to run it yet. Depending on why I can't play it, I might keep it in the backlog for later, move it to a separate list temporarily, or retire the game.

- If I'm playing multiple games I can sometimes skip the game roll. I very likely will end up playing multiple big games at a time (rotating between games I'm currently playing tends to work out better for me), but I will not play multiple games from the same series unless the two games are extremely different. I'm not playing two mainline Final Fantasy games, for example, but I might be ok with a mainline game and one of the spin-offs. I also will probably skip a game if I already have another game going for that particular console. I don't really like juggling multiple discs/carts on a system, and a change of digital scenery is nice anyway. Other than those two scenarios however, I want to actually play the game that was rolled!

I might also alternate between rolling on my full backlog and on my "want to play soon" list. Not making it a rule or anything though, and it kinda depends if HLTB's random button even does that, or if it only does random on the backlog list.

Anyway, maybe that seems like I'm over complicating things, but it's much more difficult for me to just do "one more roll" of the random thing if I have very concrete rules for myself. And if I'm not enjoying doing at some point? No worries! I'll just drop it and move on. Games are fun! I just want to try this so I actually get myself around to playing the games and enjoying them.

Ok that was a lot of preamble.

Here's roll #1!

So the roll was Ys IX! I have only played a few Ys games, Ys I & II and Ys Origin, but I really enjoyed what I've played. However, both games are on the older side, and Ys IX is the newest in the series, so I wasn't really sure what to expect.

I did get to play around 1 hour of it so far and I've just gotten to Chapter 2. I'm not super sure how I feel about it quite yet, as I still feel like in in the "learning all of the mechanics" type phase in the game. It had a TON of opening story stuff, which wasn't hugely interesting for me. I think there were a few times that were supposed to be little callbacks to previous games, but since I haven't played any of the games they would be referencing, they were lost on me lol.

I have gotten a chance to do a bit of combat, but nothing outside of tutorial stuff. Still, the combat feels nice so far. Nice, quick, and snappy! I do get a little confused on what buttons do what, as it uses a lot of buttons on the controller, but I feel like that's to be expected when starting a new game.

Gripes so far:
- It looks pretty dreary, and not in a particularly interesting way. Lots of dark and gray and more gray. Not really a fan of that.
- Looks like a big part of the game will involve defending a crystal thingy... I don't really like defend the thing type tasks, and I wasn't much of a fan of the one defending mission I had to do so far. Hopefully it's not too frequent, or it gets more interesting.

Liking so far:
- Like I said previously, the snappy combat. It also has quite a few movement options, which means I get to zoom around. Always a plus in my book lol.
- The music is great! Not really surprised about that though, since Falcom tends to make awesome music for their games.
- For how big the game's main town is and how Falcom is a fairly small dev team (at least I think so?), the game runs really smooth. I don't tend to notice that sort of thing, but I certainly did here. I was particularly surprised about that since I'm playing on a regular PS4, and not the Pro. It does sometimes make my PS4 sound like it's a jet plane taking off, but that hasn't been too bad so far.

So its a bit of a mixed reception from me so far, but I'm looking forward to when the tutorialy stuff finishes up and the game opens up.