RP-Gee Enough Already, My Brain Is About To Explode And Farming Is The Answer

I’m a huge fan of RPGS – they’ve been my gaming bread and butter since I was a kid – and 2023 was a fantastic year for them. I’ve been a completionist all my life, and while I used to wonder who on earth had time to poke around in every corner of mega-dense games in search of each tiny thing for the few collectibles I couldn’t find on my own, now that I work for TheGamer, I am that person. I’ve worked here for almost two years now, and in that time, I’ve gotten to submerge myself entirely in new entries to some of my all-time favorite series – I guided the heck out of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom back in May, Persona 5 Tactica absorbed my November, and I was in charge of our Persona 3 Reload coverage in February.

I’m also not the only one who’s spent the last few months drowning in RPGs here at TheGamer. In that same timespan, I’ve watched my colleagues cover Baldur’s Gate 3, Prince of Persia, Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo 4, Starfield, two Final Fantasy launches, two Like a Dragon titles, and so many more already, and the deluge isn’t done yet. Helldivers 2 and Unicorn Overlord are still going strong, and then there’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Elden Ring DLC, Shin Megami Tensei, and so many more that are still coming our way in 2024.

Whose Idea Was It To Frontload 2024 With RPGs?

I can only take so many hundred hour RPGs.

Me, though? As much as I love RPGs, I’m ready for a break, because too much of anything, no matter how much you love it, is too much, and I fear I’ve reached that point with RPGs already this year, but it’s only March. Even as someone who loves the genre, and has always been excited for the next big game to come along and consume my life for a few weeks, I don’t really want to quest anymore at the moment. My colleagues and I joked about how many farming sims I was in charge of here between my heavy RPG adventures – Sun Haven, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, Fae Farm, and My Time at Sandrock, to name a few – but after a few months of the RPG onslaught, I’m kind of finding myself yearning for the fields again.

So many of the farming sim games I like usually begin with a burnt out character around my age deciding they’re fed up with the capitalistic grind and departing for a far off land for a life of quiet simplicity, bent on falling in love with a charming neighbor and growing a bunch of crops. And though I definitely don’t have it in me to do the manual labor of owning a real farm, nor do I care for the smell of real livestock, I get it.

In Tears of the Kingdom, I quested across a Hyrule bigger than ever before, climbing over mountains and battling my way beneath the surface down the Depths to take on Ganondorf, risen from the dead to bring mayhem to the land yet again. In Persona 5 Tactica, I teamed up with the Phantom Thieves to battle our way across intricately stylized worlds to help their new friends, Erina and Toshiro, figure out their place in the twisted worlds we landed in. Persona 3 Reload took me almost two months and 186 hours to finally beat, spending over one real-time week in the game making friends, climbing Tartarus, and taking on the Dark Hour before I even met Nyx face-to-face to try and save the world – and I still missed finishing few social links along the way!

What’s on my docket for the next few weeks, though? Stardew Valley’s next update on March 19 is sending me right back to Pelican Town again to see all the new additions, and given that it’s been a second since Sebastian and I went on a date, I’m looking forward to hanging with him again at the new festivals in his cute new outfits. Princess Peach: Showtime comes out on March 22, and I’ve already written about how excited I am to step back into Peachy’s high heels and show the Mushroom Kingdom all the cool things she can be with her new transformation powers. I’m heading to PAX East after that at the end of the month, and based on my schedule for the weekend, I’m sure I’ll come home excited for a whole wave of fun, adorable new titles.

I don’t know quite yet what my next hundred-hour RPG will be, but what I do know is that I’m excited to retire to the countryside for a quiet few weeks until it finds me and drags me back out to my life of questing once again.

2024's Upcoming Deluge Of RPGs Will Be The End Of Me

I love it. I hate it. Someone help me.