Brain Full of Games

Sorry for my disappearance; we had a horrible medical emergency in my family and things are really up in the air. Have not have the time, energy, or desire to play many games. But there really is not anything I can do but take things one day at a time and try to be helpful for whoever needs me, and be out of the way when that is the best way to show support… that being said, I did play a bit of Crystal in the last few days as I have prepared myself to wrap up this play through and move on to FireRed in honor of the recent Switch releases of FireRed and LeafGreen earlier this year.

While I am just about ready to move on to the next Gen, I haven’t quite finished writing up my retrospective on Pokémon Crystal. I still have some thoughts to gather. And, you know, it feels a bit silly to jump immediately back into Pokémon with a FireRed play through… but unfortunately for all you people who are surely sick of Pokémon after the last 30 years of being incapable of escaping its influence and infiltration of the normal, casual, and even extreme gamer’s life, I will never be free of my thoughts of Pokémon OR the year 1999. So we are all going to suffer together.

But as you can see from the title of the post, I am not going to subject you to my ramblings about Kanto or my feelings of intense frustration with Nintendo and Game Freak regarding their favorite money-printer just yet. I want to tell you about my mental illness surrounding the Blue Rose.

The Blue Rose, of course, does not exist. It does not have to. The idea that it represents is very, very real, and one of the most powerful forces in the world. It is what keeps me tethered when basically everything else in my life is worthless to me. It is love! The Blue Rose is found in stories from Twin Peaks to A Song of Ice and Fire. I assume the origin of the story is lost to time, but for a basic understanding of the legend, I would suggest reading this short fairy story by Maurice Baring.

What does this have to do with Animal Crossing? Well. To start; if you are not aware, in Animal Crossing games you can buy certain flowers of certain colors and plant them to grow lovely little garden or to line your cutesy little paths, but these are not the only flowers and colors available in the game. In New Horizons, for example, you can buy eight different types of flowers in about three colors each. I think these are always (or almost always) White, Red, and Yellow. Planting flowers of certain colors next to each other can produce not only genetic hybrids, but new colors. Those hybrids can further produce hybrids and crossing certain hybrids together will create a chain of new possible colors even beyond the simple Red + Yellow = Orange! For example: I start with White and Red Wind-flowers and plant them near each other with some gaps around them so new flowers have somewhere to spawn. The Whites breed with Whites to make Blue Wind-flowers, and the Red and White Wind-flowers breed to make Pink. Then, hopefully, the Blue and Pink will make Purple Wind-flowers. But it isn’t as simple as just letting them breed 3x, because flower genes are more complicated than that and it is actually quite difficult to get a Purple Wind-flower.

Now imagine this time 500x complexity and you have the path to creating a Blue Rose.

And I cannot think about anything else but getting the Blue Rose. my game is completely consumed by flower patches. I have put re-decorating, collecting furniture, playing the stalk market, and terraforming on hold while I time skip days and weeks at a time trying to get the right hybrids for the Blue Rose. I am STUCK. I cannot do it! I’ve ‘played’ 4 months in the past week because of all the time skipping. There are other flowers I have also not been able to spawn yet (like the Purple Wind-flower I mentioned above), but really I do NOT CARE. I don’t even know why I want the Blue Rose so badly, since it really won’t fit with my Japanese village theme… I guess I am just a slave of love. I am a romantic, I love love, I love being in love, and I really love my cat. I had to fit her into this rant somehow. I live a life full of love I guess and I want my favorite symbol of it in my stupid control freak furry god simulator.

I don’t know what else to say about it. I found that picture above online because I still do not have my own. I probably won’t talk about New horizons again until I do have some, and I’m worried it might be months before that happens.

Anyway, apologies for my long absence. My posting schedule is going to be a little random for now as I get my thoughts down whenever I can. Generally, things are more stable. But now the difficult part: recovery. And we wait and see.