The Console I Never Quite Got Around To

The last console I bought was the Nintendo Wii. I won’t belabor what happened, except to say it disappointed me so completely—the motion controls, the casual-game ecosystem, the whole attitude of the thing—that I essentially walked away from console gaming entirely. Steam eventually picked up the pieces.

But the PlayStation 3 kept orbiting my peripheral vision. I wanted a proper JRPG again, something vast and slow and operatic—Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Persona. Those games don’t translate to a small screen. Playing Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger on a phone feels like watching a film through a keyhole. The scale is wrong. The atmosphere dissolves.

Every time I got close to buying a PS3, though, the rumors would start up about a successor, and buying a dying console is its own specific kind of defeat. So I waited, and Sony announced the PlayStation 4 with a press conference in February 2013, and I watched it hoping to finally be convinced to come back.

Part of me genuinely wanted back in. The other part kept doing the math: console, then a 4K television to do it any justice, then a yacht, a castle made of solid gold, and bottled immortality while I was at it. The numbers never quite worked out.