As the sort who occasionally suffers from bouts of nostalgia, and also with an unexpected, if short-lived, glut of free time, I began playing through Final Fantasy X again last week. Which, you know, is good; it’s still a well put together game, though I find memories of X-2 lingering around locations and souring the experience a little bit.

One of my roommates offered up the suggestion that I played the game through to %100 completion. I gave him a look, a look of contempt, and then reminded him (and, in turn, anyone who hasn’t played the game) that there is a gauntlet of optional bosses who have ten times as much hit points, a ridiculously high speed of attack, instant kill everyone attacks, a squadron of tanks and an arsenal of ICBMs at their disposal. Attempting this would require hours upon hours of leveling tedium, just to have a shot at it. And we laughed, as you do, and promptly dropped the subject.

Now, today has been a slow day at work, and in an effort to fill time, I thought to myself “Hey, you, self, let’s check GameFAQs just for the hell of it, eh? I mean, how hard can it really be?” Five minutes of reading convinced me that it was, in fact, completley impossible for anyone with any sort of responsibilities to attend to ever. So, all well and good, and I’m just about to close the web browser, when I see…

The NSGNSNCNONENNENBB Challenge Guide.

For people who can’t pronounce this (anyone) and can’t figure out what the hell it stands for (also anyone), and are also too lazy to click on the link (much less than anyone), let me summarize the list of the things this particular personal add-on to Final Fantasy X dissallows:

-No Sphere Grid

-No Summoning

-No Customizing

-No Overdrives

-No Escape

-No [No Encounters]

-No Blitzball

So, we’ve got essentially a first level party, with stock equipment, who can’t use any special attacks, can never avoid a fight and… well, I mean, some people would have no problem with ever having to hear the name of FFX’s sports minigame ever again, but it does cut out an easy (relative to the rest of this) way to get a bunch of items.

The entire strategy when playing the game this way centers around very slowly stealing a billion items from enemies, which can then be used to damage them veeeery slowly over time. Now, perhaps I am jaded, or getting old, or not suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, but I don’t see the point of tormenting oneself for hours at a time just for the sake of, you know, being l33t.

I mean, really, at this point, there’s nothing left in the game to possibly remove to make it more impossible; in order to be more extreme, you’d have to stretch things out into real world terms, like a NCBNTNS (no caffienated beverages no tobacco no sleeping ) challenge. You know, because what we need more of is people dying from marathon gaming.

So, the key question: Why the hell would someone put themselves through this agonizing gamut of frustration and resetting? My aforementioned roommate put it thusly: “My e-testicles are bigger than your e-testicles! And my sphere grid is HUGE!” Which is expected, because, you know, he’s fantastically vulgar. I don’t know if I’m convinced, though there have been other cases where “challenges” are posted as a way of flaunting the size of one’s e-dick (check the level one ozma faq), but I’m not sure if I’m convinced. I think it’s equally possible that these are the sort of people who just can’t make thier lives complicated enough. Like, why walk to the store with your feet when you can do it with your hands? Except that you won’t accidentally fall on your face playing FFX. Maybe it’s a bit of both.