"Oh, Mediocre Game, I Just Can't Quit You!"

[Satan's Onion]

So lately I've been playing a lot of this one game called Nostalgia. I can just run around and level up, grind for skill points, go buy stuff, go do sidequests, and occasionally advance the plot for hours at a time if I let myself.

The thing is though...it's not that great a game. The sidequests and battle mechanics are kind of ehhhh, the environments are uninspired, the music doesn't really stir my soul, and the dialogue is frankly awful. (There're four main characters--an upper-class Brit, a lower-class Brit, a Frenchwoman, and someone who turns out to be from the realm of the gods. But when they don't all sound like precisely the same modern American teenager, they have Chrono Cross-level text "accents". I seriously think I could write better than this game.)

But I just don't want to stop playing it...and I don't have the faintest idea why. Has anyone else ever had something like that happen--where a game just kind of keeps you playing despite the fact that objectively, you know it's kinda crap?