I tried to play Vagrant Story, I really did, but...

The buttocks were so big, and the graphics were so bad, and everyone talked like characters in a bad comic book. I had to stop. I'm sorry.

See, HC handed Vagrant Story to me a week or two ago. "Play this," she said. So I dithered. Because, you see, Our Hero is on the front cover, posing in all his manly glory; and right below the title, shining like the twin moons of Justice and Righteousness, were his buttocks. His naked, tanned buttocks. He was wearing the world's vastest battle shorts, shorts that ballooned around his thighs like twin yurts, and around back were two half-moon cutouts with a wee strip between them so that he could clench the shorts between his warrior cheeks and hold them in place to display his naked, tanned, waggling, completely unmissable buttocks.

You think I'm going on about his buttocks because I have a thing for buttocks. You're wrong. I'm going on about his buttocks because NOT A HUMAN BEING ALIVE COULD MISS THEM. No PRIMATE alive could miss them. Beltane, a member of a completely unrelated genus, was staring at the game box and thinking, "Is that what I think it is?"

So of course I had to try the game. You know. Buttocks.

And then the game started, and lo, was it awful. Sepia-toned knights ran around in a vaguely castle-like sea of sepia pixels, popping up comic-book-style speech bubbles to emit "handwritten" speech in awful, awful, completely hopelessly awful "medievalle" English. An upright, stiff-necked sepia-toned knight with the fetching name of "Romeo Guildenstern" churned pixels about the screen as he ordered his knights to do this and that with some mysterious set of people whom we haven't seen yet. Are they good? Are they bad? Do we want them to be put to the sword? Is it actually going to matter, or are we going to be hauled through the plot like a fish with a hook in its lip? And are the moral conundrums we're going to have to ruminate on actually--

OH MY GOD WAS THAT WHAT I THINK IT WAS?

Romeo Guildenstern turned around. This uptight, fully-armored knight had a hole cut into the back of his outfit so that you could see his buttcrack.

Butt cleavage.

Houston, we have butt cleavage.

In my lap, Beltane was thinking, "Yes, that was what you think it was."

Now, it's nice that someone's finally making the men show a little skin. We female fans appreciate that. But maybe butt = breasts is not the best paradigm to work from.

And then we finally, finally got to see Our Hero in action. Lo, did his buttcheeks glow like sepia-toned beacons of honor. But whereas on the box they were the twin jewels of a pair of buttocks round and ripe, lo, like a bubble begging to be popped, Our Hero's actual buttocks were round and ripe like twin pumpkins begging to be hacked to pieces and made into pie. Our Hero's butt was bigger than MY butt. I developed butt envy.

I had to turn the game off. It's never going back on. I'm sure it's a lovely game with a wonderful plot and some really incisive commentary on the human condition, but until the designers distribute some undershorts to the cast, I just can't take it.