So I guess PSN just... Randomly purges your cloud save data if you don't play for a year? B/c finals got so fucking stressful I tried to fall back into my old disassociation spiral by playing Dark Cloud 2 but my 300 hour save game is just... Gone? So thanks I guess for not letting me disassociate before finals but also fuck you I was so close to finishing all the spheda courses.
Oh.
Oh ho.
Oh ho ho ho ho.
It wasn't random. It was so much worse than random.
See, I bought my copy of Dark Cloud 2 before the current iteration of PlayStation Network, when you just paid for a digital copy of a classic game and then that was your game. You know, the way ownership works.
They they introduced PlayStation Network Essentials, a change to the pricing structure of their subscription plan designed to deliver a comically small amount of additional content in exchange for jacking up their subscription prices.
And Dark Cloud 2? Well Dark Cloud 2 is part of their essentials tier. So now, my pre Essentials save data is locked behind a paywall. I could restore it, you see, but I would need to pay their price to have access to my own user account's cloud data, because the game is part of that subscription tier now even though I bought it before that tier existed.
This aggression will not stand.