Final Fantasy VI was the game that got me into RPGs. Tho it needed some help.
It was the mid-1990s, I read a lot of game magazines. For some reason magazines like Diehard Gamefan used to talk up the quality of RPGs all the freakin' time (I remember one letter section had the Postmeister, their mail person, taking almost an entire page in response to a long fan letter on the subject, to bitch about how America doesn't get enough RPGs... it was, in retrospect, the most "Glorious Nippon" thing ever because he made claims like that licensed games don't exist in Japan and people there only play RPGs, which nowadays we know is bull).
Anyway, I vaguely kinda knew what an RPG was because my family had a PC and one of the games on it was Dragon Wars (no relation to that movie that came out a coupla years back) and I basically made the connection that it was an RPG, and I also had played Hydlide, but still I somehow knew those basically didn't count. Other magazines like Nintendo Power and GamePro started running RPG-specific sections and NP once had a feature on Japan-only games (this being where I first heard about Fire Emblem), and eventually I decided to try the genre out.
So one weekend I rented Final Fantasy VI (yes, for SNES--screw the renumbering), tho the same weekend I also rented Earthworm Jim because this was when that was popular, and to be honest I wound up playing EWJ more. That copy of FF6 had a save in the World of Ruin, and I remember playing it, getting in the airship, getting attacked by some flying monster that kicked my ass, and wondering why this game was so hard. I also tried a new game and somehow got my ass kicked by that snail. These days I'm not sure HOW I could've been such a neophyte as to lose to the snail boss, but there you are. I remember bitching (at least internally) about how stupid it was that you couldn't move, or about how the "zombie" condition would kill you if all your party caught it even tho they were clearly still fighting (I actually at first thought "zombie" was just what happened when a character hit zero HP).
Yeah, when people say RPGs have no player skill involved, I remember this stuff and laugh.
But even tho I hated it at first, FF6 somehow hooked me (altho I had a brief divergence at one point to play FF4 because I stayed at a grandmother's house in another town and the rental close to her had 4 but not 6). I kept renting it weekend after weekend and finally just got my own copy (I wish I had kept the box and everything. Yes it was brand new).
I remember one thing I used to do was run from all the battles. Then the bosses would be super-hard. I had a cousin who saw my save game and wondered what the hell I was doing and when I explained why my characters were so weak, he was like "Dude, you need to fight." Admittedly to this day I still sometimes just run from battles because I get impatient.
So there was a weird thing where due to my primary copy being a rental, I would play, then not see the game again for a week, but wind up having to start a new game because my copy was overwritten by someone else... I didn't mind tho because I actually was engrossed in the game. Like, its kinda silly to say now, but back then these characters felt so human that I felt like they could be people I actually knew. It's kinda sad that I don't get feelings like that from fictional media anymore.
I remember actually thinking it was an amazing achievement when I beat FF6, like "Wow, I actually beat an RPG!" Nowadays I know that RPGs are the most beatable genre out there, but again, at the time it felt like I had climbed a mountain.
Those are some of the memories that came to me at the drop of a hat. May have more in there.
Reply With Quote
