Allow me to set the scene. I’m 10 years old. I’ve never played an RPG before. Sure, I’d screwed around on The Legend of Zelda on my uncle’s NES, but I’d never seriously played anything that really involved the clever use of items and equipment. I go over to my friend’s house because he just got “this amazing Super Mario game for my SNES!” I began my videogame experience with Super Mario Bros. for the NES, and have played everything with his name on it since then. And before you call me a Nintendo fanboy, my family’s first console was a hand-me-down Atari 2600 and my first console purchase was a Sega Genesis. So I got a fair look at all there was out there. That aside, my love for all things Mario was borderline obsessive.



Anyway, I get over to his house and find out that this new Super Mario game doesn’t play like the other ones. You can play as a couple people at a time in something they call a “party” and the fighting doesn’t directly involve you jumping on Goombas, or anyone else for that matter. “Well then how do you even play?” I asked, wondering just what the hell Nintendo had done to my favorite character. “You take turns with the computer players. They attack you, and you attack them until one of you dies.” It sounded like the dumbest thing I had ever heard. We sit down and I watch him begin this grand adventure.

It’s amazing, to borrow Mr. Concelmo’s favorite word. The opening fight with Bowser blows me away. The graphics are on par with some of the SNES’ greatest games. It’s a story set in one of my beloved universes that has depth, plot, and a cast of awesome characters. The combat is easy to learn and the notion of Special Attacks that run on a point system (referred to therein as Flower Points) gets me incredibly excited. We play for hours. I spent days at my friend’s house working through that game with him. Unfortunately, my family ends up moving away and I don’t get to see our journey through to the end.

Later that year, however, I snag a copy of my own for Christmas and play the hell out of it. By now, games like Pokemon are starting to grab my attention. Before I know it, almost all I play are RPGs. Don’t even get me started on Pokemon. I know its for kids, but dammit I was a kid when it came out. 11 is a very impressionable age if you remember right. You believed all kinds of shit when you were 11, at least I did. In any case, I fell for Pokemon hard. It was a further adventure into the genre I was just getting to know. It opened up a world of possibilities. And since it was portable, I could play it anywhere. I don’t know how many hours I dumped into that game, but I caught all 151 of those bastards.



In fact, when I was in my Junior year of college, my roommate and I went out and dropped $20 each on an old Gamboy Color and a copy of Pokemon. The best part was when he took his to a college assembly and got caught playing it. The usher who saw him just looked at him with disappointment. My roommate looked at him, looked at the screen, and then set it down on the floor. When I asked him if he turned it off, he said excitedly “Hell no, dude! I’m in the middle of a battle.”
This is the beginning of my obsession with RPGs. Super Mario RPG changed my perception of what constituted an amazing game. Pokemon and Final Fantasy would expand on it. And while some of these are not necessarily incredibly deep games, they certainly hooked me on the genre. To this day, I’ll play anything that comes close to being called an RPG.