My best friend, when I was eleven years old, lived on a farm and I would often meet him at his house to spend the day. Growing up in a house, for over a decade, without a normal home console, I had missed out on all of the gaming that anyone could offer on the NES, Genesis and all of the others of the time. And then the unspeakable happened – I was introduced to Super Mario RPG.

Now, it was hardly the first game I had played before. My mom would bring me to the hospital where she worked and I got to spend time playing Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers to my heart's content. I also had a Game Gear and that allowed me to play Sonic the Hedgehog and a vast number of other games I can't hardly remember.

My friend was stoked to have received this new game that just came out a few weeks before. He was around the part in the game where you find the Lazy Shell, presumably the best weapon/armor you could find in the game. I watched him play for a while, and noticed that this game was not like the other games that I had played, where split second reactions and speed were the key elements of the gameplay. No, I saw it more at the time as a calculated and thoughtful (as in, you had to think about what to do next) adventure. After he beat the boss of that area, and some hopeful prodding, he let me start my own save file.

It starts in media res and that blew my mind. It's not that other games didn't, Sonic cannot be said that it had an intro, however, it didn't have a story to behold at every event either, and even Mario had a scant story. I met the characters and fell in love with their personalities, the story was engaging, and the music was phenomenal. However, it was the game-mechanics that drug me in. The way I could customize what they were wearing (often called “equiping,”) the puzzles, and the battle system. It was all very engaging and I had to have more.



My friend's family, soon after that discovery, moved down to South Carolina. I got to the part where you invaded Booster Tower, and I REALLY wanted to know how Bowser fared against the baddies. A few years later, I found out about emulators, and this restarted my love affair with RPG's, but rather than start up a new game and go through the motions of getting my party back to Booster Tower, I had read in the years following my last bout with goombas that there was another game that I should check out. It was called Chrono Trigger.

So I loaded up the ROM, and the pendulum ticked in front of my face. I had no idea what was going to happen, or if it was going to be any good. But my eyes widened and I saw Crono wake up to the Millenia Fair that was brewing down the street. And just as I was getting in touch with the game mechanics there, it tossed me through Lucca's teleporter, and back into another time period. With all of the unanswered questions that arose from that single hour of playing, I couldn't stop until I knew exactly what was going on. And today, I still don't know exactly know, but it was so wonderful I couldn't even begin to describe it.

Tell me I was a sucker for a compelling story and turn-based RPG mechanics, and I will tell you you are a sooth sayer. But it is true, and it is something that has compelled me to this day. After Chrono Trigger, I experimented in the Final Fantasies, the Ogre Battles, and the occasional Dragon Warrior. They were all good games, but didn't draw me in, at the time, in the way that Chrono Trigger or Super Mario RPG did. So after playing those two games into the ground, I moved on, and tried to find something that would recapture the magic that they had.

Nothing came along for a while that was spectacular, but I played them just because I loved the gameplay elements. I got a wonderful thing for Christmas of 1995, the Sega Saturn. There were, of course, the platformers and the fighters that came out for the Saturn, but they were fun time wasters. This was about the time that I started my obsession with puzzle games, but that is another story. I wasn't able to get my hands on even a copy of Grandia, which I wish I had, because I hear it is awesome.

I was so hungry for a new epic quest that I just about peed my pants when I heard about Albert Odyssey, I saved up all of my prepubescent dollars to purchase it at the local video game shop. It had a great story and kept me playing until the end, but it felt like it was lacking something. That something is the charm from Super Mario RPG and the in depth, if not confusing story of Chrono Trigger.

So skip ahead to today, which is by far too many years for my brain to comprehend. I'm replaying Final Fantasy IX due to the lack of money to even afford a PS2. But my question is, what happened to RPG's and games as a whole since SMRPG and Chrono Trigger? FFIX is terribly easy, and the story is incredibly boring. The only character that I am remotely interested in is Vivi, because he actually seems realistic to me, in the setting that he is in.

Not that Crono had a reason to be doing what he was doing, but he at least seemed like a multi-faceted character, and when juxtaposed with Zidane, there is no comparison. Zidane seems like all he wants to do is get into the princess' pants. Through the whole game. Thats it. Vivi wants to know what he is, and where he came from. Eiko wants to get into Zidane's pants. Quina wants to eat. Garnet/Dagger wants to save her country. And so on. There don't seem to be much of any concerns any other way.

For instance, when you return from the Eilodon Wall at Eiko's home, she has trouble deciding what to do – stay at the destroyed village with the Moogles, or leave with Zidane's party. A maximum of three sentences later, Zidane has convinced her to do what she thinks is necessary. I mean, at least Lucca was worried that her machine wasn't going to work, and Robo cared that he destroyed his brothers. Those were human characters, but when something tragic happens in FFIX, they shed a tear and move on. They are themselves again, except for Vivi, who seems to really want to know whats going on with the Black Mages, and that confusion gives him depth.

But I digress. I know there are a lot of good RPG's out there that I've missed, due to the fact that I wasn't allowed to have games in my life until I was older. Or maybe I'm just stuck in the SNES and Genesis era of gaming, where there weren't huge cinematics to worry about, and the companies pumped that energy into telling the story of those characters that you were going to relate with for the next few days.



Let's just say that Albert Odyssey made me laugh hysterically, Chrono Trigger made me cry more than once, and Super Mario RPG made me want to know more about this huge sword that wanted to eat the land. Final Fantasy IX has yet to evoke any emotion from me.

So what happened to RPG's storytelling? Better yet, what happened to games as a whole's storytelling? Who knows. All I know is that Super Mario RPG was one of the best games I have played, and it started me on an unhealthy nosedive into the RPG realm, even if it was a simple and concise story.