Thinking back to all of the games that I played as a child, I have vague memories of many different games, including; Lemmings, Aladdin, Star Fox, Super Mario World, but there is one in particular that still remains in my heart and memory to this very day...



Final Fantasy III (fuck you, that's what it is on the cartridge). When my dad got an SNES when I was younger, we had a whole box load of games. I would play all of them in rotation, some more and some less than others. I'd plow through some of them, and others I would struggle on for weeks while my dad kinda coached me as I played the games that he had played and beat. There was one that he never really understood, and for that reason it was different from all the others, not a platformer, or a racing game, or even a beat 'em up. I constantly kept revisiting it trying to figure out how it worked. It was there that my affair with RPGs, and my love of gaming in general began.

The game was like the weird Animes that my great uncle sent me that he taped on VHS (Ghost in the Shell, Akira, etc.) in the sense that we (my father and I) didn't really understand how they worked. I remember one time, I was under leveled on the Phantom Train, I just could not beat it. It wasn't until much later, after my father got a strategy guide/walk through for me for the game that I found out that you could defeat the Phantom Train by throwing a Phoenix down at it.

I guess this is where I also developed my incredibly elitist tastes in plots and characters when I was younger. I'd go to school (second or third grade I guess) and I would be bored by the 'kiddie' stories that I would be read by the teachers. Whenever we started to receive assignments that we would get to pick our own book, I would always pick some high fantasy books or something (including Lord of the Rings, The Redwall books, and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe). However, no matter how many of these books I read, I would always come back to my beloved Final Fantasy III, as the story was more engrossing than most of the books that I read. Even though I was very young, when I first saw the scene (SPOILER ALERT FOR A 15 YEAR OLD GAME LOL!) where Celes goes back to the Cabin to feed the dying Cid the fish that she caught for him, and finds that he is dead, upon which she decides that it isn't worth living alone on that wretched island, and she jumps off a cliff to attempt to end her life. I didn't really know what was going on, but I still remember that as one of the first times that I cried from an emotional moment in any medium.


This is what I thought of the books that I was read as a child.

I still love RPGs to this day, having recently played through Final Fantasy X(meh, Tidus was a bitch) and Xenosaga ep 1. I play FF III, on the Super Nintendo cartridge about every other year, and it's probably one of my favorite games. Ever. It isn't as hard as it used to be(partly because it wasn't that hard of a game to being with, partly because I've played it so many times), but I still love it all the same, and wouldn't trade it for anything, ever. I know I could probably sell it on ebay and get about $50 for it, but I refuse, no matter what other new game I want. I won't part with that game, ever. It's a part of who I am, and the reason that most of my tastes are the way they are.