[Editor's note: Aoi talks about Final Fantasy II (IV) for her Monthly Musing contribution. -- CTZ] 

My very first game, as defined by "the first one you watch someone else play long enough to develop some familiarity but still get killed really quick," was Mario Bros. on the Nintendo. We also had Duck Hunt, but I hated the gun's loud clicky noise, and when I finally tried to play it - with the barrel jammed against the glass of our old early-70s TV - I still couldn't hit any goddamn ducks. No, Mario was it; I learned to run around with my arms in front of me and sing the water-level theme over and over and over, to identify which levels had the pipe shortcuts over the walls, how to jump for optimum flag-grabbing points off different level-ending heights and that playing it was hard.

I was, oh, about four. As with Duck Hunt, I sucked at Mario. I knew it. I let my two older brothers have the controller back on a more or less permanent basis, not just because they were bigger than me. I watched them play The Legend of Zelda, and The Legend of Zelda II, with its unspoken subtitle, Good Luck Actually Beating This Magnificent Piece of Sh*t. (I would hide behind the couch at the sight of the Wizzrobe boss, and the Thunderbird second-to-last boss. Luckily, my oldest brother could kill them, as well as the whole game. You rule, Rob!)

They moved on to Mario 2, and Metroid - holy shit, Samus was a GIRL - and Dragon Warrior, with its brain-melting overworld theme. (All together now: doo doo dooooo, doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo dooo doooo -- you know.) I knew them all and loved them, but never did I attempt to pick up the controller for myself, not with two competitors and an annoying little sister always hovering nearby. Then, one day, our neighbors up the street showed the boys this weird new thing, and Rob requested it urgently for his birthday. It came, and I saw little else on our Nintendo, it seemed, for years: some weird thing called Final Fantasy.

If I'd been any older, that first game would have been the focus of this piece. But no. Once, when I was five, I woke up a Sunday morning feeling like five kinds of shit. I wandered into the playroom, where Rob was playing Final Fantasy; he had a party of four White Mages, and he was fighting Sharks in the Sea Shrine. He glanced at me, felt my forehead, and said, "You're sick. Go see Mom." Turned out I had the flu. I got to miss church AND school for a while. Whoo-hoo!

My attempts to actually play FF were not so fortuitous. Once, when Rob and Chris were away at camp, I snuck into their room and turned the NES on, then erased the single save file those cartridges held, painstakingly chose, named, and outfitted a little party, set off proudly for Garland's castle, got into a random battle, panicked, and turned the game off. I wouldn't play Final Fantasy I again till I was 20 and picked it up for the PlayStation. D'oh!

Fast forward to the Super Nintendo: beautiful graphics, a fantastic new Mario launch game, and all the glories therein. We rented it briefly, then begged our parents to buy one, but were told to live with the Nintendo for a while longer; a SNES would distract us from school, and the Nintendo was perfectly good -- an argument that proved valid till a cockroach crawled into the back of our NES and shorted it and Metroid. (The smell was bad.) But a gentleman offered to pay us money for it, and he did, and lo, there was a Super Nintendo!



By now, I was almost seven. We began noticing a red-boxed game at the tape store called "Final Fantasy II." It looked pretty and had good ratings in Nintendo Power; we rented it, and I loved what I saw, but was not permitted time to play, not with my position on the totem pole. For the first time, that Christmas, the three eldest of us kids banded together and asked for three games in tandem: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (about right for my age), Mario Paint (fucking awesome for anyone), and Final Fantasy II.

Purchasing the game allowed me to see, for real, a glimpse of the kind of storytelling of which most people don't even know games are capable. (Present company excluded. Duh.) Too young to realize how hilarious awful the dialogue had been localized:



I was awestruck at the concept of a game where people had names of their own, and had to make choices and betray each other and hit on girls and even snog, in all their spritely glory! People in your party died. People left your party, but came back later. People seemed to die, but then came back in a blaze of jaw-dropping glory. (... And then died because you never bothered to level up.)

And the music! I always enjoyed the Final Fantasy theme in that pivotal bridge-crossing intro on the NES incarnation, but to hear such delicate sounds in the opening screen, the powerful, declarative Red Wings' theme, the melancholy overworld, and hey, the same victory thing! It was all there, and I loved it. If soundtracks and toys had been available, I would have sold my siblings' limbs for them. (What? I couldn't hold a controller with one arm.) At recess, I played Summon Monsters, much to my classmates' confusion. The losers!

I really wasn't surprised to find the last battle, the cameos by all your friends on Earth (and dead guys), so epic and difficult and beautifully wrapped up; after all, it was such a great game, why would the ending suck? In the same vein, I played the crap out of Mystic Quest, which the Japanese released as "Final Fantasy USA: Mystic Quest," a then-common practice for Japanese games developed for the U.S. market, but one that took on a fairly vitriolic connotation because that game seemed to have been made for total babies.



I'm also glad I didn't play FFV, with its superlative Job system and laughable story, because the next major FF was III/VI. I could go on, but why bother? We all know II and III were awesome, but it took FFVII to really launch the RPG to its rightful heights of popular glory (not to mention all the explanations behind the II/IV and III/VI naming).

My only regret is that the U.S. DS remake of this game is coming out a few weeks after my birthday, so I'll have to buy the damn thing myself. I'm not really mad, though, even with the weird dub, because it's FF EFFING IV and I'll excuse myself to go do a happy dance now, and perhaps go play the Chronicles version on the PlayStation. Yes, I do have a Super Nintendo and copy of FFII, but it 1) eats game data, and 2) takes me only 10 hours to get to the end of the game, courtesy of a massive castration given to the local version by the same people who made Mystic Quest for poor li'l sucktastic Western gamers. Give it to me hard, I say!