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My History of RPG Gaming, by wsim

     All of us have our own stories and memorable moments in RPG gaming of course but I will now share my experiences and stories of RPG games up till this very day. While I don’t consider myself a hardcore RPG gamer, I’ve been playing enough RPG games to consider myself quite familiar with the genre. My gaming life doesn’t revolve around RPG games but it seems that RPGs happen to be one of my favorite game genres. The odd thing about this is that a couple of years back, this idea would’ve been considered far-fetched and unthinkable. Not only that, I’ve experienced both ends of the RPG spectrum, from the remarkable and compelling RPGs to the mediocre and just plain uninspired and bland ones as well. Without much delay, I shall now share my stories with you other Final Fantasy fans out there.

     I’d admit that I wasn’t even remotely interested in RPGs until about 1996, with the release of Super Mario RPG on the Super Nintendo. Before this, I never decided to give the RPG genre much of a chance and the fact is, I was more interested towards action and platform games than anything else. The concept of leveling up characters and having to sit through and read many hours of dialogue and text wasn’t just my cup of tea, so to speak. All that changed with the release of Super Mario RPG near the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle in 1996. Since I loved the Super Mario franchise from it’s beginning days on the NES, was enough reason for me to rent and give the game a shot and I decided to give it a try. However, since it was technically still an RPG game, I was kind of wondering if the game would even interest me enough to put in a good amount of time into the game. Luckily enough, the game perfectly combined the best of the Mario franchise with some of the basic RPG elements that define the genre in comparison to the others. Thus, I was hooked on the game from the very start and the colorful graphics and excellent musical score was just a few reasons for me to keep playing. The game tutorial is quite helpful and within no time, I was able to get a good grasp of the essentials in the battling and gameplay. The dialogue and storyline is quite funny and interesting, to say the least and the game was just a wonderful experience to RPG newbies at the time, like myself. From this, I was beginning to gain some interest in RPG gaming but due to my poor gaming console decisions; I didn’t get a chance to play another RPG game until 1999. That was because I ended up purchasing the Nintendo 64 when it first came out and I was hoping for some more good games on the console. While the first few games were good for multiplayer fun and all, especially goldeneye, I realized that the N64 severely lacked as far as RPG games go. Over time, I lost some interest in gaming, since the N64 never quite had a large variety of good games and there were just too few games that interested me in the long run. Fortunately, I was introduced to the PlayStation after my friend got it around late 1998. He rented Final Fantasy VII and as he was playing it through, I watched him play the game and we were both fairly impressed by the graphics and the storyline. This made me consider possibly getting a PlayStation and playing FFVII as my first Final Fantasy game. After hearing my friends at school talk constantly about the likes of FF Tactics, FFVII and of course FFVIII, I just couldn’t take it in anymore. Based on the excitement and eagerness of my inner feelings, I finally decided to get a copy of Final Fantasy VII and experience the supposed greatness of Square’s flagship franchise. But there were several bumps in the road along the way, some of them are quite unfortunate. First of all, I was rather short on cash and due to my impatient antics, I ended up purchasing Bleem, which was a PSX emulator on the computer by the way. Okay, so my computer wasn’t that great and all but I believed that I had to play and finish through FFVII as quickly as possible to get into the FF craze that was quickly spreading along people at my school. After playing FFVII a few times on Bleem, I got pretty pissed off and gave up on it, since the program was just too faulty and couldn’t run that well on my computer. But after playing through most of FFVII on Bleem, I was quite impressed by the game and I had some high expectations on FFVIII. To save you the trouble, I will now skip through my days of playing FFVII and FFVIII on Bleem and get to the major turning point, the time when I finally got my PlayStation sometime in 2000. Again, I quickly popped in my FFVII disc and it ran just perfectly fine. To my satisfaction, I ended up beating through FFVII fully this time around and while the ending was quite disappointing, the rest of the game was just fantastic in my opinion. After beating FFVII, I played through FFVIII as my next RPG game. Yes, while FFVIII had amazing graphics and awesome FMV sequences, the gameplay seemed a step behind FFVII and the experience wasn’t quite as fun as FFVII was for some reason. Nevertheless, I thought FFVIII was still a solid RPG game, too bad it didn’t quite live up to it’s proposed hype. Moving along, I easily whizzed by FFIX and it happened to be the easiest FF game that I’ve played but it was still good and had plenty of nice mini-games and sidequests to complete. After this, I realized that I’ve started to become quite familiar and good at playing RPG games and now I turned my attention to the older FF classics like FFVI and FFIV, among all others. After seeing the ending of FFVI, I stood at my TV screen in awe and I finally saw Square in their prime. Yes, FFVI was the best FF game ever made to this day in my opinion and the brilliant storyline and musical score made the game even more special. Then, I was in for a serious challenge when playing FFIV for the PSX. This was the hard-type version that was originally released in Japan as FFIV for the Super Famicom. While the game can get a little frustrating at times with hard enemy AI and of course lots of leveling up needed for tough bosses, it proved to be a nice challenge for more experienced RPG gamers out there. Clearly, it showed old-school FF at it’s best as it combined a medieval settling with a very solid developed main character and it had a pretty solid storyline to boast as well. Beating FFIV was a large accomplishment to my RPG gaming experience and after this, I went to play FFV. Unfortunately, I never liked FFV much and the Job System was great but besides that, the storyline and characters were too bland in my view. Still, I ended up beating FFV and then began to play through FF Tactics. Perhaps here, I really began to realize how amazing Square’s efforts were as long as they put in the time and effort. The battling system was interesting and the game was very customizable overall, with a revamped Job System. But ultimately, the storyline and music in Tactics were simply excellent and the game was nothing short of epic and the characters were interesting, to say the least. Oh yeah, in between FFV and FF Tactics, I played through FFX and while I thought the game was similar to FFVIII in terms of style and concepts, the game was surprisingly addictive and provided something fresh to a new generation of RPG gamers. My most recent RPG game that I’ve completed was none other than the great Chrono Trigger. While it reminded me a lot like Super Mario RPG in terms of style and music, the game was just damn fun. The multiple endings and sidequests in the game will keep any RPG gamer hooked for at least 30-40 hours, since the actual game is rather short, more like 20 hours for that matter. After playing through Chrono Trigger, I had reached almost a full cycle in my RPG gaming life and now that I think back to what I’ve accomplished during the last couple of years, it’s been an amazing run. Before 2000 went by, I had only played through one RPG game and a little bit of FFVII and had little experience with RPGs in general. Within the next couple of years, I’ve emerged from just a casual RPG gamer, to perhaps a dedicated and loyal supporter of Squaresoft and other RPG developers. After beating FFVI-IX, I decided to create an FF fan site and these experiences were the cornerstone for my inspiration and interest in the genre, not only offline, but online as well.

     Today, I’m looking forward to such future RPG hits like Xenosaga and perhaps some other interesting ones for the PS2. Right now though, besides working on my website that you all love dearly, I’ve been spending my free-time playing through Xenogears for the PlayStation. It’s a pretty good RPG game and since the genre is getting more popular as the months go by, it’s certain that RPGs are here to stay and they will continue to interest and appeal to many gamers, whether they be seasoned RPG-vets or just the casual gamer that passes by………. This ends my experiences and stories about how I got into the genre and what had happened since then. Memories are a good thing sometimes.