I remember the moment gaming became something more to me. Christmas Day, 1991. Age thirteen. Sitting on the floor in front of the TV in my Minneapolis living room. I had opened three gifts that morning, each of which had contained clothes. This fourth one was boxy-shaped, felt like it weighed enough to be a videogame, and rattled like a SNES cartridge when I shook it. Holy shit, I thought, as I tore the paper off like my life depended on it. This is going to be great.
Final Fantasy II. Er, what we thought was Final Fantasy II. We wouldn’t know about Japan’s region-exclusive numbering vs. America’s for many years—and by many years I mean when Google existed and we could all look this stupid yet important fact up on our own computers.
My dad smiled proudly. “It’s one of them Dragon games you play with Tommy?” He’d obviously looked the game up on some gift research website. He understood Dungeons & Dragons about as well as he understood videogames—the Dungeon Master at his D&D games was once referred to as our “Imagination Supervisor.” Still, he wasn’t too far off. He didn’t know how much that randomized Christmas present was about to change my adolescent mind.
That night, we shoved that cartridge into the console. Screen flashes on—the introspective animation of those motherships gliding over medieval castle keeps, Nobuo Uematsu’s iconic music kicking in not creepy so much as bloop-boop badass. And now I’m controlling Cecil, this Dark Knight who’s starting to question his morality in following orders. Wait… the protagonist has doubts about what he’s doing? This isn’t Mario trying to collect coins or Sonic blasting his way through loop-de-loops. THIS IS DIFFERENT. THIS IS… grown-up.
The two days after opening that cartridge, I don’t think I left my house. I opened the door for food when my mom begrudgingly dragged me outside to eat, but that was about it. “You’re going to ruin your eyes,” she said repeatedly. Too late for that now, mom! But something about Final Fantasy clicked with me. When Cecil reaches his breaking point and turns from a Dark Knight into a Paladin, redeeming himself through his compassion for others… there was something lodged into my teenage psyche.
The ’90s were a bizarre stroke of luck for me timing-wise. Between 1991 and 1999, so many Japanese developers were making their biggest, most important games while I was growing up and weathering the hormonal storm of high school. These games weren’t just escapism: they were therapy disguised as gaming adventures.
By the time I booted up Final Fantasy III on my SNES in 1994, I was a sophomore in high school and feeling all the feelings of a teenager who just turned fifteen. Unlike Cecil, who pretty much had to save the world on his own, FF3 had multiple protagonists I could care about. Everyone in this game has some sort of fleshed-out backstory—Cyan’s parents are killed, Locke wants to rescue his girlfriend, Terra struggles with her humanity. And don’t even get me started on that opera scene…. I spent 20 minutes trying to describe to my friend Mike why I cried when I watched a bunch of pixelated sprites perform a MIDI opera. “You just had to be there, man,” I eventually conceded, embarrassed by how animated I was getting.
Around this time, my parents started to become concerned about how much time I spent playing videogames. “Seventy-five dollars for a cartoon game?” My dad questioned when I emptied my savings account to buy Chrono Trigger. I tried to tell him this was Hironobu Sakaguchi (of Final Fantasy fame) working with Akemi Kitamura (of Dragon Quest fame) and the artwork was by none other than Dragon Ball’s Yoshitaka Amano. He did not know those names. “Just don’t let your grades suffer,” he warned. They didn’t—probably because I learned more about narrative structure from games like these than I did in my English classes.
Chrono Trigger’s storyline had me utterly obsessed. That I could impact my own outcome in this epic journey by making choices along the way? How PERSONAL. I kept a notebook full of flowcharts detailing decision trees and outcomes. When my teacher, Mrs. Henderson, took it away from me after finding it in her class one day because I was USING IT IN HER CLASS DON’T EVEN SMACK JOKE, she wrote at the top of my notebook: “Interesting analogy. Compare this to MacBeth.” And I did. I compared Shakespeare’s tragic hero to Crono and his fight against what seemed like fate. I got a B+ on that assignment. She never asked me where I came up with such unorthodox analysis, either.
The battle systems started to demand skill and strategy, rather than mindlessly hitting a button until all of your enemies died. Final Fantasy IV introduced Active Time Battle, creating actual tension during every encounter because you couldn’t “paralyze yourself into victory.” Chrono Trigger allowed you to pull off combo attacks by testing out which characters worked best together. By the time Squaresoft released Final Fantasy Tactics in 1998, I’d spend entire weekends mapping out my ideal party member combinations for future battles on graph paper. My friend Dave walks over to my house one Saturday afternoon and sees me scribbling draw matrices on characters’ stats and abilities. He stares at my notes for a second, then laughs. “Dude, you’re doing homework.” “Good homework,” I replied, recognising how bizarre my obsession had become.
Level grinding became my meditation. Whenever life got overwhelming in my teenage years—during college apps, drama with girls, fights with my parents—I turned to videogames. Grinding had a soothing quality to it. The repetitiveness of whacking enemies until they die and your character levels up was something I could easily get lost in for hours. I even became very efficient at level grinding and developed spreadsheets to share with friends so they could level up their characters more effectively. “If you use Edgar’s Offering in the dinosaur forest in FF6, you gain the most EXP/hr,” I proudly explained to my friends.
Exploring those world maps felt liberating. Everything else about my life was being micromanaged as a teenager—leveling gave me control. Getting the-scroll-from-airship-which-opens-map-in-a Final Fantasy game was like certain Final Fantasy games was always exciting. Suddenly the game-world opened up to you and you were free to go anywhere… within limits. I remember unlocking the Blackjack and taking it for a joyride on the world map of FF6, purposely ignoring the next storyline marker to just wander around and discover what other secrets I could unlock. Finding secret dungeons in FF games made me feel like an Explorer. Actual exploration! Not just some guy running from plot point to plot point.
Plot twists mattered more to me as a kid too, because game spoilers were hard to come by and developers were less cheesy with their tricks. When Kefka blows up the world halfway through Final Fantasy VI, I gasped. Nobody gets away with killing the princess and destroying the world mid-game! I immediately called up Tommy to vent in my disbelief. “Hey, have you beat it to the flying continent yet?” He asked, knowing fully well I had not. “DON’T RUIN IT! Uh, just keep playing,” I said before hastily hanging up, playing the last several hours of FF6 in nervous trepidation of what I was about to discover.
Transitioning into PlayStation hardware upgraded the visuals, but story remained king. Final Fantasy VII hit in 1997, and all of a sudden these underground games that I was try-hardishly evangelizing to apathetic teenagers were mainstream. Commercials on TV! Game covers plastered all over magazines! I felt validated…and weirdly protective? Other people liked my “games”? When Cloud ascends the corrupt Shinra building in that game’s finale, I actually cheered. PlayStation graphics were cool and all, but it was Barret and Tifa and Aerith’s story that kept me coming back more than any polydimensional badassiness.
Okay, THAT scene with Aerith…I’m pretty sure no other game had shocked an entire country half like FF7 did at the time. Combination of Uematsu’s music, emotional backlighting, and irreversible character deaths was something I had never experienced in any medium before. I sat there, slack-jawed, dumbfounded, controller hanging limp in my hands. I had seen videogame characters die before Liz Taylor. But nobody had MADE ME CHEAT AND SAVE BEFORE THIS MOMENT NEVER COME like Final Fantasy VIE. Video games were growing up with me.
Let’s not forget about how bad translations were at times, due to Ted Woolsey inserting dad jokes into FF4 because he didn’t realise Nintendo would censor his swearing, or how script-space made every RPG protagonist subtly abrasive. I laughed so hard when Rydia told Dagger “You spoony bard!” It felt cooler because it was so stupid. Game translations became our secret nerd code as RPG fans. Years later we’d discover fan translations of games that revealed just how many lines changed, or how much of the original text was lost in translation. Sad? Maybe. But damn if Kefka didn’t still sound more epic saying “Son of a submariner!” than whatever the Japanese version was.
Suikoden came out during my senior year of high school, and boasted political intrigue and 108 characters you could recruit into your party. Recruiting heroes to fight alongside you for Castle Recruit headquarters gave you a vested interest in your adventure that went beyond leveling your main protagonist. When my girlfriend at the time asked me why I had to cancel our plans for Saturday, I couldn’t explain that I had to get one more chef to add to my roster. “It’s like… political asylum, but for a video game chef that I can fight along with in another video game…” I sighed, deflated by the silliness of it all. Two weeks later, she dumped me. God awful breakup that was certainly fueled by this, but hey—I recruited every last Star of Destiny.
Speaking of music, the compositions these developers were coming up with were nothing short of magical. With限ら Namma Technology Limited;td, composers like Uematsu, Mitsuda, and Hiroki Kikuta were able to create some of the most memorable videogame soundtracks of all time. I can hum the intro theme to Chrono Trigger in seconds—it’s been ingrained in my memory more so than actual CDs I listened to growing up. I used to tape the soundtrack from my JRPGs onto a blank cassette with my boombox mic’d up to my TV. My mom walked by one afternoon and heard Japanese wizards casting spells in a seemingly endless opera. “Is that a classical music station?” She asked. Congratulations, NieR composers. You’re *this close* to being defined as classical.
I played through Xenogears my freshman year of college. On some level, it explored religion, self-existence, identity, and everything else I was learning about in school with far more sophistication. My roommates and I would stay up until 3 AM arguing about how the character Joshua’s name was a direct allusion to Carl Jung. Our RA knocked on our door at 2 AM and asked us to please keep it down. We let him listen in, but he didn’t stop talking when he realised what game we were discussing. He stayed for over an hour with his own theories of how the game’s take on the Zohar related to real-world Judaism. Gaming was tackling deeper subjects that I could’ve never imagined“Oh shit”ing at only a few years prior.
These games even impacted what other types of media I consumed as I got older. I began to appreciate literature and movies with similar quality storytelling. When friends wanted to watch mindless action flicks, I was bored. Where was the character development? Moral ambiguity? FUCKING PLOT TWISTS? I even considered going into game design myself (I have no clue how to code) and ended up minoring in literature in college because video games had taught me so much about storytelling.
Looking back at my life now as a squarely-middle-class-aged man, I feel fortunate to have experienced this halcyon era of gaming right as it was happening without knowing what modern games could be or how they’d influence the future of storytelling. To live in a place where you can witness something great and never know if it’ll get better or worse is a luxury. JRPGs were good enough when I was growing up that they were able to seep their way into my heart and change my perspective on entertainment as a whole. I was old enough to understand their themes, but young enough to play them without worrying about having a “responsibility” to finish them.
I still play these games to this day, be it on original hardware, official remakes/reboots, or (*shh*) emulation. Character sprites have aged better than pixeled characters ever could, but what’s kept me coming back to these games years later are the stories and personalities. I booted up Chrono Trigger last year for the first time in over a decade, and found myself loving it more than I remember. Now when Lucca talks about her mother’s car accident, it hits me in a different way. I’m older and crappier, so it makes me sad.
Those JRPGs will forever be snapshots of where games were and where I was when I played them. Revisiting them as an adult allow me to reflect on my gaming youth with jaded eyes, but also appreciate them with new eyes. That 13-year-old kid tearing away wrapping paper from Final Fantasy II on Christmas morning back in ’91 never knew he’d fall in love with a genre that would shape his understanding of characters for the rest of his life. Thanks to Cecil and his fictional pals who followed, I now know that 16-bit characters on crappy TVs can tell stories worth remembering forever.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
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