Calling Final Fantasy V one of my favorite games ever is slightly misleading. I have no urge to play through it again‚Äî-if I were to re-play an RPG it‚Äôd be Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VII, big surprise. But I’d definitely call it one of the most memorable games for me. Kind of random how I ended up with the game. In third grade, my family still lived in Japan because my Dad was still stationed in Atsugi. Basically everyone had a Super Nintendo, and most kids had at least one or two Japanese games in their library (typically a Dragon Ball Z title). Region protection was a lot simpler in those days, Super Nintendo slots had two plastic tabs that prevented non-US games from being inserted. You could clip those off or just carve slots in the Japanese games so that they‚Äôd go into the tabs. Less popular methods that I saw included heating up a screwdriver and melting the slots into the Japanese cartridge, clipping the tabs off of a US Game Genie, and just pulling the circuit board out of the plastic shell.
One day I’m at Dae or Daikuma (I spelled both of those wrong) and walking around the electronics section. There’s a small commotion near one wall and I look and see that people are spinning a wheel and then getting games. I watch with Dan and my mom for a while and they figure you pay 2000 Yen, spin the wheel of numbers, and the number you land on corresponds to the type of package you get (1-game, 2-game pack, 3-game pack, etc.)—-you didn’t get to choose individual games so you basically had to choose one and then take the crummier games that came with it. So my mom pays and Dan spins. Two-game pack. Final Fantasy V and Super Smash TV. I was in love with that type of game and it was part of a familiar with the franchise; easy choice: Super Smash TV! Final Fantasy and RPG meant nothing to me.
After getting bored with shooting aliens, I decided to try out the weird game with the bird on the cover. I’m in a forest. Controlling some guy and walking around. Fine. What’s happening to my screen? Ok cool a fight. Ok now I’m in a village and dialogue boxes are popping up and I don’t understand a thing. Now I’m leaving the village and fighting more and now I’m controlling two people. Now three. More villages, more dialogue I don’t understand, more fights. And on it went for dozens of hours.
Eventually I learned how experience points worked. And then I got a grasp of the job system—-different jobs have different skills and that was about the extent of my knowledge. Equipment purchases made sense: higher numbers were better. Using spells and items became memorization of the length of words and their location in the menus. So I managed to have a rudimentary understanding of the logistics of the game.
On the other hand, I was blind when it came to progressing through the story and triggering events. You know the really obvious hints in RPGs where villagers will say something like, “There’s rumors about monsters in the cave up north.”? Imagine the exact opposite. I had to talk to every villager to try and trigger an event. The goal seemed to be to just try and find new places on the map. If I found a new place and died really quickly in a battle, I guessed that it was probably somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be yet. I’ll always remember having to find a hidden village in the forest on some island. Mostly because it was an accident. I was roaming the entire world trying to find the next thing to do. At one point, both things happened: I found an enemy that I really couldn’t kill, and I couldn’t find anything else in the world to do.
Dan told me he skimmed a Japanese magazine and saw that the final boss was a turtle. The guy I wasn’t able to beat was an evil tree. Totally different. I figured I wasn’t near the end so I stopped playing for a few years. In seventh grade I was reading about the game online and found out the last boss was Exdeath, who became a tree. I turned the game back on, learned the spells, grinded out a few levels, and then beat the game.
The entire time, the story was next to non-existent to me. I read through the plot summary on Wikipedia the other day and nodded maybe three times total. Most of it was new to me. I always wish I kept a diary throughout my life, because it’s always, always interesting to look into your thoughts from the past, even if it’s just descriptions of a mundane day. Basically, I’d like to know what I was thinking when I was eight and nine and putting fifty or sixty hours into a game without a story. Was it fun? Did I invest too much time to just quit? Did I know I’d be reading about the game and writing about it more than a decade later?