Chad Green, from up the street, brought this over one weekend, back in that interim period where we didn't have enough SNES games to play, so the NES was always hooked up. It was the first RPG I had seen, for I was nine years old. I was enamored with the pitch of the backgrounds, the steady pumping battle music, and the characters - both the gnarly monsters and the party members. The intrigue of the black mage, with the wide brimmed hat, the face in shade but for the two dotted eyes, stayed with me. So much so that, years later in my teens (and probably early 20s, let's be honest here), I would read a webcomic starring those pixel characters, which I don't think I ever enjoyed, except for seeing these little wizards and warriors doin' thangs. Also, Chad Green was a dick and a decade later, his little brother would leave a bag of shitty weed in my basement, which would be pinned on me. Nice try, Greens.
Not even once.
Played it on the DS in the 2000s, and found it mostly tedious, despite being first game with a job system I had played in ages. Jobs are cool!!! I made it to the last dungeon, and I don't think I beat it.
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I played it twice on the SNES, and started it a few times - twice on the GBA, and once on the DS, never making it to Cecil's transformation. The first time I played it on the SNES, I made it to the final dungeon, and I don't think I beat it.
Ah, the famously lost game! I played the fan translation on the computer, via ZSNES, and never quite got the settings right - this was back in the late 90s, when emulation couldn't handle RPGs particularly well. I didn't make it to the second world, but I did when I replayed it on the PSX, as part of that one collection. Boy, that was a bad port! Load times and weird lag, on an SNES game? How do you fuck that up? Only when I got the GBA port did I make it to the last world, where I don't think I beat it.
I could write a whole book about VI, and might settle for another blog post about it, but I'll say three things here. First, after Chad Green returned with his copy of Final Fantasy, I told my mother I very much would like a copy of Final Fantasy, for the NES, for my 10th birthday. She passed this information to my grandmother, who went to an Electronics Boutique in a mall in Anne Arundel county. She purchased me this game on the suggestion of the clerk, and upon receiving it, I did my best to mask my disappointment - I didn't to start with the sixth, I wanted to start with the first one! [Note: This is the same reason I didn't watch Star Trek: the Next Generation growing up, which was either a very stupid art choice or a very smart social choice for an already nerdy-werdy wimp in the 90s] Second, I have played VI to completion at least ten times, on the SNES, on the very bad PSX port, and on the GBA, and have started it dozens of times since 1995. Third, were it not for my grandmother's generous heart (that game must've cost at least $80 in 1995) and the right Electronic Boutique worker offering a kindly word to her, I would not be a writer, or whoever I am now.
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After VI converted me, I knew I had to have VII. If you read anything about the hype around FFVII leading to its release, even tangentially, consider me among that rapid throng, dying to get their hands on three full fucking discs of roleplaying as a pineapple soldier with a big ass sword, that done got holes in it - what do you put in those holes! (Materia, I tell myself from the future, in which I have played FFVII Remake, during the first months of a pandemic that is on track to kill more Americans than World War II). I will probably write a big post about VII, but I will say two things. First, my father forbade us from getting a Playstation, because it was expensive and we were already too much into games. In fact, we wouldn't get one until nearly 2000, on the verge of the PS2's release. He was a big proponent of having us tinker with computers though, so there was my loophole. The lengths I went through to play FFVII on PC is a tale, to tell. Heck, even getting the PSX version eventually is a tale. Neither of these tales are particularly flattering. Second, I have played VII to completion three times - twice on the PC, and once on the PSX eventually. I have started the game and played through Midgar at least ten times, though.
I have played IX to completion just once, on my second playthrough, on the PSX. On my first go, I made it to the end and didn't finish it, which seems to be a recurring issue with me and Final Fantasy games. I have only started it twice otherwise, to not complete it, since the early 2000s.
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I played this through on the PS2, doing all my grinding and lightning dodging and chocobo racing, in a small picture-in-picture window on a 32-inch TV in my parents' basement, the main screen fixed on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, the year after 9/11 spilling out in white powder and Northern Coalition fighters and Greta Van Susteren. Since that initial playthrough, I feel as if I've played it to completion another time? Maybe before X-2 came out a few years later. I have started it a few times, including on the Vita and cross-saving to the PS4 port, but that save file somehow got deleted from the cloud, just after I beat Yunalesca. Fuck this, I thought to myself, and then repurchased the game for the Switch about a year later.
Never touched it, because WoW was my only MMO, and I am happy I never dipped a toe.
Played it to the last boss twice after it came out, once in my on-campus apartment and once in the townhouse I lived in for my senior year and early 20s. On-campus, my TV and PS2 Slim sat atop a firmly stacked tower of USPS shipping boxes, which was so tall that I had to lean back in my chair to look at it; at the townhouse, I don't remember what my TV stacked on, but I do remember it being in the corner amid a tangle of wires and dustbunnies and tumbleweeds of my long hair, and sometimes, at night, I would look into the curved reflection, catching third-hand light from passing cars, shot through amplifying glass through the air through the slitted window shades onto the wall opposite the screen, and every time it happened, I would be startled, as if I was found for a moment by an authority I had offended. Anyways, I played it to completion last year on the Switch.
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I started this game twice, once on my shortly-owned Xbox 360 and then on the proper PS3, making it 10 or 15 hours in, but I couldn't tell you shit about where I was or what had happened. Maybe I should replay it. Then again, maybe I should finish anything else.
I played this once, at release, the first Final Fantasy game I played on release day since VIII (and probably IX). I played it on the Playstation 4 Pro I purchased three days after Donald Trump was elected, which I bought to make myself feel better, which it didn't, but at least I sold my OG PS4 to a friend for a price which made us both feel OK. I played it in an apartment that I shared with a woman, and it was on the third floor. I played it on a couch, which was more of a loveseat, which we had split the cost of, which cost us each about the price of a Playstation 4 Pro. I played it mostly drunk off the stash of Pikesville Rye we had accumulated, a whisky that had been nothing special except the cheapest at bars, a bottle with a simple white label as if it were government wholesale food, a whisky we both had an affection for out of nostalgia mostly and a familiarity, which we had drank when we dated some nine years previously, which was an unsuccessful relationship, which is a silly thing to say as all relationships find a failstate in the end (I bury you, or you bury me, the bitter deal we make unknowingly) and to find it together is the grim and hopeful point of such a relationship, which we did not find in each other, though we did find two full years of nostalgia and familiarity, a restarting of a previous run, like popping in the disc and finding a save file from disc 2, and you think, Hey maybe this time I'll finish it, and we did not, for she had reached the vision of that grim and lucky point to our relationship and found it unwelcome, like me on the couch, drunk off $15 whisky mixed with endless Seagram's. Pikesville Rye was going out of production, so we had some thirty bottles, all of which was gone by the relationship's conclusion. I played XV and she watched, mimicking Ignis proclaiming after a battle, "That's it! I've come up with a new recipe!" and she always hit the last word with a southern drawl that wasn't there, but she put it there, her spectator's pleasure. I beat the game alone, late at night, after she had gone to bed, and for that, I am glad - to bear my own witness to my own things, silly and vapid as they are, the empty businesses I busy myself with, which are the most important and the least. Soon thereafter, it was done, but the era proceeded, nationally lower and personally higher. I do not think I will play XV again.
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