[General Discussion] Getting Involved With The RPG Video Game Genre For The First Time.

Ah man, this takes me back.

My first brush with RPGs was with my cousin actually. They're about 5 years older than me, and back when I was maybe 7 or 8, I'd go to their house since they had an SNES and what I now know is a disk loader emulator for the SNES which allowed you to play what I now know as ROMS. (Back then, I had no idea. I just knew games were on a disk and you had to load the disks into the SNES.)

Anyways, one of these said games was Final Fantasy VI. Obviously, I never got to play since I had two cousins, and if they did do 2-player (which was rare), it was usually the other playing. But I really didn't care, because just watching it was fun. Another game at roughly the same time that caught my interest was what I later found out to be Fire Emblem 4: Seisen no Keifu (or Geneology of the Holy War is the English subtitle, I believe), which again, I never got to play, but was happy and having fun just watching them play.

At home, I didn't have an SNES (or any other console for that matter) but all I had was a computer. A few months later, my other cousins came down from New Jersey to visit. They're also about 6 or 7 years older than me, and they then introduced me to the world of emulation and ROMS (namely, for the Genesis and the SNES.) At the time, the Genesis didn't interest me much, but I immediately went online to find Final Fantasy VI, downloading at 3.5KB/s on a 56k modem (those were the days) and enjoyed every minute of it.

The rest is history. After Final Fantasy VI, there was Final Fantasy VII (for the PC) which my cousins bought. I eventually borrowed that from them as well, enjoying the game at a chugging 20 frames per second. When the PSX finally hit, Final Fantasy became an all-time favorite franchise, not only with VII, VIII and IX, but more importantly, I, II, IV, V, VI, and the dark horse, Tactics, which incidentally, was what introduced me to strategy RPGs (or at least the first I actually played), and since then, I have never turned back. I LOVE Strategy RPGs.

As a random note, other franchises followed slowly as I wouldn't check out other RPGs unless I was recommended one. This brings in the Mana series (starting with Seiken Densetsu 3 and then Legend of Mana), Tales series (starting with Tales of Phantasia), and Fire Emblem series (one that I had forgotten about until 2 years ago) to name a few. But now I check out most RPGs as they come out, most of them being pretty fun. (Admittedly, I never got into the Chrono series....maybe a visit to that series is in order...)

This only applies to JRPGs, apparently, as I haven't played too many Western RPGs that I liked. The exception to this would be Fallout and Fallout 2.

Jam it back in, in the dark.