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

My dad brought home an Atari PC, not sure of the model. Which had several floppy disks that contained several genres of games. Mudpies, Spy Hunter, The Black Cauldron, Pac-Man, Asteroids... all sorts of what I would consider cheap, old school arcade games. And on one of those disks was Ultima: Exodus. The file that was saved actually had a high level party that had a ship that could obliterate any enemy on the map with a press of the space bar... until it ran out of shots.

I was between 6 and 8 if memory serves me correctly and I couldn't quite figure out the mechanics of the game, though it had several quirky little print outs that my dad brought back from work. They described the world and even what was necessary to cast certain spells in the game... rather, how to casts spells quite literally. Actual ingredients, usual organs of creatures I could neither pronounce the name or identify with my then current knowledge. But the verbal picture of fantasy was what broke through to me in those little printouts, though my eureka with the game would never really come. The "instructions" would have belonged in something like a fantasy novel, as nothing ever clearly described how to play the game.

I deleted the save file and decided to try and make my own party. I chose all warriors/fighters, because when I did get into a random battle in the first save file, I saw that they were the most powerful. Playing through the game, I was told to find the king and talk to him. I noticed that you could fight anyone in Ultima: Exodus via a command in the pop-up menu of options. I decided that it was time for a regime change.

The king promptly annihilated my well-meaning group of revolutionaries, each attempt I would make to dethrone him only left me defeated more swiftly than the previous effort.

After deciding the monarchy wasn't that bad, I tried a few attempts to possibly reduce the tyrannical city and palace guard contingent, each attempt met with various levels of "You wanna be the guy? Maybe when you're older", I gave up on Ultima: Exodus.

My understanding of RPGs at that time was summed up as the following: If you hold a stone to your breast and chant "I-vag-llorum", you'd be granted protection against evil. If you save over a save file at the end of an RPG, chances are you have to start over again with people who don't have an awesome ship that shoots red pixels of death... but you'll still have the no-direction of a game that could let you try to overthrow the kingdom if you so desired it.

I'd play other RPGs, Final Fantasy 1 on the NES, Dragon Warrior... but the only thing that ever stuck was when 1995 hit and then I saw advertisements for Chrono Trigger. I was smitten. The very idea of it was subversive to me at the time, every other setting was some kind of fantasy romp and my mind could only be wow'd by the world presented and leaked little by little in magazine previews.

I played and fell in love with Chrono Trigger like many folks.

RPGs just really haven't been the same since, save for a few pleasant exceptions. But isn't that how it always goes?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

We live in hope, Megavolt.

Originally Posted by Megavolt

I does seem like the three-peat of Secret of Mana ('93), Final Fantasy VI ('94), and Chrono Trigger ('95) was something special that will never be repeated again.

Vengeance is mine, by the way.

There's nowhere I can't reach.