My story is a crazy one. I didn't show up at the RPG scene for a long time. Sure, I'd been into adventure games on the surface level (sup Zelda?), but it was a while before I came into contact with features like levelling up, turn-based battle systems, intricate storylines, memorable characters, and the like. While I consider my encounter with the genre as something close to haphazard, I'm grateful that it happened.
Think I was nine or ten years old at the time, so this would take us back to 1999/2000. Now, being a pubescent kid with an unhealthy addiction to all things Dragonball Z (it was as if I gained testosterone bonuses just by watching it), I spent a ridiculous amount of time plundering the internet at dialup speeds for information on the show, spending a heck of a lot of time in fan forums and such. Sometimes, I'd kill time by playing DBZ-related games on the official FUNimation website. Suddenly, they released a game that was
really good! You could play as any of the main characters and if you chose one with Saiyan blood you could even go Super Saiyan and put Frieza in his place!! WOW! Too bad my mom spent ridiculous amounts of time on the phone... She kept telling me to get off the internet because she was expecting calls. Apparently, I was using the phone line a little
too often to satiate my rabid fanboyism.
Of course, this was no good. I'd found a new addiction, and by god I'd take any means necessary to ensure my own entertainment. How else would I kill time while waiting for the "next exciting episode"? I thought to myself that there had to be some way to play this game without connecting to the internet, and so one day I did a quick googly query for something along the lines of "dragonball z downloadable games". The result was a website with a subtle cobalt hue - it offered downloads of various Dragonball related
roms that required use of an
emulator. These were mostly generic SNES-era Dragonball Z fighting games (admittedly, there was one called Hyper Dimension which had some pretty sweet graphics). Anyway, amongst them was a gem: Chrono Trigger. According to the website, this game was "designed" by Toriyama and acclaimed by many. I decided to try it out.
Needless to say, I fell in love. With time, mind you. Embarassingly, my first playthrough saw the characters named with respect to DBZ - Crono was "Trunk" (the 's' wouldn't fit!
), Lucca was "Bulma", etc. By the time I completed the game, I couldn't believe I was previously wasting my time with that Dragonball trash. After all, these games actually had a storyline that progressed! Character development! Plot twists! Since this run-in with an unexpected but totally magical guest of a game, I've always had a soft spot for games that can tell a good story, no matter how arduous the gameplay may be. (Not that Chrono Trigger was tedious at all.) Went on to emulate other gems in the genre, and I've still got some SNES RPGs that I want to get through some day.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
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