Normally, a story like this would start out with me saying something like “I’ve been a fan of the Final Fantasy series for as long as I can remember.” I can’t start out that way, though, because it isn’t true at all.

I remember exactly when I started playing Final Fantasy games. I was in college, living in a dorm, and I had just bought the first console I’d ever purchased for myself—a Nintendo 64. By this point in my life, I’d been playing games since I was very young, but they’d mostly been platformers, adventure games, and the like; I hadn’t ever really played an RPG, much less become ensnared by the genre, as I would in later years. That changed when I picked up a copy of Paper Mario for my new system and proceeded to sink nearly all of my free time into it.

If you’re a fan of Final Fantasy yourself, you may have noticed something odd about where I chose to begin my story—there were no Final Fantasy titles released for the N64. There were, however, several released for the original PlayStation, and when my boyfriend at the time noticed how much I was enjoying Paper Mario, he suggested that I might like to try another popular JRPG that had, at the time, been out for several years—Final Fantasy VII. You can guess where it went from there. Continue reading →