- Playing
Soulblade growing up with my cousin and little brother. We must have put well over 300 hours into that game, and for a long time it was more or less all we talked about / did when we met up. :'D There were plenty of other fighting games after and before that that I went through varying stages of obsession with, but none that were even remotely comparable. It had such a big impact on the three of us that to this day, whenever we're together we'll invariably wind up putting on Soulblade for a few games.
- Christmas of 2002, when I received
Kingdom Hearts. I didn't particularly like the game, and still don't. Yet somehow the memories of playing it on the big TV in the living room that Christmas as my two brothers watched are extremely important to me.
I think it's because at that point, my emotional state was pretty much going down the toilet, and I really wasn't happy at all. Being able to escape for a couple of weeks into playing a videogame with my brothers (and a videogame themed after Disney, one of my other childhood loves, no less!) was really comforting to me, and I still look back on it as one of the few happy memories from what were a couple of very, very bad years for me.
- The two or three years I spent obsessed with
Final Fantasy VII. And I really mean obsessed. I must have played it about thirteen or fourteen times from start to finish, as well as having countless files I took to various points of the game. I was suffering from terrible bullying in school at the time, and pretty much used the game as a comfort blanket, seeking solace in its world and characters to escape my own life.
It was one of those games that wound up being more than just a game to me.
More than that, though, Final Fantasy VII was important to me because it introduced me to Kris. Kris was one of my brother's friends in high school, and since he didn't have a Playstation and wanted to play Final Fantasy VII, he would come over to our house every weekend to play it, each week progressing a little further. Since I knew the game ridiculously well by that point, I pretty much sat there and guided him through it, and while doing so, I got to know him quite well.
Kris was... well he was kind of an angel.
His family were quite rich, but rather than that making him spoiled or bratty, he seemed only to want to share what he had with others. Every time he came to our house he'd bring our family big bags of chocolate and flowers for my mum, hundreds if not thousands of pounds' worth of games and toys that he had finished with would be passed on to our family for free (I think I still have about fifteen PC games that he gave us), and as if he sensed that I was more than a little bit damaged and introverted, he was incredibly kind and gentle to me, and really helped to bring me out of my shell.
I had never met anyone quite so generous and sweet in my life to that point. I had grown up in a very poor family with two very competitive brothers, and all three of us were fiercely protective of our own little corners of the world. Meeting Kris changed all that. Meeting Kris made me realise what was really important in life, and showed me the sort of person I wanted to be. Those weekends spent sitting beside him guiding him through Final Fantasy VII and chatting to him about all sorts of things are some of my most precious childhood memories.
- Playing co-op games with my brothers (lots of them, really, but
Streets of Rage,
Toejam and Earl and
Secret of Mana in particular). While my two brothers were always very similar in terms of interests growing up, I was always a little bit different, and we weren't very close as a result. But then we started playing co-op games together. And after spending dozens of hours playing together with them and working toward the same goal, the three of us were soon all but inseparable. It sounds silly, but my two brothers are now two of my best friends in the whole world, and I think the seeds of that friendship were planted back in those days as we played games together.
- Playing
Grandia for the first time. I had played Japanese games before (actually, I'd wager a majority of the games I had played until then were Japanese), but it was the first Japanese game I can remember playing where I was really consciously aware of its country of origin, and probably the first one that made me feel that I might be interested in learning the Japanese language, even if it was nothing more than a vague inkling in those days. Given that I am now a Japanese major, that I am currently living in Japan, and that learning a foreign language has taught me so many things about both myself and the world, I can't help but look back on those first moments of curiosity fondly.
- Playing
Xenosaga Episode III during the Christmas holidays in 2006. I originally played and obsessed over Xenogears a couple of months before I crashed out of high school, played the first two episodes of Xenosaga over the next couple of years as I gradually put myself back together, and played the third and final episode about a month after I took my tentative first steps back into education / the real world. So I think I'll always associate the games with that three or four year period in my life.
And playing Xenosaga III was a really precious experience for me because as I said goodbye to a series I had really loved, I found myself thinking back over how much I had changed in the years of the games' releases, and just how much better things had become for me. Of course it helps that it was an absolutely fabulous game in its own right, and a brilliant ending to the Xenosaga series.
- Getting my first CD burner, finding out that you could download Playstation games, and finally getting to play games like
Chrono Cross,
Xenogears and
Valkyrie Profile. I was nuts about RPGs during my early teens, and we missed out on sooooo many great titles from the Playstation era here in Europe. Suddenly being given access to them all at once was pretty amazing, and I'm pretty sure I got shivers up my spine when I first booted a burn of Chrono Cross and saw the Squaresoft logo.
Much more important, though, was that my ventures into Playstation piracy led me to this community, and to a group of friends who I have now known for almost ten years. I wasn't happy at all back then. In fact, I can't really think of a time when I was
less happy. But when I look back on those times I can't help but smile because of all the good times I had with people here discussing games and downloading titles new and old. I think venturing into an internet community for the first time and getting to know so many wonderful people back then saw me through some very tough times, and I don't dare to think where I might have been now had I not ended up here.
Originally Posted by Gypsy
Bulba~
Posting Permissions
