Are we forgetting something?

by Cawdor

I am a Final Fantasy nitwit.

I have bought every game associated with the name, yes even mystic quest, I probably will until the day I realize that I don't need these games to keep me from going mad. (Which will be never, I think) Anyway, I was looking over my collection of FF games and one thing has occurred to me, they are probably the worst RPGs I own.

I heard that gasp in the audience, so I shall explain. I have them all, from the first, to the game boy legends, to the opus IX, and I have loved them to pieces, but then I look at Lunar 2 nestled next to this monopoly, in its oversized package, little toys and lavish book. And I realized something, there is an RPG, not a game. You see folks, we common gamers have missed the boat, we spend so much time squabbling over old school vs. new school, final fantasy IV vs. final fantasy VIII, and other elitist arguments that we forget why we played them in the first place, to escape. We spend more time worrying about engines and pixel counts and such that we forget this, and I think it is about time we remembered.

So what does this have to do with Final Fantasy being the worst thing on my shelves? Final Fantasy has become and industry that appeals to the widest audience, people who are just discovering RPGs. Each game is reinvented, yet we compare it to the previous eight or nine like they were strippers. And since we spend so time comparing this one set of games we miss all the others out there, like the truly great Valkyrie Profile, which I think to be the best game to come out in a long time, and the Lunar series. And the best part of these games is the simplest, they are fun. Yes, fun.

Have we forgotten fun? I still remember laughing at myself when I mixed up Celes' lines in the opera scene in FFVI. Or truly caring what happened to Leena in Grandia. I was so angry when Arieth died in FFVII that I couldn't go to work. So where did all of this go? I don't know, maybe I have just stopped having fun.