The First Time I Played a Final Fantasy Game was Traumatic

When I was 7 years old, all I wanted for Christmas was a Super Nintendo. For months my parents would tell me that they were sold out everywhere and to tempter expectations. Then one fateful night, I walked past the tree and I saw a new box under all the lights and ornaments.

A rectangular box. A heavy rectangular box. And while I had never seen a SNES box out in the wild, I just knew that’s what was behind the wrapping paper. A few weeks later, it’s Christmas Eve, and that box was the first thing I unwrapped and lo and behold, there it was. I was the N64 kid before the N64 was a thing. That Christmas, I got my Super Nintendo, packed with Super Mario World, along with two other games. Gradius III, a side-scrolling space shooter that in hindsight, I’m pretty sure my Dad got for himself more than me since he loved those types of games. The other was Final Fantasy II.

I’m pretty sure my parents got me that game because they knew how much I loved the Legend of Zelda games, saw the sword on the cover and figured “close enough.” Since I never heard of Final Fantasy at the time, I saved that game for when I got through Super Mario World and got bored of Gradius III. Over the Christmas break, I beat Super Mario World and played enough Gradius to the point that I had memorized the first several levels. The Sunday before I went back to school I finally decided to pop in the cartridge and see what the game is all about. I was initially confused, and I’m curious if anyone else experienced this, because the game had a save file already on there.

When I started the game, I was already at Fabul castle, after Rosa was kidnapped. That’s about 3 or so hours into the game. So I was seriously confused as to what was going on. I walked around the castle and without understanding any of the context, I was lost. When I went back to the overworld, I saw a boat to the top right of the screen, so I head over there. I watch the in-game cutscene of everyone getting ready to travel to Mysidia and start to kind of piece together the story.

Then Leviathan shows up out of nowhere. The scene of the ship shaking, characters falling overboard, and that ominous as hell music was such a sensory overload that I turned the game off and didn’t touch it for weeks. I should mention that I was a very anxious kid, so a tranquil scene of a boat travelling to adventures unknown being disrupted like that was a lot to process. Eventually I muster up the courage to try again during my Spring break.

I pop in the cartridge and before I could get to the boat, I encounter my first ever random battle. For those that never played the original SNES version of Final Fantasy II, the screen would zoom in and out rapidly, and there was this alarm that would go off. Again, it scared the hell out of me so much that I turned the game off and didn’t touch it again until the summer.

I’m not sure what made me decide to try the game again, but I popped it back into my SNES, and this time, I chose “New Game” and got to experience Final Fantasy II from the beginning. At this point, I’ve had months to process the random battle alarm and the monsters, so I was able to enter the game with a lot more confidence. And I gotta tell ya, I’m so glad I did give the game a fair shot. This was one of the most defining games of my life. The soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu was powerful, complex, and beautiful. The characters had motivation and personality quirks, and the combat was unlike anything I had played previously. I spent that entire summer playing the game, finding the secrets, and just loving every moment.

There is another story attacked to Final Fantasy II that I’ll tell another time but this was my first real exposure to Final Fantasy and it changed me as a person.