First Post!
Welcome back, or welcome in general if the front page somehow wasn't enough for you! Either way, glad you're still here.
This is the first post, which means we have to get the awkward introductions out of the way: Yay, first post!
Okay, moving on.
If you know me at all, you probably know me as one of three things: a wannabe writer, a person with a deeply unreasonable number of original characters, or simply someone who enjoys video games. JRPGs in particular! We'll be spending a lot of time on that last one over here!
You see, my late father grew up in Munich, and he had one of the very first Game Boys. The original model, bulky and grey, the kind of thing you could genuinely use as a blunt weapon if the situation called for it. He had two games for it.
The first was Tetris, which, come on, needs no introduction because I bet even your grandmother has probably played Tetris at some point.
The second was... Burai Fighter Deluxe, which is considerably more obscure. It's a horizontal shoot-em-up developed by KID and published by Taito, where you play as a soldier in a jetpack blasting through five stages of biomechanical mutants to save the galaxy. What set it apart from other shooters of its time was that you could aim in eight directions rather than just firing straight ahead, which sounds simple but made it feel genuinely different. It even got a name change when it was later rereleased on Game Boy Color as Space Marauder.
Dad probably never knew any of that context. He just played it and compiled some of the level passwords (old stuff, no game saving and loading) on a piece of paper I eventually completed myself.
Eventually, I got my hands on Pokémon Blue, and Pokémon Red.
Speaking of Red, you see, I was the kind of kid who lent games out freely and with great optimism, and I learned the hard way that a borrowed Game Boy cartridge is a gone Game Boy cartridge. Yes, Pokémon Red was among the casualties... and so was a frankly embarrassing number of other games that I have absolutely not made peace with.
You. You know who you are. I hope, I don't know, that freaking Tetris haunts you, even if I still have that one. I hope you close your eyes at night and see blocks. And I hope they never, ever, fit.
...Anyway. Shortly after Pokemon, I got Final Fantasy VIII on PlayStation, and that was more or less it for me: Game over. Brain rewired forever. I'll have more to say about VIII specifically at some point, but what's worth noting is that I actually played it, and VI and IX, before Final Fantasy VII because I missed VII at release entirely and came to it later.
For now, this is who I am and where we're starting!