To Make a Mark in History

I know, I know. I haven't updated anything lately. But I have an excuse! Listen to me, now, I have an excuse!

(Hint: the video is my excuse!)

So, while my gaming hasn't been spectacular whatsoever, I have been making perler art. Yeah, so what there's a billion geeky craft blogs now? That's not what my blog is about. I'm just telling you that I've been making them. Well, if you ever went to my deviantART (I don't know why you would, since it's connected to this very page at the bottom), you'd see my later stuff, too.

What have I been playing? A little of this, little of that. A friend of my husband donated a fully functional NES to us, and I demanded some RPG for it so I could make use of it, too. The RPG chosen? Only the very first console style RPG in the history of gaming, Dragon Warrior! You know, that game is actually slow, the action is all text based, and you have to spend days grinding to do anything, but holy crap on a stick, I love this game.

Wait a Tantagel minute, though. I covered Dragon Warrior before, right? Yeah, the GBC version, and on a ROM no less. This is an actual cart - that keeps saves all these years later. Playing it with that square controller that will put bumps on your hands after a while, pressing that A button almost all the time, never having enough gold to buy all the equipment you find in the last town until you have to buy something three times as much to survive the grind to get the gold for the current equipment. You want that Magic Armor? Well, you're gonna earn it. In fact, you're gonna earn everything in this game, including a marriage you may or may not want.

This is where it all started, ladies and gentleman. This is where the entire subgenre of "JRPG" or "console style RPG" was born. That has quite a bit of power behind it, considering the industry giant that the RPG genre has become in today's gaming. In my attempt to study the History of the Evolution of the console style RPG, I'm compelled to play and beat this game in its original format on a TV set to channel 4 with a square controller. Not doing so is... well, it's just something my Gamer's Heart won't let me get away with. If I'm gonna make it a point to study these things, I have to bury myself in the history by playing what was made back then, since there's no way to travel to that time period and experience the rush of these games coming out as they were brand new. My husband tells me of the days when he believed that Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior were going to be cutting at each other's throat for dominance in our hearts, that it would be as epic as Star Trek vs Star Wars with the nerds, that each and every game would only try to up its competitor and we'd all relish in the awesomeness that was now available for play. I would love to journey to an alternate world where that is the case. It would be better than Square and Enix merging, putting Dragon Quest on the back burner, and dumping all of its money into a dying franchise. The two epic companies behind greatness like Chrono Trigger on one side, and Robotrek on the other. My personal opinion of this merge isn't exactly the best, since all Squeenix has managed to produce is things like Unlimited Saga, Kingdom Hearts 2, and The Bouncer. Every now and then, they manage to eek out a glimpse of hope, like Dragon Quest IX, but when you put the vast amount of crap on the scale against the games that Squeenix has managed to make that is actually worth playing... I think you see where I'm going with this.

Enough of my rant. Dragon Warrior was made before all of that. Before Final Fantasy even was conceived in Hironobu Sakaguchi's mind. It inspired a whole genre. A whole genre that has captured the hearts of millions around the world, be they casual or hardcore. Hard to believe that when Final Fantasy was in creation, they thought "we have to be better than Dragon Quest. we want more characters in a party, more weapons, more spells, more armor, more monsters, more dungeons", isn't it? While Sakaguchi wanted to tell a story, he did make a great game and people everywhere thought so, too. There have been numerous sequels and spinoffs of Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest hasn't the same amount of sequels, however, it's my opinion that there's a greater number of better Dragon Quest games and spinoffs that are great games, as opposed to what's got the Final Fantasy name slapped onto it just to boost sales from fan-twats.

I'm gonna be bold here for a minute, gamers, and tell you right now that if you claim to be an RPG fan, you need to do the same. I understand not all of us have NES consoles anymore, and we may have too modern of a TV to even play with one anyway. Then play it on the GBC or even on emulator, the way it was meant to be played. No save-states, no fast-forwarding. Experience the game the way it was meant to so that you, too, may experience a piece of gaming history.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill some Goldman enemies to get some gold for my magic armor. If I can survive that area of the continent, that is!

Thanks for reading!

Much love,

Suzuri