My gaming adventure as a child was somewhat unorthodox. I had an NES - an unwanted gift (from my parents POV) from my uncle one fateful xmas when I was 4-5. I'm old, but not so old that I was really sentient during the NES's heyday. My folks never appreciated or approved of gaming as a pastime; they tolerated it in so much as they couldn't bear to abolish something their child clearly loved, yet put pretty firm limits and resisted all my forays into the medium. I was too young to know what NES games were good or not, and my folks were often too busy to arrange play dates for me with kids my age in the late 80s, early 90s so I could experience the world of gaming through my peers. I was afforded two games per year, one on my birthday and one on xmas. Not a horrible or unregular prospect back in the day! But since I was again, too young and inexperienced, my mother made the selections. She did her best, god bless her soul, but at the end of the day she was still a boomer-mom. So most of the games pulled off the shelves were guesses at what I'd like. I asked for "Tetris" one year, so she thought she was being clever in buying me
Tetris II for the NES. It's #2, so therefore it has to be better, right? Of course, Tetris II relied on matching colors, not just shapes, and my NES was relegated/banished to an antiquated black and white TV in the back of the house, so the game was functionally unplayable. Games like that, or embarrassing and unplayable shovelware like the NES Jurassic Park game was my experience with the 8-bit era of games. No Zelda, No Metroid, no Castlevania, no Metal Gear, no Contra, no Mega Man, no Punch Out, and no Final Fantasy. Rentals would have been the only possible venue for me to be exposed to these games, but the neighborhood Blockbuster didn't actually open for business until after the sunset of the 8-bit era.
The 16-bit Era was also something I largely missed out on. By this age, I'd learned to read, poured over gaming magazines, and had made friends at school/daycare where I could learn through cultural osmosis what was good in the world of gaming. But it was still something that I was largely gatekept out of. Apparently, my parents were so pissed at my uncle for giving us an NES (They very much didn't want their kids to play ANY games, didn't know this gift was coming, and couldn't bring themselves to take a gift away that we'd just excitedly unwrapped on Christmas morning - AT my uncle's house no less. I actually didn't see my uncle for YEARS after this event, and this was apparently why.) that we were sheltered from ever being gifted into the 16-bit Era. "If you want (an SNES or Genesis) you'll have to buy it yourself" - so I slaved away at chores that were probably irresponsible/dangerous to delegate to a child (I was pushing a lawn mower that was twice my size over gigantic tree roots in our yard at like, age 7) for a pithy of allowance for years, and coordinated saving up for an SNES with my little brother. On the day we had finally saved enough money to pay for an SNES+tax (which I had calculated down to the last penny), my parents led my brother and I to the local Target (or was it Wal-Mart?), both of us preciously clutching our halves of the investment in our little hands. We looked around the electronics section greedily at the world of gaming that was now about to open to us, thinking about which games we were going to buy to play on our new Super Nintendo, and which ones we would save for rentals instead. When we were finally done window shopping, I called over a teller to unlock the security glass to retrieve our precious bounty. When I then went to fetch my mother and brother so we could pay for the machine, my mother's face went taught and she paused for a brief moment that seemed like an eternity before explaining that sorry, my brother had changed his mind at the last second. He was going to buy a GameBoy instead. Huh? That can't be right, we were saving up for this for years. Let me talk to him, this must be a mistake. Maybe he got the different Nintendo branded items confused. It was too late, he was already prancing about the store with a GameBoy in a plastic bag. He'd already spent his share. "I'm sorry, but that is his money and at the end of the day he can spend it how he chooses." And that was that. At the rate I saved up money, I wouldn't be able to afford an SNES until after the 16-bit generation had given way to its successor. Crestfallen and defeated, I stewed in resentment of that betrayal that I still haven't completely gotten over to this day.
So I missed out on almost the entirety of the 16-bit generation as well. No Mario World, No Super Metroid, No Chrono Trigger, no Street Fighter, No Link to the Past, No Star Fox, no Donkey Kong Country, No Streets of Rage, No Sonic, and no Final Fantasy II & III. All of these classics from the 8-bit and 16-bit era, I had to come back to much later in life. Which isn't a particularly irregular or unprivileged perspective. But the result was I just don't have the same nostalgia glasses that a lot of y'all have for this era in gaming. Time spent playing FF1 on an emulator, or money spent delving into the collector's market was time/money I could have spent playing games with my limited resources that objectively offer superior and more sophisticated experiences. Late-Gen games from the 16-Bit Era like FF6 hold up pretty well to modern sensibilities, but FF1 - in most of its forms I've tried over the years - is just too primitive and offers too little outside the core and rudimentary battle mechanics to keep my short attention span locked into it to ever come close to completing the game. I don't really see that as a failure of the game, or a failure on my part. We were just ships passing in the night, and it was not meant to be. Which sums up my feelings for pretty much the entirety of FF1-5. I have little doubt that had I played FF1 as a child, I would have adored it the way a lot of you do. Aside from a stint with FPS games as a teenager, I was never good at, or gravitated towards games that required twitch-reactions to successfully play them, and always gravitated towards games that were more cerebrally engaging and that I could take my time with. If the young version of me could wrangle any amount of joy out of playing Tetris II in black and white, FF1 probably would have felt like the greatest thing of all time. If I could go back in time and gift one game to myself as a child, it probably would have been Zelda. But FF1 would have been option 1B for sure. Everyone who got to experience this game contemporaneously back in the day is very lucky in my eyes.
