My parents bought me and my brother a Nintendo Entertainment System all of a sudden one day. They always said they hated video games, and thought they were dumb, and then they bought us a Nintendo Entertainment System. It came with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt on the same cartridge.

For Christmas that year, we were given 5 games. I didn’t know at the time, but my uncle had bought the 5 games, and given them to various family members to give to my brother and I. This would be Christmas 1990 I am assuming. I would have just turned 7 that December. We were living in “the rancher” in North Delta. My grandparents lived in West Vancouver. They had a very nice house.

Anyways, the games we received are written below:

– Super Mario Bros. 3
– Contra
– Guerilla War
– Blades of Steel
– Final Fantasy

Today I would like to go on about Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy wasn’t a Japanese game for a Canadian 7 year old in 1990. It was a game that had a cool “old fashioned” font on the cover, with a picture of a floating castle in an orb behind a crossed sword and an axe. In 1990, a 7 year old can go to town with this. This was the first time I saw weapons crossed decoratively, and I drew lots of weapons crossed. Spears, axes, lances, swords, chain sickles (a Dragon Warrior thing) and more.

The game also came with a world map, and each location was numbered in the order that you were supposed to go to them. Dragon Warrior games also came with such maps I believe, but this map made a lasting impression on me, and I would be taking printer paper, and drawing these elaborate world maps for games that only existed in my head, numbering the order to go to places. (A moment of silence for printer paper.)

There were two places on the world map that had numbers on the side where the location names were, but not on the map. These places were not on the map. My mind was blown, and I thought about these places long and hard, and thought about the concept of places that were not on maps long and hard. One was a floating castle, and the other was the final castle (here the word castle is being used similarly to how dungeon is currently used in video game lexicon).

I forget if there was an items table insert that came with the game. There was a list of the monsters. The list of monsters listed the HP of each monster. Any bosses that had 1000 HP were hardcore. HP means hit points. When you attack an enemy, you take off hit points, and once their hit points reach zero, they would be slain. (Once your hit points reached zero, you would also be slain.) The translator for Final Fantasy had settled on the word slain for death I believe, and that led to me at 7 knowing the word slain. Slain.

7 year olds can read, but it’s not like they really enjoy savoring on every word, especially when playing a video game. RPGs were still a fairly new thing, and this sort of calm style of playing video games was new. I was excited at playing a video game, and would not read carefully. I didn’t get why the intro scene for the game was after I fucked around on the world map for a few hours, and died at some guy in an old castle up north where he had the princess. When I first reached the intro (a king builds a bridge, and when you cross is things get all emotionally misty and the credits go across the screen), I had thought it was the end of the game. 2 or 3 hours didn’t seem to bad for a game, and I could’ve definitely played it a few more times.

I’m going to jump ahead, but my brother and I didn’t understand the concept of equipping weapons until near the end of the game. Our “black belt” (these days called a “monk”) was always our most effective character in battle because they didn’t need weapons to be strong. Our “fighter” was weak as shit, despite being called a fighter. We didn’t get that. We got it after we learned that you could equip weapons. It was a eureka moment for us.

The game rewarded you in fun ways. When you beat the pirates, you got a ship that could go all over the inner sea. The sea seemed so huge! It was fun to explore. Then, after you beat a wizard, some elves or dwarves were all happy, and that somehow lead to blowing up this small piece of land between the inner sea and outer sea. You could then explore the outer sea! When thinking about these seas, please think about the Mediterranean as the inner sea, and the rest of the world as the outer sea. That’s how I thought of them. At 7 I felt the spiritual connection with my cultural European ancestors in their own inner sea quite strongly. I may’ve even subconsciously thought about Northern Africa and its historical identities.

From the outer sea you could go to the Lich’s hole in the ground. He was the fiend of the earth. There were four fiends and they all made their respective element (Greek element) go to shit. Lichy had made the earth rot. I didn’t really get this or care at the time, but that’s what he did. You kill him, and then an orb on the status screen glows. Progress. Then you get a canoe, and can traverse the small rivers. You go into a volcano (a volcano!) and kill the fiend of fire. Another orb glows. Fires can be made again. Two orbs are yet to glow.

These orbs would later become crystals in other Final Fantasy games. Four crystals would become seen as a Final Fantasy-esque thing. When Final Fantasy IX half-assedly had crystals in it, it was seen as a return to the roots. I have no idea if the orbs were called crystals in the Japanese version, but I have to doubt it because they were orb-like in shape.

RPG progression was going well. Inner sea, outer sea, canoe. Next was the ice cave to resurrect the airship (it was buried in a desert). With an airship, you can go anywhere! In Final Fantasy, this was the final barrier, but newer RPGs also had areas that were inaccessible to airships because you couldn’t land in the area. It was all forest or mountainous terrain. It’s impossible to land airships in such terrain. In Final Fantasy II (IV) there were Black Chocobos (a Chocobo is a flightless bird that you ride) that could fly and only land in forests. Final Fantasy IV also had a hovercraft that would go over shoals (I learned this word from Dragon Warrior II, which I have already talked about), but not over mountains. Hovercrafts can ‘t hover above mountains obviously.

Once the airship is obtained, 7-year-old kids get their first sense of the subjectivity of perception. When you first get the boat, you feel that the boat moves a lot faster than walking. The boat feels really fast. The airship is much much faster. It speeds along across the entire world. When you ride in your boat after getting the airship, it feels so incredibly slow. My first thought was that the game slowed down the boat, or that there was slowdown (slowdown in games was a norm). It took me a while to get that my brain was getting used to the certain speeds in the game, and they were making me perceive them as fast or slow depending on what I was comparing them too. (If the boat actually slows down, then I have been had my entire life.)

As a kid, things like getting access to the outer sea, or finding the airship makes you feel like there’s just much more world to explore. However, when you think about it calmly, you realize that there are just two new towns you can access when you reach the outer sea, and likewise with the airship. I say this, and I felt like this, but the truth is actually a little more nuanced.

There was a third town you could reach with the airship, but everyone spoke a weird language. Well, they spoke gibberish until you talked to this guy in a town way before who knew the language. If you talked to him, then he would teach you the language, and you could speak it. I wish language acquisition were that easy. There are many languages I would love to know. Perhaps I’m talking to the wrong people.

The above guy in a town “way before” blew my mind. A town “way before” is a town that you have already gone through, and in my brain was a town that you have already “completed”. The people in that town will forever say “thank you for defeating the _____, you really saved us!” However, that did not happen with this one guy. You had to remember that he originally said “I like languages” or “I’m a scientist” or something, and then go back to him.

Back to the fiends, once we got the airship, we didn’t really get where the next fiend was, but after randomly talking to everyone a few times, we finally found out that we reached his lair from inside a town. His lair was underground, and he was the Kraken. He gets slain. The orb glows. I suppose the seas stop being restless, but you would have to wonder if they were restless before, how boats were being used. I think 25 years later Bravely Default (another video game) addresses this.

The final fiend was in the floating castle that was on the box of the game. To reach the floating castle, you needed to first go through a tower in a desert. You could not enter this tower right away, but there was a trick that I forget. You probably needed an item to open up the door. There was not sense of accomplishment much like being in a floating castle ready to fight the fiend of the air.

The floating castle had a futuristic feel to it. In current RPGs, the area with a futuristic feel always makes my heart sink because it is a dull boring area, and will most likely take over the aesthetic of the rest of the game. However, when you are 7 in 1990 and get into a tower you couldn’t get into before, get to the top of it, and get transported to a floating castle in the sky, you get pretty excited that it is futuristic.

The fiend of the air (or the wind, this may have changed in translations) was a floating dragon I believe, and once he was destroyed, the final orb would glow, and the wind would calm down (or perhaps start blowing again).

As kids like to look at charts for hours on end, and allow their imaginations to imagine countless scenarios, I looked at the enemy charts for many hours. There was this one enemy that I had not found, the “war mech”, and so I thought I would go looking for him. As he was a mech, I assumed he would be in the (futuristic) floating castle, and so I looked for him in the floating castle. I found him.

The war mech was stronger than any fiend in the game. He was a tough foe (foe is a word learned from I believe Final Fantasy II (IV)), and I remember I beat him with only a fighter left in my party. I gave myself a pat on the back for beating that one enemy on the enemy chart that I had never beaten before, and continued playing the game. Many years later when I was a jaded older elementary school student, I learned that the war mech was almost like a secret boss that most people couldn’t find, and definitely couldn’t beat. I felt mighty big when I heard that. In an ideal world, this is a tidbit I could whip out at dinner parties when people are talking about their stock portfolios. (I don’t have a stock portfolio. I honestly probably should.)

I had no idea why at the time, but once all those orbs are glowing due to beating the fiends of all the elements, you go back to the castle in the north where you rescued a princess at the very beginning of the game. By doing so, you are transported back in time to fight the last boss, Chaos. He had 2000 HP ,which was double a war mech.

I didn’t have any know how as to how to beat a last boss of the first Final Fantasy, but I was 7, so I had a lot of time. I spent hours making my characters stronger, and wandering Chaos’s castle in the past. I got to Chaos a few times, and he destroyed me. I could feel his power and got excited that I was battling such a power enemy. There are no power bars in most RPGs, and you had no idea when you are close to beating a last boss. You do read on the enemy chart that he has 2000 HP, and so you do the math in your head with every hit you take off him, but you’re 7 so your math may be flawed. The second the game lets you know that you’ve beaten him is a magical second. When you defeat normal enemies, they disappear right away, but with Chaos, it was a slow disappearing, more like a tower crumbling, or a statue disintegrating than anything else. The 20 seconds or so it took for Chaos to finally disappear were euphoric.

I sometimes wonder how my uncle chose the game, or how he came across the game to give to us. Was it in some sort of bundle pack? Did he randomly pick them up at the store? Were they stolen, gotten from his friend near the docks? Regardless, he probably got the games, and thought that kids like video games, and it would keep us busy for a while. I would bet that he didn’t think the 7 year old would be 32 in a café in Japan writing about the game. It all sounds kind of lame when I say that.