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For seven or eight years, I replayed this game once a year. That's sometime between seventh and eighth grade and college. I feel that I not only grew with this game, but that it was also a part of my growth. RPGs stress character and the character(s) in this game impacted mine.
This is the reason I bought a Dreamcast. I remember not being impressed for, maybe, the first twenty minutes of the game. After that I was hooked. I think Shenmue was so different that, initially, this worked against it. Once I accustomed myself to its world and gameplay, I knew what it was: a weird masterpiece. It is definitely anachronistic by today's standards. I'm not sure that someone playing it for the first time, now, could take the same liking to it.
I marathoned this game every summer in high school. In all, I think I must have put around three-hundred hours into it. Morrowind is more than a game, it's an experience. Its epic scale was unmatched at the time of its release, and for years afterward. There is something to be said for the lack of fast travel, which made the game world feel much larger than it actually was. In that same vein of "addition by subtraction", in retrospect, the reams of text, filled with rich lore, and lack of spoken dialogue made characters feel more fleshed out than their counterparts in sequels.
I received this game on a burnt disc, around 1998-9. From the intro, where "Born Bad" by the Gone Jackals plays, I think I knew I was going to like this game. This was probably my introduction point-n-click adventures, which has since become perhaps my favorite genre.
To think, if one of the great oligarchs of the games industry, EA, hadn't gobbled up BioWare, by now we probably would have had a sequel. That's too bad, but without one, that only makes Jade Empire more unique.
Like Morrowind, this was more than a game, but in a different way. If you were a kid at the apex of Pokemon's popularity, the Pokemon culture was all around. The TV show, the card game, and the video games were a common thread between guys and girls alike. Pokemon, and its Game Boy games were a phenomenon that connected people ... sometimes by link cable.
This was my introduction to RPGs. I picked this game off of the shelf at Wal-Mart, apparently impressed by the blurbs on the back of the box. I think I was probably eight at the time, since FFVII was a greatest hits game, but FFVIII was not yet out. Whatever the case, this was probably the most revelatory game to me since Sonic the Hedgehog.
The follow-up to FFVII was no less immersive or impressive. I do remember being particularly stunned by the graphics, in comparison to the previous game. I don't know how I felt at the time, but I eventually came to dig Squall more than any other character in the Final Fantasy realm.
Wow. Capcom nailed everything; RE4, in terms of excellence, has few peers.
When I include the franchise Kingdom Hearts in this list, I mean Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II. The first KH was uniquely appealing for its synthesis of the Square and Disney worlds. The story, at the time, was not too convoluted, i.e., it was accessible, as well as provocative enough to make the player care. The combat system was also refreshing, compared to standard, turn-based RPG fare. In KH II, the story started veering off the rails, but the game was mostly lather, rinse, and repeat--success.
