Winter of 1991. A good time in the L street house, we are firmly into the eighth grade, we have moved unto the new Super Nintendo video game system (SNES), and do too a deal with a friend (lookup the year to see the story on that) we get to start playing Final Fantasy II (FF4).

Yes, I once again have to explain that Final Fantasy II as I was introduced too was in fact the fourth installment of the franchise and will be called FF4 from now on to stay consistent, but at the time it was the second Final Fantasy game to us.

There was some knowledge of there being other games, Keith had that pipeline to a friend with the Super Famicon, the Japanese SNES, and so we knew a little about it. Keith had by the time of this games launch, which was November 23^rd, already moved away to Grass Valley, so that knowledge wasn’t as strong anymore. Chris K. who got the game, which I am guessing was a Christmas present given the timetable, also was big on getting into the Nintendo overseas lore, but maybe since he was a year younger we took all his information with a grain of salt.

But it was with the purchase of this game and bringing it over to play at the L street house that Chris M. started showing up as a regular customer a lot more. Prior to this in the seventh grade I would get his older brother Marty from time to time with the other boys when bad ideas were a foot, but Chris M. not so much.

In the fall when I got the SNES and had a couple classes with Chris M. we started to see him a bit. Especially when he got into SimCity and competed with Chris K. for one of the coveted two save spots on the cartridge.

Chris M. of course was over at the apartments where Chris K. lived, and Keith formerly had so he was getting to play Chris K’s SNES a lot as well. It also filled him in with the same video game library the two of us were using, which since Keith had the original Final Fantasy on the original Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), he was also familiar with the concept of what FF4 was and wanted to play it.

FF4 had four save slots luckily. One was reserved for Chris K. obviously, and another for me in trade for a save slot Zelda 3 when it came out, giving Chris M. a pretty easy fight have one of the remaining two. With a consistent save slot on the cartridge, he got to playing.

Which brings us back to him being at the L street house a lot more. Whenever Chris K. would come over or leave the cartridge there, he would know his save was there and then try and come over and play his save. Of course, I or Chris K. would also want to play our saves, so on occasion that would cause some friction between Chris M. and whoever’s console he was trying to play it on at the time.

This is oddly then when I remember Chris M. vividly for the first time and its not the greatest situation. One day when he was over trying to get a turn on his save while I was playing my own. Somehow, he found a way to grate on my sanity while I was playing with his backseat gaming. At that point Chris and I were pretty new to our personalities, and I didn’t know he go into obnoxious overdrive.

Interestingly this was on a weekend where my brother Steve’s kids were visiting so we had a small contingency in my room watching the SNES. Justin of course would just watch, but Meghan, even at that young of an age, which was like seven, would get pretty demanding about how she should get a turn, and probably on Mario World instead of the boring game I was playing. Meaning I was probably extra irritated between her and Chris M.

Now at this time in our lives, Chris M. was not a very big kid, I was on the other hand fresh off a football season and a growth spurt. So, when I finally got fed up with everything, I decided it would be best to drag Chris M. out of my room and throw him out of the house. The main reason I remember actually doing that is that I hit his head, lightly, on my baby chair, which one of the other kids or I had been sitting on, on the way out the bedroom door.

No fight ensued, but Chris M. also didn’t leave from what I recall. Instead stay out in the living room for a second after the ruckus. Here is where the details get fuzzy. Somewhat prideful as Chris M. could be, decades later as I write about this, I wonder why he stayed. Perhaps Mom noticed the kerfuffle and interjected herself. But instead of being mad and leaving, or being mad and trying to fight back he eventually made his way back in and somehow Chris M. and I went from antagonizing “give me a turn on the SNES” friends, to really good friends over the next half of the school year.

Yes, I do think a video game had something to do with it. Not all of it. But the game for its time was something new, different and seemed cutting edge. It was an RPG with seemingly complex combat with a narrative that could be followed. The graphical changes from the NES to SNES really came through to us, and, well, caused Chris M. to obnoxiously want time on the game.

Chris K. had some interesting RPGs on this Turbo Graphics 16. I remember one vividly that could be cheated into a quick win, where the “hero” claimed he was all about fast cars and hot women. Which was funny to us, but it really was getting a story about a Bad Guy Dark Knight changing his ways and saving the planet from an evil overlord hiding on one of the moons that took a hold.

The games subtle and not so subtle references to Star Wars really helped me enjoy it. I was starting to wish I had more things on that front to entertain myself with since I had loved it in the 80s. But the early 90s was a very slow period for a time with that franchise. So, seeing this vader-esque villain, character themes and fantasy story turned a bit sci-fi hit the spot like a warm soup on a cold winters day.

I am not here to recap the story though. There are plenty of sites on the internet for that. Mine is of my history with the game. Of course, the game started off as I told, with the save slot and time jockeying. But even though this game does get beaten over the course of twenty hours or so, we didn’t stop with it there.

Finding the hidden items, leveling the characters up to ridiculous power levels and restarting the game with better knowledge of the fights and items started happening. Not happy with just beating the game, not losing unique items to certain characters, which in some cases we couldn’t play again after their departure from the storyline, became a source of pride. Knowing when to unequip a character’s good items to not lose them, when to do certain side quests to make the main story more of a breeze. These were now all part of optimizing the next playthrough.

One day, I think in the ninth grade, while staying home sick from school I happened upon a sword we had never seen before in Eblon cave called the Medusa Sword. Without the internet to tell us drop rates and give us full lists of the games items, finding a new item on that playthrough helped add to this idea that with enough playthroughs we could figure other things, like un-petrifying the twins in Baron.

It was to the ends of optimizing playthroughs that one of the main stories of playing the game comes from. December 25th, 1993. Chris M. now two years later is a fixture of the house and is at it on the holidays.  It’s evening and the holiday fun has wound down, everyone has gone home save Mom, Dad, Myself and Chris. Chris decides to play himself some FF4.

He is in a location in the game called the “Land of Summoned Monsters” or the “Feymarch”. In this dungeon, as they are called, you encounter different monsters you can engage in battle. One of the monsters is called a Conjurer. These little baddies summon other monsters to do the fighting for them. In one particular encounter they can summon these half-spider, half-woman creatures called “Archnes” that then attack your party of heroes in the game with a spell called quake.

This spell, quake is a devastating magic that opens the very ground beneath your characters feet and does earth “elemental” damage to the whole of them. However, there is a spell that one can learn in the game called “float”. If someone is smart enough to cast this on their whole party in this dungeon it causes this particular encounter to mean nothing, since the Spider-woman’s attack can’t hit your characters who are now hovering above the ground she uses to deal out her pain.

So, Chris M. decides to use this encounter to speed or power level his party, depending on which phrasing you like, or for the sake of this, optimizing his battle time to leveling. Those not familiar with the concept, in RPGs characters get stronger over time by earning experience. In most games the bulk of this experience comes in the form of killing monsters. Each Spiderlady Chris M. kills earns him so many experience points, which once he decides to kill the conjurer off and end the encounter will be banked into his characters. The next hour goes by, and Chris M. patiently kills them over and over again, keeping a running tab on how much experience he is due when he makes the call to kill the conjurer.

The number climbs to something ridiculous like two million points. At this point Chris M. decides to make a little joke. On the SNES controller there are two triggers or shoulder buttons on the left and right side. They are called the L and R buttons respectively. If hit and held down in FF4 it makes your party attempt to flee a dangerous encounter. It’s not an easy escape though, the game will decide while you’re holding the buttons down whether you can or cannot flee, or whether the enemy gets to slap you around in the new vulnerable position you’ve put the characters in. This sometimes can save you from dying to a particularly mean beastie, however, running from the fight loses any chance at an experience gain. No reward for being a coward.

Well Chris makes this joke about running from all this experience and oh so lightly taps those two buttons. Now usually running requires holding those buttons down and praying the game lets you run before the monsters eat you alive. In this case, the slightest tap and his party escapes the encounter, leaving Chris, and his hour and a half of work in the dust. This was the time Chris ran from two million experience.

Above we see a cartoon I made of Chris’s reaction to the event. The idea of wasting that kind of time on that encounter at that age, well, yeah, he may have hammed up his reaction but just the embarrassment of the situation, let alone having to re-do the encounter, was enough to mock a quick escape.

This was a landmark in my gaming history. What is weird, I don’t remember the first time the game was beaten, presumably by Chris K. Instead, I just remember this game changing the way I viewed what games could be. Prior to this, the Zelda games were really my introduction to games with a narrative, and there isn’t that much there to be honest. Now I expected games to actually have relatable villains and plot twists and free roaming world maps.

While over these couple years with FF4 I would try a whole slew of RPG games, none captured my attention, or seemingly really anyone’s in the same way. We did have some other fun ones, like Soul Blazer on the SNES which I liked a lot, and stayed up late during Chris K’s birthday party to play all night with Chris M. But nothing was as big. It wasn’t going to be until the next Final Fantasy then that expectations would be set so high again. And of course, we wouldn’t get the next game until 1994.

Somehow this makes the time with FF4 as the gold standard of RPG games seem like it was forever. I got played during sick days of Junior High and High School. It survived losing playtime to games like Street Fighter 2, Civilization and Sim City 2000. There are modern games I wouldn’t play over some of those. Couple that with the novelty of the title for me, this is the nostalgia title and sits firmly at the top of my all-time Final Fantasy titles.

But times would have to change so Final Fantasy 3(?) was on the horizon in the fall of 1994.