I thought I had grown up and left role-playing games behind. But I couldn’t resist trying the highly hyped Bravely Default to see if I was ready to relapse.
Today, I am a modern, fully functional, city-dwelling adult. I write about food for a living, I own a comfortable sofa, I belong to a book club, and I spend too much money on alcohol. I live in Brooklyn.
It wasn't always a given that things would turn out this way. That's because, between the ages of 11 and 18, I was driven by a singular passion, one that people don't tend to associate with well-socialized teen girls: I spent hours and hours and hours of my life parked in front of a PlayStation, and then a PlayStation 2, immersed in various Japanese role-playing games. Final Fantasies; Chrono Chross; XenoSaga; Star Ocean, Shadow Hearts.
The works.
Understand: I was not the kind of gamer who would play for a casual hour on a Saturday and then wander off to do something normal. I was the kind of gamer who — barring outside intervention — would play until I was overcome with nauseous despair. The kind of gamer whose parents instituted weekly time limits so that my legs didn't fuse to the sofa. The kind of gamer who would play a game once, consult the internet to make sure that I'd rummaged through every corner and finished every sidequest, and then play the game a second (or third) time in order to write a psychotically granular game guide to upload to GameFAQs.com, a website of which I was a committed and highly active community member.
(An excerpt from this, my magnum opus: "This is not (yet, and probably not ever) going to be big on specific strategies for beating bosses, etc. Those you can find in the excellent general walkthroughs written by other people, probably ones with more time on their hands than I have.") [Ed.: "more" time, lol.]
Once, in the crazed throes of a Final Fantasy X playthrough, I decided to type up checklists of every single monster I had to track down and beat, every item I had to find, and every super-powered weapon I had to trick out.
Reader, I printed out those lists and made a three-ring binder.
As with most of the questionable decisions I've made in my life, my journey into binder-compiling obsession began when I saw people cooler than me doing something, and wanted in. It was the fall of 1999. I was an 11-year-old in Harry Potter glasses, starting sixth grade and emerging from a period of dressing almost exclusively in head-to-toe polar fleece leisure suits. My older brother and his friend Hunter (who wore a bowl cut with real grace and upon whom I had a non-actionable crush) started meeting at our house after school to hang out and, often, play the newly released Final Fantasy VIII. And I was jealous.
Innocent, pre-Final Fantasy me in fifth grade.
Ariana Papier / facebook.com
I'd always liked watching my brother play video games, but most of them were too boring or too violent or too inherently dopey (bless you, Crash Bandicoot) to compel me to pick up a controller. This game, though, was a window onto a big, fantastic world populated by characters who seemed to have real motives and relationships, brought to life in legitimately beautiful ways. It was rich and cinematic and surprisingly adult, and my perfectionist brain was drawn to the game's measured pace and strategic framework. One of my limitations as a human is that I only like doing things I'm good at. And this was the kind of game, I realized, that I could be very good at.
I was, for years. I played Final Fantasy VIII until I practically had the whole thing memorized and pounced on each new installment in the series. My hobby, though, was private. It wasn't really something I talked about with anyone besides my brother and a handful of strangers on the internet. Eventually, I went to college, where I no longer had the option of segregating at-home geekdom from public conformity. I decided pretty quickly that explaining an RPG habit to potential friends was a lot more mortifying than playing the games was, at that point, actually fun. Something changed.
It's too pat to say that I loved JRPGs because they filled some chasm of teen loneliness or self-doubt. I was never a sad kid. I had friends I liked and a family I loved; I was proud of my grades; I played a mean clarinet solo. But I think I was always a little bit bored. And from the moment I got to college, I became, overnight, the opposite. That shit was four years of straight-up brochure-material personal growth. How could I justify spending an hour leveling up to beat a boss when I had a Nabokov novel to read before tomorrow's section, where I would be expected to dazzle real human beings with my piercing insight? Why would I spend the night alone with my TV when there were cute boys in the hallway to sit next to while they played guitar badly? I was BLOSSOMING, man. I felt like I was finally playing the hero in the real game, and I didn't need the pretend version anymore.
For the most part, that was that. I liked keeping my gamer past in my pocket as a kind of nerd cred card to flash when the occasion demanded it, and I'd wax nostalgic periodically. One summer when I was home from college I even fished my old PS2 out of the basement and rehabbed its wonky laser so I could revisit a few old favorites. But for about eight years now, I haven't so much as picked up a console controller.
Until, that is, I was asked to play a new JPRG on a professional basis. Almost a decade later, It turns out that the closeted RPG geek I was throughout my adolescence is still glued to a tiny screen somewhere inside me — and she couldn't turn down an offer like that. I wasn't sure if I'd outgrown those games forever, or if the fascination would start to bubble up again, and I wanted to find out.
