The Golden Age

Kotaku has an interesting post about when the original Final Fantasy came to the United States. The roleplaying genre in the United States had been largely confined to computers when Final Fantasy came out. A newspaper article from 1990 featuring Nintendo Spokesman Tom Sarris said the following:

Basically, you can expect something for everybody,'' he said. "One of the most eagerly anticipated titles here is 'Final Fantasy,' which is very, very big in Japan, and that is very much geared to the adult market.''

Final Fantasy is a role playing-adventure fantasy game that will come with two maps and, Sarris said, the biggest instruction manual ever to accompany a Nintendo game — 84 pages long.

I still remember that manual, too. I loved game manuals growing up; at least, I loved the ones that had lots of detail and didn't read like they had been translated by Babelfish from Japanese to Chinese to German back to Japanese to Quenya to ecclesiastical Latin back to Chinese and then to English. If there was a map, or some big chart like the one that came with Dragon Warrior III, I could entertain myself almost indefinitely without bothering to turn the game on.

Now you're lucky if a manual bothers to tell you anything beyond the controls and how the different multiplayer modes work, the answer to both generally being roughly "the same way they work in every other game to come out in the last half-decade." Video game documentation has gained sentences that consistently look like they were written by someone who actually speaks English, but lost its soul.

Final Fantasy being intended for the adult market fits with my experience in elementary school. (As well as explaining anomalies like the repeated occurrence of the word "motherfuckers" in the dialogue of several characters and the game's otherwise inexplicable abundance of references to events from the Eisenhower administration.) I have friends who like RPGs now, but were utterly baffled by my interest in something so "boring" back when we were growing up: turn-based combat, reams of numbers to keep track of, talking to other characters. These were foreign and repugnant concepts to them, like Frenchmen eating snails or the pagan blood rites of some tribe of Stone Age headhunters or the music of Ace of Base.