Like many other video game enthusiasts of the early 90’s, I received a free copy of Dragon Warrior with my “Nintendo Power” subscription.
(Bear with me here.)
Freebie games are now a dime a dozen (generally geared toward getting your money through add-on purchases after the fact!), but in 1990-91 when this promotion occurred, it was mind-bending as hell.
Console games back then, pretty much without exception, cost $50 a pop. Yeah, many games eventually went on sale, and yeah, there were some exceptions – like one-offs on the Genesis or most (all?) of the games on the pricier NeoGeo – but by and large, that was the default cost: $50.
So you had to be choosy. And I, like many other western gamers, wasn’t ready to dump $50 into a role-playing game.*
* This is why the promotion existed, to get western gamers to try to get onboard with RPGs, since they were so huge in Japan and Nintendo wanted to maximize profits in the West as well.
I had brain rot for action, you see. “Die Hard” and “Star Wars” were probably my favorite movies by this point (“The Blues Brothers” might have been a close third). Playground activities centered around pretending to club other kids with some sort of blunt instrument (or actually connecting on occasion … Sorry, Gary!).
Video games, by extension, needed to be fast-paced as well, yes?
Well, not always, as it turned out.
Because of the Dragon Warrior offer, I learned I could receive a free game if I subscribed to a magazine I loved already. And that was something different entirely.
I signed up in about 0.0003 seconds.
And thusly, Dragon Warrior – the grindiest of painfully grindy RPGs – became my definitive viewpoint of the genre for the next decade.
It was the first and last impression. The alpha and the omega. Nothing to see here, folks, this is all there is.
“Yeah, this is fun I guess, but what’s with all the boring, repetitive, unavoidable battles? I’m not playing another game like this.”*
* It is beyond safe to say that Dragon Warrior will NOT be making an appearance on this list. Yes, it’s historically relevant, and yes, I still have great affinity for it. But at some point, you have to ask yourself, “Would I honestly recommend someone sit down with this thing today and try to play it?” The answer with Dragon Warrior: Not unless I was playing a cruel prank on someone.
So when “Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars” came along in 1996, it couldn’t have been further from my radar.
And justifiably so on some level, because even though it is undeniably stupid to generalize an entire genre of video game because of just one game, that one game in question was extremely difficult to love.
I regret nothing.
Except…
Holy smokes, did I miss out on some genuine bangers for a really long time.
Thank goodness for retro gaming as an actual business and my own personal resolve to circling back to missed games as an adopted mentality.
Because Super Mario RPG is a downright joyful experience.
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars at a glance
Genre: RPG
Release: 1996
Platform: SNES
Complex’s No. 8 Best Super Nintendo Game