Birth of a fanboy
The boy was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games. He first learned about it when the first Final Fantasy came to America. He was too young at the time to know what it was about but his father seemed to enjoy it. He heard about Final Fantasy again when Final Fantasy II (now IV) appeared on his Super Nintendo. He was still quite young to be able to play but he could understand what was going on. Then came Final Fantasy III (VI) which was a gift from his father to his mother (obviously a joke). He was now old enough to play, but he was too shy to take the controller from his older brother’s hands. Instead they played together, the little boy would observer and advise his brother. He had a fantastic memory and everything that happened on screen was embedded forever in a part of his brain. This would help him play the game himself once he would dare try the game.
A year or two passed, he now had enough confidence to try the games he only saw others play. He first played Final Fantasy III, then II. He played a bit of FFI but it was too hard for him. His parents even bought Final Fantasy Mystic Quest which he enjoyed even though it was not really like the other games. As the time passed, he learned to love those games and the consoles they were made for. He was not only a Final Fantasy fanboy, he was also a Nintendo fan. He made his parents buy the Nintendo 64 along with the excellent Super Mario 64. Then Squaresoft decided to leave Nintendo (rather, Nintendo decided to use cartridges that could contain a tiny fraction of what CDs could). The boy followed Squaresoft and sold a bunch of old games for the privilege of playing the newest Final Fantasy game.
A seasoned fanboy
In the following years the boy would play everything related to Final Fantasy. When he couldn’t find the original game he would find the ROM. He played and replayed the classics he had learned to love in his youth, he learned the correct numbering of the SNES games, he played the real Final Fantasy II and III. He played Final Fantasy V and bought all the remakes (Final Fantasy Origins, Chronicles, Anthology, Dawn of Souls). He tried Final Fantasy Adventure (which turned out to be a marketing name since it was really a Mana game) and the Final Fantasy Legend games. Even when a game was not really fun, he forced himself to play it just to know more about the fantastic universe of Final Fantasy.
He played everything.
The enlightenment
He loved the series so much that he spent a lot of time in forums discussing the games (released and announced). He learned about all the re-releases of his games, how plenty of games were first released in Japan, then in North America then re-released in Japan with just enough additional content to make plenty of fans buy the games again (and make the North Americans envy them). He learned about the shady marketing tactics the company had used to sell games. They used the Final Fantasy name to boost sales of other series.
One day they announced what fans everywhere were hoping for since the release of Final Fantasy VII: more Final Fantasy VII. They announced a mobile phone game, a movie and a spin-off game based on a character from the original game.
It was really that one game that put the last nail in the coffin. The game didn’t appeal to the boy (who had become an adult) at all and the reviews didn’t help either. The low scores confirmed the boy’s suspicions: SquareEnix could make a bad game. The fanboy in him had died. He was still very much a fan of the series, but he no longer bought games just because of a name stamped on it.
As I said in my last post, I recently finished playing through the remake of Dragon Quest IV for the Nintendo DS. There was one thing that annoyed me more than anything else in the game. It’s how much the main character sucked (stat wise).
