What I'm about to write about, at length, will expose me forever as a complete friendless loser, a modern-day hermit who wouldn't suffer any human contact whatsoever if it wasn't for his mother's regular family tech support calls. But you know what? Whatever. Like you don't have problems.

It has long been a goal of mine to beat all of the Final Fantasy games in rapid succession. You know, kind of like watching all of the extended edition Lord of the Rings DVDs in one sitting, only even more grueling, and with infinitely less hot and more pixellated elves. At the moment, I am something like two-thirds of the way through Final Fantasy IV. It is time to see whether I am the sort who will "get going" and is therefore "tough," because that is exactly how the going has just recently gotten. I played through the first two games in the Game Boy Advance versions, which are substantially less difficult and time-consuming than the NES originals. The third game has never been released in this country so I played it on an emulator. This allowed me to use the "save state" function, making dying a lot less painful and boss battles a whole lot quicker. Technically, this is cheating. But who can blame me? I wasn't terribly interested in spending more than a few days of my life playing a sixteen-year-old NES game with a dodgy, incomplete homebrew translation. And the point of my odyssey isn't to get every treasure and to complete every sidequest. The point is to beat all of the games within a reasonably impressive-sounding window of time. To this end, I'm using walkthroughs to get through all of the games as fast as possible. Normally, I like to play through a game at least once on my own before going through again without outside help, but I have played most of these games before. And if I really had to wander through each village by my lonesome trying to find the exact house in which to find the exact dude who opens up the next section I would go completely insane by the fourth game. Not that I wasn't well on my way there already by deciding to embark on this little adventure.

What is it that makes the Final Fantasy games so compelling? The first game is still playable and a lot of fun even 20 years after its initial release. The second game is even better than the first, with a way less minimalist storyline and a rather broader framework for character customization. The third one is kind of a dud, but every game afterwards from IV (originally released for the Super Nintendo in 1991) through X (PS2, 2001) is a classic save one. FFVIII, the weak link in the chain, is a solid game that only pales in context. That's a pretty excellent track record. It's hard to imagine another major video game franchise that doesn't have an obvious misstep or two along the way. The NES Mega Man games are all terrific except for the first one, which is so difficult as to be unplayable and ugly besides. The original Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and Wind Waker are all superb, but Adventure of Link and Majora's Mask are lame. I doubt there are many other Metal Gear fans out there who have suffered through the dreadful NES game Snake's Revenge. (And a lot of people, not including me, disliked MGS2.) Resident Evil 3 wasn't so good. Things have gone disastrously wrong for the Sonic the Hedgehog series after it graduated from the Genesis. Over on the PC, strategy games like Civilization and SimCity have gotten more complicated without actually getting any more fun as the sequels have amassed. All of the WarCraft games are pretty good, but there's hardly much point in replaying the first or even the second one now; they've been rendered obsolete. I can't think of another series of more than three or four games that maintains such a consistently high standard of quality as the Final Fantasies do. Particularly since games made the big shift from cartridge to CD. Check the used racks at your local video game dealer for the endless piles of lousy Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot sequels. Those franchises got old before you'd even finished the first game.

Final Fantasy, on the other hand, crossed over from being a cult hit on the NES and SNES to an enormous, gargantuan hit on the PlayStation. At a time when a lot of other classic gaming properties were trying to find a way to make a graceful transition to the world of polygons and full-motion video and failing, FF publisher SquareSoft completely seized the moment. When you think about it, a lot of the things that kept the series cultish in the cartridge days allowed for it to get huge on CD-ROM. The gameplay of the first few games is as cerebral as NES titles got. Because the games require very little in terms of processing power -- you walk around on a map and in battle, select your actions from a menu -- they had storage space allowing them to be the longest, deepest, and most involved of their generation. Well, I can only say for a fact that the first one was. The other two NES Final Fantasy games never came out in this country. But the original was epic and challenging and featured a brilliant twist that keeps it replayable to this day. You get to choose your party. You can go fighter, thief, white mage, black mage or fighter, fighter, red mage, white mage, or black belt, black belt, black belt, black belt. Anything you want. The game can play pretty differently (given the era) each time through depending on this choice you make the minute you start a new quest. There are FAQs out there explaining how to get through the entire game with a single red mage. (Of course, there is also an FAQ explaining how to get all the way to the final boss of the Legend of Zelda without ever picking up a sword. Just because these things can be done doesn't mean you should necessarily do them.)

Starting with the second game and blossoming in the fourth and especially the sixth, Square hit upon the idea of rewarding players for their time investment with elaborate storylines. (The first game barely has any story at all, which was part of its unique charm. In 1988 it was perfectly normal to spend 100 hours beating a game that had no characters or story and indeed involved 95% fighting repetitive random enemy encounters to level up your party enough so that they wouldn't get slaughtered in the fiendishly punishing dungeons. Those were simpler times.) All of these various threads combined to make Final Fantasy VII, released in 1997 for the PSone, huger than imaginable. Because the series' established play mechanics were so simple, it was relatively easy to make the maps and characters gorgeous. Nearly every non-RPG game from the PSX/Nintendo 64 era has aged horribly, since the shift from 2D to 3D graphics was such a difficult technical leap. Final Fantasy VII hinted at the sort of look that wouldn't become the norm in games until a whole other hardware generation had passed.

And it sold. An awful SquareSoft fighting game called Tobal No. 1 sold thousands of copies to people who never even played it -- they just bought it so they could get their hands on the twenty-minute-or-so FFVII demo that came bundled in the package. FFVII has been called both the best game ever and the most overrated game ever. In a way, both are true. In retrospect it's not the most fun of the games in the series to play. The magic system is inelegant compared to some others, the characters aren't the best, and the story has not aged well. I would say VI, its immediate Super Nintendo predecessor, is the best game in the series. A lot of true believers would agree with me. It may be more controversial to say that absent the hype and the colossal sales figures the relatively unheralded FFIX is the best of the post-cartridge games. But then again....

The release of Final Fantasy VII was an event. It was the first video game I remember preordering. I still have the shirt I got with my $10 deposit. Expectations were out of control. All of my friends got together when Tobal No. 1 came out and each of us played through the demo one by one. Those summon animations...crazy. (If you have a great memory for these sorts of things, you will recall that the demo contained the first dungeon from the full game only tweaked to include an extra character and those summon spells. Oh, those summons.) When the real game came out, it was a constant race between everyone in my clique to see who could beat it first. There were a lot of phone calls. "Nyah, I finished the first disc!" "Nyah, I got the gold chocobo!" And so on. It was a watershed moment in my high school social life. On weekends we would all gather in someone's basement and everyone would bring their own TV and their own PlayStation (and many power strips). We'd all sit, together alone, each absorbed in his own personal version of the same shared fantasy, occasionally yelling out for boss strategy assistance or snack refills. My mother, who holds a master's degree in education, was fascinated by this behavior. She called it "parallel play." She also said it was something usually observed in 1- and 2-year-olds, not teenagers.

Not to drive the point home too plainly, but my friends in high school and I were geeks. Big geeks. We were the chess team, the bridge team, and the scholastic bowl squad. Our lives revolved around "Star Trek," Dungeons & Dragons, and our video games. It was not at all unusual for us to all geek out en masse over a new game. Sure, the last major example was Final Fantasy VI (which was originally titled "III" in the US, long story) but I also remember getting deeply into a game involving cavorting anthropomorphic unicycles. The point is, our spare time was going to be largely devoted to this hobby anyway. Had it not been Final Fantasy VII, it would have been some other game. But what was different about that game is that everyone was playing it. By which I mean, girls were playing it. For a moment, it looked like the geeks would inherit the earth. My friends and I, having beaten the game into submission, were sought out for our knowledge. That was pretty damn cool. (This happened again in college when the Tolkien movies started coming out. There was a time there when I would go to parties and talk to pretty girls in earnest about the Fall of Númenor. I knew there was a reason I struggled all the way through the Silmarillion in junior high.)

Well, I have a lot more to say on this subject, including some of my criticisms of the whole MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) genre and why I don't consider the Final Fantasy MMORPG, FFXI, to be a true part of the series, but I have really been slacking as far as my questing is concerned these last few days and somebody has to stop the evil Golbez. I still have a lot of Final Fantasy to go and as I update you the reader on my progress, I'll continue my informal history of the series. We haven't even mentioned the disastrous Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within yet. I saw it in the theaters!