Me, The Übermensch, and the Console RPG

One of the first RPGs I ever played was Chrono Trigger. Oh sure, I had played Dragon Warrior when I was but a wee zygote and I'm pretty sure I hit Earthbound on the SNES first, but I was still damn green when it came to RPGs. I know this because after some moaning to my friend about the difficulty of saving in Chrono Trigger, he informed me that I could actually save anywhere on the world map instead of saving only once in a blue moon at the game's very uncommon save points. I give my old friend endless credit for gently informing me of an RPG trope that is only slightly less common than magic swords. Had he chosen to mock me instead, he might have spontaneously invented the modern usage of the word noob in 1995.

Despite such early stumbles, RPGs very quickly became my genre of choice. Needless to say, I had made a terrible decision  that would cost me dearly in time, money, and general social standing for years to come. At least I had friends leveling up along the road to hell with me! Squaresoft was setting the world on fire back then as far as our little gang was concerned, and the feedback loop of our enthusiasm kept us all going and made “gamers” out of the lot of us. As for myself, I would eventually develop an obsession that not even some of my fellow gamers understood.

Chrono Trigger changed my life with three simple words: new game plus. New game plus was a feature unlocked after your first completion of the game, and allowed you to start over from the beginning while maintaining the levels and equipment of your completed file. This was implemented so that the player could defeat the final boss at any time and unlock new endings based on their impact to the time-line, and I took it as something of a challenge. From the moment that I started that second play through, I knew I had to create the perfect Chrono Trigger file.

Getting everyone to level 99 (or  ** as the game expressed any maxed out number) was a piece of cake compared to what I eventually got to. I shudder to think about the amount of time I dumped into it, but I played the game relentlessly until I had acquired enough one time use stat boosting items to have a complete roster of perfectly maxed out characters with ** in every stat and complementary perfect equipment. I had created the Sears Willis Tower of Chrono Trigger game saves.

Yet even this staggeringly pointless achievement failed to satisfy me. I moved onto other RPGs, relentlessly striving to crate perfect or near perfect files. I ground Gigas into the dirt in Earthbound, I took on endless hordes in Robotrek to perfect a frustratingly terrible gun that eventually becomes a god-killer, and I exploited a river rafting loop and a turbo controller to effortlessly hit level 99 in Final Fantasy III. And yes, that's Final Fantasy VI. You make the bald eagle cry when you bow to Japanese numbering. My real life at twelve may have been lacking in some respects, but in RPG-land, I was a God that created immaculate beings in my own image.    

This trend consumed my RPG habits for a good while, but around the time of the PSX and Final Fantasy VII, a curious thing happened. While all of my friends were working on breeding Gold Chocobos and mastering Knights of the Round, I proceeded on a fairly straight path towards Sephiroth. I saw the way that my friends had made a joke out of that final encounter, and for some reason it suddenly felt anti-climactic to me. I didn't think about it at the time, but becoming a perfectionist had made me to shy away from RPGs with very solidly built characters and to master only those RPGs where the protagonist was a mostly or completely blank slate. Final Fantasy VII, Wild Arms, Star Ocean, and Tales of Destiny were merely played and beaten, but games like Suikoden and Azure Dreams were conquered in my old style. In the obscure first-person RPG Tecmo's Deception, I played a protagonist whose face is never seen. I fully completed that game, capturing every soul in the optimal fashion even though the game warned me that it literally meant a world ending return of Satan himself. Hey, sometimes perfection has a price.

My late high school dive into an excellent D&D group and my introduction to Western RPGs via Knights of the Old Republic (for I had grown up in a computer illiterate home) further pushed me down this route. I've been planted firmly in the Western RPG camp these days, partly because I feel JRPGs have become ever more elaborate updates of the same experience I had in 1995, but largely because Western RPGs play to the variable statistics and wide open imagination that entrances me the most about RPGs. Mass Effect, Fable 2, Oblivion, Jade Empire and (soon enough) Dragon Age have all been played until I hit a point of zen in our current gaming era.

So this just leaves us with the big question: Why? Why would I do this to myself? Better yet, why am I not alone in doing this to myself? Sure, some of my old RPG friends didn't understand my obsession, but several did. One friend of mine nearly went stark raving mad after losing an Earthbound file (one that towered over my own, I might add) to a little rapid reset action caused by a lose power wire. Why did we invest ourselves in something that transitory? Something that, in the best case scenario, would exist on cartridge for only a matter of years. Even as I write this, perfection is the driving passion of an untold mass of MMORPG players.

As a kid, I never experienced bullying to any significant extent. I didn't need to run away from real life persecution. I did, however, often feel unable to control the course of my life. I was born into circumstances that were beyond my control and events often happened for unexplainable reasons. Even worse, the world seemed so dull; just Suburbia in all directions, no warlocks or dragons or robots waiting over the horizon. On the other side of the bridge, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III, and Earthbound were all lively and epic. They held me in a state of wonder. I wanted the TV screen to pull me into those worlds, incapable of being boring. Worlds where life choices came down to good and evil, heroism or cowardice, not which college I chose to go to.

I have more of a handle on my adult life, but I still experience that sensation of powerlessness  and boredom more often than I'd like to. I imagine it's the same for a lot of gamers. Our lives end up being defined as much by the paths we don't take as those we do. Even the loftiest heights of achievement leave nagging what-ifs. Who wouldn't want to trade in that kind of uncertainty for a life of adventure and an unambiguous “LVL 99?”