When I was 12, I had to make what could have been one of the most important decisions in my life to that point.
A decision that would not only shape my near future but would irrevocably shape me as a person for many long years to come. A decision of massive importance that only I could make.
What decision was that, you might ask? It was, despite its great significance, a rather simple one: Which system would I buy to supplant my aging Super Nintendo: a Nintendo 64 or a Sony PlayStation?
There were a lot of factors to consider in this major choice. Did I want to stick to cartridges or move to the burgeoning CD-based gaming format? Did I want Sony’s newfangled controller, with its X’s and squares and triangles on the buttons, or the seemingly familiar Nintendo layout, just twisted into some sort of odd trident shape that seemed to expect me to have a few extra fingers to reach all the buttons and sticks at once? There was also the price to consider and parental concerns to allay, and much more.
But really it came down to one real angle: Whose games did I want to play?
It was more complex than I expected. My early instinct to stick with Nintendo and its robust catalog of first-party titles was shaken by the unexpected, upsetting defection of Squaresoft to the enemy camp of Sony. Suddenly, what seemed like an upstart system from the guys who made the Walkman was a serious contender, at least if I wanted to play the next Final Fantasy game.
So, really, it came down to one matchup alone: Zelda vs. Square. The Hyrule fantasy against the Final Fantasy.
How to choose?
At this point, I’d only played a couple of games from each series: Final Fantasy II and III (later to be more correctly identified as IV and VI) on one side, A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening on the other. All four were amazing games, possibly masterpieces.
One side had the feeling of my beloved fantasy novels like Dragonlance and that ilk: massive worlds to explore, expansive casts of characters, byzantine plots that threatened to fall apart at the end, colorful dialogue, and the like. The other side’s games were lonelier affairs, like lost fairy tales from another time and place. They felt like nothing else I knew, really. They didn’t come from Japan or even Earth. They came from Hyrule, I guess.
Well, after significant wrestling with the problem, I had to go with Zelda. I received an N64 for Christmas and waited for a Zelda game to come out, playing a whole lot of Goldeneye and Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64 in the meantime. I watched jealously as Final Fantasy VII came out to huge acclaim and I stewed in misery as I couldn’t play it. (A later playthrough of its PC port left me satisfied. I hadn’t missed out as much as I thought, though.) The huge absence of RPGs on the N64, while PlayStation seemed to release another new classic of the genre every few months, drove me nuts.
And then Ocarina of Time came out and it was all just dust in the wind. I knew I had made the right choice, at last.
And even now, after playing many of those PS1 classics in retrospect, I know I made the right choice. The Hyrule fantasy did trump a Final Fantasy, even three of them, all by itself.
