Saturday!

A million years ago, a plucky little company called “Enix” released a game series called “Dragon Quest VII” in Japan and it was popular enough that it was determined that there was a sizable market in the US and so they marketed it here as well (though under the name Dragon Warrior VII).

This game was *HUGE*. It had *2*, count ’em, *2* CDs. It did this thing where the booklet told you about how you can get all of these different classes and go up and learn all of these different levels in these different classes but then you spent hours (and hours and hours) trying to find the school that can allow you to change classes… but then, when you got there, you got ambushed right when you were about to pick your first class and then you had another handful of hours of gameplay before you finally beat up the bad guys who ambushed you and kept you from learning a class.

We’re talking 20 hours into the game, here.

Now, here is the amazing part: it’s not like the game was boring up until this point either. It was fun, there was a good story, it was exciting, and you couldn’t wait to see what happened next. You were just also thinking “Man, I wish I could pick a class like you could in the other games and like it said in the instructions”. And then, once you could, the game said “okay, tutorial’s over”.

AND ONLY THEN DID THE GAME BEGIN.

It, truly, was an awesome experience all the way back in the Year 2000.
And I’ve played 5 minutes or so of it on the 3DS and I find myself saying “I don’t remember *ANY* of this!”

Which means I’m looking forward to doing it again. Which is good, because I have 4 stops.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]