White Protagonism, Early Shmups, and Galaxian
August 17, 2025
Final Fantasy V was the first game in the series that I played, back in 2003 or so. My play experience was a little unconventional. Since the game was not officially localized outside of Japan for its original Super Famicom release, most initial non-Japanese fans would have experienced the game through an emulated fan-translation, but my encounter introduced one additional layer of abstraction. Rather than PC-based emulation, I played the game through a SNES emulator for the Sega Dreamcast. The emulator was very much a work-in-progress, and ran at a framerate somewhere in the low teens. Naturally, this made more action-oriented games cumbersome to play, and so I gravitated towards the RPGs. The burned DreamSNES CD I was using had a pre-defined list of ROMs already on the disc, and I wasn't the one who made the selections. Final Fantasy V happened to be the only Final Fantasy included, and I quickly fell in love with it.
As a teenager with no prior frame of reference to compare my experiences to, I had no appreciation for how slow the game ran compared to its original hardware, and I didn't care. This was simply what an RPG was to me. In retrospect, I think it probably taught me a good deal of patience, and to this day I have never been bothered by high random encounter rates or slow progression in old RPGs.
I have a few articles planned for the site, ranging in topic from silly Job rankings to my thoughts on Faris as an early trans character in video games. I'm also going to highlight some of my favourite writing on the game already available on the web from other folks. I hope you find something you enjoy here!