Final Fantasy: Lost in Japanese

I have to confess. I came up with this dumb idea to play all the Final Fantasy games in Japanese about eleven months ago, but wasn’t sure if I could even finish one game given how rusty my Japanese was. To see if there was any hope at all, I decided to play what I thought was going to be a “Warmup” game before digging in to the Final Fantasy series. I broke out a used copy of the original Breath of Fire in Japanese that I picked up on a trip to Japan. I stuffed it into my GBA and got busy. And busy. And busy. I figured such an old game would take me about 10 hours to finish, but it ended up taking quite a bit of help from a walkthrough and a ton of time: I probably spent 60 hours or more on the game, two-thirds of which was spent in various stages of Wandering in Circles or Fast Asleep. It took me about four months of real time to complete the game, as most of the gaming sessions would pick up at the CL (Cluelessly Lost) stage carried over from the previous gaming session and within ten minutes degenerate to the Fast Asleep stage. But with liberal amounts of walkthrough help, I finally finished the game. This was actually the first Japanese RPG that I have ever finished, so all things considered I’m satisfied with how things went.

Not that I liked it, mind you. I actually found it a boring game, which is probably natural considering I spent so much time wandering in circles through the same towns looking for hints that I missed the first time around. It gets pretty old talking to the same people over and over again, especially since they say the same things over and over again and half the time I don’t even know what they are. My general impression of many of these conversations was something like this:

My Party: Hi!
NPC: Hi, warriors of destiny. (unintelligible Japanese sentence #1) (unintelligible Japanese sentence #2) (unintelligible Japanese sentence #3) You must do this! It is very important!
My Party: Why?
NPC: Because it will save the world!
My Party: Very well, we’ll do that.
NPC: Good luck.
My Party: Bye.

And off we’d go Wandering in Circles again.

You might be wondering how I managed to stick to the game if I found it so boring. Well, I’ll tell you. As any follower of epic fantasy knows, all heroes are aided on their adventure, and I, too, had some fortuitous help in the beginning. I was aided by A Broken Reading Light. What, you say? Well, my wife and I will often read before we fall asleep, but a few months ago my night light broke, which means, yes, you guessed it: no reading before bed! Instead, I fired up the GBA a few times a week for some pre-sleep gaming. Without the Broken Reading Light, I doubt I would ever have made it through Breath of Fire.

But anyway, enough dallying around with the warmup. Let’s go on to the adventure!