My First Time (Part 1)

A story I've told many times now that I'm older/wiser/more bitter is my history with Chrono Trigger. It was likely the first JRPG I ever played, maybe even the first RPG I ever played, but, like most stories about your first time, it is a bittersweet story of mistakes and cluelessness.

When I was much younger I loved to visit pawn shops. As a child, pawn shops were a magical place that embodied the miscellaneous, where each object broadened my conception of the world. They were like those shops on magic alley in Harry Potter (so the movies lead me to believe), but with chainsaws.

It was in these stores where I first learned about things like power tool ownership (my father wasn't much one for, and I thought that Bob Vila and my grandpa were special), the tangible ability to acquire a pocket watch without a time machine, the full extent of home theatre technology, and how many people fail to learn guitar. Also here, there be video games.

And the video games quickly became my favourite part of Saturday morning trips to the pawn shop with my father. Being a child I did not have a lot of throwing around money. I mean, I had a paper-route or an allowance depending on the age, but that did not leave me with the capital to procure many video games on my own. I was mostly reliant on my parents. Which meant lots of Mario and Blockbuster. I could usually convince my parents to buy games if I loved them enough (it certainly helped if either of my parents also liked them), but in pawn shops I could afford to buy them myself.

Thinking back on it now though, these games embody a certain amount of desperation. They really were someone's last resort. The cash one would get from cashing in a copy of Street Fighter 2 Super Tired-of-so-Many-Editions Edition, would be negligible, so really, if someone sold their SNES games, they were likely pretty hard up for cash. But, luckily, I was blissfully unaware of this issue as a child, and so that area where the pawn shop kept their SNES games behind glass, was the area where I could become the proud owner of a new video game for the low low price of $10. And really, if you were ballsy enough (I wasn't), you could get it for $8.

So on occasion like many others, I bought a game called Chrono Trigger, and I can't even remember why. I might have rented it before, but I prefer to remember that I bought it for the artwork.

Look at that shit! A dude is jumping at a monster with a sword that has been lit aflame by a chick using magic. That's epic. I was never really into magic as a kid (save the force) but here, I could see a practical use for magic: making swords even cooler. In addition, there's a frog man with a sword ready to pounce on that giant walrus. I mean I was already into Ninja Turtles, and a frog with a sword was certainly close enough when it came to my coolness radar. Sold.

But, the game was somewhat troubling. There were these menu things. I couldn't just jam on the "Y" button to take down screen after screen of baddies. I needed to move around some map and then walk into guys and then select "Attack" or maybe "Run" or "Item" or "Dance Magic Dance", and then Chrono would fly at the dude and slice him with his katana. Wait, I tell my player to attack as opposed to pressing a button to immediately attack? Heresy.

My mind was young and I couldn't understand this menu thing. Chrono Trigger lacked the immediate gratification I was used to, and thus I was pretty put off. But! I paid $10 for this fucker so I was determined to play her hard. Hard.

But then I got here:

This here battle is one of the earlier boss battles in the game, and it requires a little bit of finesse. I think that this stegosaur-tank is immune to magic or something, and that you need to attack his head first then his body, or something along those lines. A not too complicated strategy that one could likely deduce through battle, but one you don't even have to because there is a note in some dude's office that lays it out fairly clearly. BUT, I was a kid (and apparently a none-to-bright one) and so I died and died and died and died. So, I cried (and cried and cried) and filed the game away, swearing to beat the game some day, and then I never played it again.

Thus concludes part one. I started writing this and realized I'm not one for brevity. So, we get parts!