Today I put to rest a period of my life. When I was a kid, my mom was very strict on letting me have games, so I never had a console until I bought my own a few years ago. It was because of this that I didn't really understand the appeal of gaming until I was older. However, I did play some games at friends' houses. But these rarely had such an impact on me.
I was spending the night at my best friend's house and we were playing Lemmings on some system, either SNES or PlayStation. So it would have been that time period, around the late 90s or, most likely, the early 2000s. I didn't have any games at my house, so I thought Lemmings was the shit and wanted to play all night, but my friend was getting bored of it, so his father-in-law let us try one of his games out. His father-in-law was from Turkey and was a pretty artsy guy, in the US as part of a modern dance company and ballet troupe.
Anyway, we tried the game, which turned out to be some kind of JRPG. Of course, I didn't know what an RPG, much less a JRPG, was back then. I think it was a bit out of my friend's range too, so we were both being too young and stupid to understand it. Neither of us had played anything like it. I remember that it had something to do with kids in a school with some kind of paranormal activity. It opened with a bunch of kids in a school, or a hospital, or a school's nursing office, or something (really narrows down JRPGs, eh?). But what I remember most is that it opened with that classic Taoist quote of "I dreamed that I was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream it was me?" I remember that making an impression on me because it was the first place I'd ever heard that quote. But what could the game have been??? I was stumped for years, but curious.
I finally found out what game it was today: the first Persona game. I had my suspicions that that was it for a while once I heard that it had butterfly imagery, but today I downloaded a ROM and verified it and almost shit my pants. This is the opening image that has been lurking in my subconscious for years:
Unfortunately, I found out that the English version is a complete travesty in that during "localization" they changed half of the character artwork and made a garbage translation. So what will I do? Play it in Japanese, naturally! I've read manga in Japanese before, but this will be a step up (and probably a good primer to reading untranslated VNs). I have no controller for ePSXe and I'm not sure if it's the kind of game that needs one. I couldn't control Silent Hill worth a shit on this without a controller.
