FF IV...

Once upon a time, a video game company by the mildly unhip name of Square Co., Ltd. released the much-awaited fourth installment in its flagship Final Fantasy series, the first native (non-ported) RPG for the Super Famicom. Attempting again to reach out to the North American market, they also had it translated into English, and published it in North America under the name Final Fantasy II — locally accurate, if somewhat inherently oxymoronic.

Most RPGs and adventure games of the time either had tabulae rasae (or nearly so) for protagonists (Zork, Ultima, Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Faxanadu) or cookie-cutter "party members" (Final Fantasy I & III, Dragon Quest III, Bard's Tale). While Japan was already starting to break this mold with such games as Sega's Phantasy Star, Falcom's Ys I & II, and Squaresoft's own earlier Final Fantasy II, the Super Famicom directly enabled Square to shatter this mold to pieces: while the SNES afforded significant advances in graphics equally to all game genres, the simple increase in memory had a far greater effect on an RPG: text (and, in their still-customary tile-based milieu, accompanying character-movement sequences) were suddenly almost cheap, allowing for far deeper storylines and more involved cutscenes than had previously been seen on a console (or on most still-floppy-driven PC titles, for that matter). FFII did not quite redefine the term "RPG" — as noted above, the redefinition had already begun — but it did fulfill that new definition's promise.

That was seventeen years ago: and seventeen years have passed.