I was in middle school. Couldn’t have been more than 12 or so. A friend of mine and I used to play a lot of SNES RPG games together. I still remember the first time we played through Secret of Mana. I liked that it was more action-oriented than other RPG games.

One game that, until recently, I hadn’t thought much about was Final Fantasy 3.

My friend let me borrow his copy of the game, as I had never played through it. He spoke very highly of the game, and I thought it’d be pretty cool to play.

The story, at its core, had a basic premise. An unlikely band of protagonists get into mischief and peril along their way towards stopping an evil emperor. A lot of the details of the game elude me, in fact, but there comes a critical point in the middle of the story where the unexpected happens. This band of characters rally to put an end to the emperor once and for all.

And they fail.

The world literally breaks because this team of people put forth every effort to be the hero and failed. Countless people die. Geographic regions are irreparably changed or destroyed entirely. The social and economic climate tank. The culture dies. The happiness dies. The world is, for all intents and purposes, dead and in a barren post-apocalyptic state.

I remember being so shocked and blown away by this. This wasn’t how stories were supposed to go. The good guys were always supposed to win. They try their hardest. Things get rough, but in the end they win. Right?

…Right?

The story advances some months later. One of the characters in the group comes to from a coma they’ve been in. They wake as though their failure just happened, in a panic. Slowly they start to realize the state the world is in, and the true extent of their failure.

Knowing the emperor is still out there somewhere, she again sets on a quest to try to bring the former group back together to stop the emperor.

These characters are, one by one, reintroduced in a different light. Gone is most of the boundless optimism. In its place is defeat, self-loathing. Despair. They are desolate shells of the heroes they once were. Disgraced. Defeated.

But slowly this band starts to come back together. Even though they tried and failed, miserably, they start to reform. They search for each other and try to do what they feel is right.

Somewhere along this part of the story, the emotional gravity of what the world, and these characters, had been through hit me hard. Even though they were 16-bit sprites, the vivid imagination of an introverted kid painted a vivid picture of a world that’s long given up and given in to evil.

And these few people, battered and beaten as anybody, struck the flint with whatever they had left in a bid to once again fan the flames of hope. They had no reason to believe in their  cause anymore. They hardly believed in themselves, but some intangible thing willed them forward regardless.

This emotional cascade dawned me. I found myself wholly immersed in the plight of these people. Their struggle. Their pain. Their arguably baseless endurance.

And tears came to my eyes.

I felt a tightness in my chest. My breath became shallow. I just sat there and thought about what these people were all going through.

As someone who primarily played video games at this point to walk from left to right beating people up in jazz clubs and on the streets  to take down Mr. X or jumping on Goombas to be told my princess was in another castle, this all proved to be a bit overwhelming.

At the time I barely had a full grasp on what emotions really even were, let alone any experience how mine would feel or how they would be affected. I hardly had the proverbial nob up to 2 and here this game is cranking it up to 7.930234 at least.

It freaked me out, and I stopped playing Final Fantasy 3 cold turkey. Right then and there. I literally turned the game off, gave it back to my friend the next time I saw him, said I thought it was a good game, and never spoke of it again.

Considering that I’ve spent most of the year trying to better understand my feelings and myself, recalling my time playing Final Fantasy 3 is something of an interesting experience.

Did that game and my subsequent adverse reaction to feeling anything stunt my emotional growth? Did that have a hand to play in the emotional wall I’ve been so arduously trying to tear down in my adult years? Why, exactly, did I run away from this game? Did I think I would be ridiculed if I told my friend that the game made me cry a little?

Near as I can remember, I haven’t told a single soul that that game had an emotional impact on me. It’s been my secret, buried so deep that I forgot it. A seed, planted in my subconscious at a critical point in my maturation and development.

I don’t know. I’m no stranger to overthinking things and making a mountain out of a mole hill, but as far as therapy sessions unearthing since-forgotten memories go I can’t help but feel like I’m on the couch right now, startled over the light bulb that’s just gone off in my head.

If I had a time machine, I’d go back and tell that big-headed kid that it was okay to feel something while playing that game. To feel anything at all in any context. It was actually pretty cool. Your predilection for analysis and comprehension spans more than just the logical. You harvested true understanding of emotion, of the human condition, from a video game. There are people in the world able to tell a story through a 16-bit medium, any medium, so well that its impact transcends the screen and touches the very soul. You could tell a story like that someday.

Embrace that level of understanding, kid. That is nothing to hide or be ashamed. I say be proud of it. If someone laughed at you about it, it says a Hell a lot more about them than it does you. What, would you rather be emotionally closed off? Some supposed tough guy incapable of feeling anything?

To feel those emotions is to see the beauty in the world, and in art. It’s to foster the imagination, and to connect yourself to everything else. Great storytellers were influenced and inspired by the storytellers that came before them. You can be a great storyteller someday, and someday you might affect someone else. Someday someone may be influenced or inspired by you.

To feel is be human. To share that feeling is to be human. So be human, kid. Be human. Trust me, the alternative isn’t what you think it’d be. I wouldn’t have showed up in a friggin’ time machine otherwise.

I think I’m going to play through Final Fantasy 3. I probably should have a long time ago.