Baby's First RPG, and the first Game Boy Color game I ever owned.
sometime in 2006, my local target had a stockpile of these for dirt cheap. they must have been there for years. would have been a hard sell at first, given that there was a shiny new GBA version on the shelves at the same time. in the years between the game’s release and my chancing upon it, the GBA copies were all snatched up. only the dusty GBC boxes remained.
(in retrospect I can say: those poor kids that got the GBA version! they missed out on the real deal)
my young eyes lit up as I noticed them on the clearance rack. before I could trail too far behind my mom and the shopping cart, I pulled the arm of her sweater. I pointed up at the my then-favorite little wizard guy. the boxes were lined up on the top shelf, and my growth spurt was still a number of years out. she looked over the box. the label in the corner said it would work on my Game Boy Advance.
"that's the one you've got, right?"
I enthusiastically confirmed.
my mom was a librarian, and had already encouraged me in reading the first three Harry Potter books. JK Rowling wasn't a Public Sicko yet, so it was still morally okay to be a fan. I had been going cover to cover on those early books for as long as I knew how to read. by this time I had already worn a Harry Potter costume for Halloween at least twice. our DVD copy of Chamber of Secrets was used with such regularity that the cardboard sleeve for its case had begun to warp from the oils of my grubby little child fingers. if my mom was ever going to buy me a game months removed from Christmas or my birthday, it was going to be this one. to my great joy, she did!
little did I know playing it was going to be as much of a learning experience as reading my first novel.
knowing only games where one button jumped and the other button punched, the menus and numbers of turn based combat were completely alien to me. "grinding" was not in my lexicon. I brutishly forced my way through. "don't walk into the glowing beans" was my strategy for winning, which complicated things when my little friend Harry was never strong enough to defeat bosses with the basic attack spell alone. pokemon barely touched my childhood; this was my equivalent to fighting the elite four with nothing but tackles.
as my elementary years passed, I kept going back to the big translucent cartridge in my bag full of GBA games. every time I did, I had figured out something new about gameplay, or menu navigation, or like, basic math. I got to experience it anew every time. I still do now, replaying the game in an emulator as a studied and grown-up RPG enjoyer.
(sidenote: even now, all 8-bit music sounds to me like Chamber of Secrets. its status as the GBC's final game means it was the endpoint for that sound chip; the final compositions for a format then thirteen years old. they do not disappoint. those tracks are vivid, draining every last drop of auditory depth out of that ancient little game box. while first exploring Raya Lucaria in Elden Ring earlier this year, I put on these old wizard school tunes. it was bliss. good work, Ian Stocker!)
sometime in 2006, my local target had a stockpile of these for dirt cheap. they must have been there for years. would have been a hard sell at first, given that there was a shiny new GBA version on the shelves at the same time. in the years between the game’s release and my chancing upon it, the GBA copies were all snatched up. only the dusty GBC boxes remained.
(in retrospect I can say: those poor kids that got the GBA version! they missed out on the real deal)
my young eyes lit up as I noticed them on the clearance rack. before I could trail too far behind my mom and the shopping cart, I pulled the arm of her sweater. I pointed up at the my then-favorite little wizard guy. the boxes were lined up on the top shelf, and my growth spurt was still a number of years out. she looked over the box. the label in the corner said it would work on my Game Boy Advance.
"that's the one you've got, right?"
I enthusiastically confirmed.
my mom was a librarian, and had already encouraged me in reading the first three Harry Potter books. JK Rowling wasn't a Public Sicko yet, so it was still morally okay to be a fan. I had been going cover to cover on those early books for as long as I knew how to read. by this time I had already worn a Harry Potter costume for Halloween at least twice. our DVD copy of Chamber of Secrets was used with such regularity that the cardboard sleeve for its case had begun to warp from the oils of my grubby little child fingers. if my mom was ever going to buy me a game months removed from Christmas or my birthday, it was going to be this one. to my great joy, she did!
little did I know playing it was going to be as much of a learning experience as reading my first novel.
knowing only games where one button jumped and the other button punched, the menus and numbers of turn based combat were completely alien to me. "grinding" was not in my lexicon. I brutishly forced my way through. "don't walk into the glowing beans" was my strategy for winning, which complicated things when my little friend Harry was never strong enough to defeat bosses with the basic attack spell alone. pokemon barely touched my childhood; this was my equivalent to fighting the elite four with nothing but tackles.
as my elementary years passed, I kept going back to the big translucent cartridge in my bag full of GBA games. every time I did, I had figured out something new about gameplay, or menu navigation, or like, basic math. I got to experience it anew every time. I still do now, replaying the game in an emulator as a studied and grown-up RPG enjoyer.
(sidenote: even now, all 8-bit music sounds to me like Chamber of Secrets. its status as the GBC's final game means it was the endpoint for that sound chip; the final compositions for a format then thirteen years old. they do not disappoint. those tracks are vivid, draining every last drop of auditory depth out of that ancient little game box. while first exploring Raya Lucaria in Elden Ring earlier this year, I put on these old wizard school tunes. it was bliss. good work, Ian Stocker!)