The very first game that Bub and I played from start to finish was Namco’s Tales of Phantasia on the Gameboy Advance. I fondly remember bringing that thing — the Gameboy Advance, even in this era (Bub was born in 2010) — to both amuse him with it and to play an enjoyable game with him sans the ratio at which monsters attack you in the wild. I don’t think he minded that. He was probably a year or two old when we started this, because I was bound and determined to finish the game once and for all, and who better to do it with than the child of mine whose interest was peaked by things exactly like this? It was a win-win…
I also remember having to ask who was a boyfriend at the time for help with the plot as it related to acquiring a hidden character and then a skill that the final boss was weak against, but I also fondly remember curb-stomping the final boss straight into the ground with the Power of Bub™. Bub watched me defeat Dhaos, and Bub watched the ending. Defeating the big bad did not seem to bother him. It never does.
This was another game that I grew up on, just as obscure as Kickle Cubicle. Although it came out for the Wii’s Virtual Console in Japan, it never came out over here in the United States… and I wish that it had, because I spent hours playing it as a young child, nearly obsessed with the carnival (or was it more of a festival?) theme that it had, trying as hard as I could to get as far as I could in the game in spite of the increasing difficulty. Without using any cheat codes, I could generally manage to get approximately midway through the game, which was ironic because my favorite “fairy” in the game was Sweetie, which was the last fairy in the game that you’re supposed to rescue — in the third world — and I also liked Princess Wondra, who you rescue at the very end of the game, which I could never get to without using our Gameshark. At some point I’d like to play this game as an adult and see if I can finish it. I know it’s difficult.