The second I made it to the Mushroom Kingdom, I was completely in love with it. The mustachioed legend was just the guy for the job. I was older, and I was playing a game that, in many ways, was designed to introduce players to the role-playing game format.

The only RPGs I previously played were Zelda 2 and Dragon Quest way back in the day, but I was too young and embarrassingly terrible at them. I was already a fan of Super Mario, despite his cruelty to turtles, but this entry was unique.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was probably the last SNES game that I got totally absorbed with, but it was also the one I got the most absorbed with. Its wondrous library was more than enough to keep me occupied even if I did have to go over to a friend’s house to play Wave Race ’64. But regardless, I got more mileage out of my SNES than any other video game system I’ve ever owned.

That may or may not have had something to do with the fact that it tended to take a while to sell my parents on system upgrades due to their insistence that the new ones should play the old games they’d already bought me. Even in its waning days when some of my more fortunate friends were already starting to get their N64s, my love for the wondrous gray box was steadfast. I was pretty committed to my Super Nintendo.

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